Touring Scotland’s historic distilleries
WE WERE driving on what is known as the Golden Mile, a stretch on the wind-pummeled, rugged island of Islay off Scotland’s southwest coast that includes three time-honoured, worldrenowned distilleries that most Scotch whisky drinkers would recognise by name – Ardbeg, Lagavulin and Laphroaig.
It was shortly after 9am on Islay (EYE-lah), and just over a hilly green on the right, the waves of the Atlantic were lapping against the rocky coastline. To the left were vast expanses of farmland, peat bogs and intermittent homes. We slowed down as a majestic Highland cow crossed the road in no particular hurry.
Aside from the fact that the road, a mere gash in this ancient landmass, is now paved, the landscape looks much the same as it did in the 1880s when Alfred Barnard traversed it in a horse-drawn carriage.
Barnard worked for Harper’s Weekly Gazette, a drinks trade magazine that still exists as Harpers Wine & Spirit. He wanted a thorough education on the whisky industry in order to have a solid foundation for his work, so he went on a near-Homerian odyssey through Britain.
He visited 161 distilleries (129 in Scotland) and chronicled the journey. His voluminous entries were printed in the magazine and published in 1887 as The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, a doorstop of a book. As it turned out, a Victorian view of Islay is pretty modern.
Bunnahabhain
The 6-kilometre road to the village of Bunnahabhain (BUNE-ah-hab-hain) is narrow, steep and serpentine. When the distillery of the same name opened in 1881, the owners constructed the path to the main road for horse-drawn carriages to bring coal and barley to the facility. Today, however, 12-metre trucks use it to take whisky away to be bottled.
We parked and followed Barnard’s path through the stone “noble gateway” into a courtyard surrounded by grey production buildings. “Some say it feels like a cathedral, some say it reminds them of a prison,” Robin Morton, a stillman, told me with a hearty laugh.
Morton spends much of his day at a computer screen, which, he’s quick to point out, only monitors the stills’ activity, not controls it. So to heat the stills, he walks over to the steam wheel and cranks it.
Bowmore
As far as Scottish island distilleries go, Bowmore is practically urban. Built in 1779 in Islay’s capital village of the same name, it’s a collection of whitewashed buildings on four seaside acres, just off the main thoroughfare, which is lined with a bustling grocery, a hardware store, gift shops and a bank.
In the concrete-floored malt barn, a single beam of light streaming through a small window gave the large, stark room the luminosity of a Vermeer painting. A man was pulling a rake-like instrument across a barley-strewn floor, making furrows so air could circulate through the germinating grains. Bowmore is one of the few distilleries in Scotland to use the old-fashioned floor-malting method. Today this part of the malting process is typically done in industrial-size drums at giant plants.
Heather, my genial guide who wore stylish glasses and her hair in a loose ponytail, scooped up a fistful of barley and instructed me to crush a single soft sprouted granule between my fingers – the “maltster’s rub”. It was silky and chalky, moist enough to absorb the peat smoke that ultimately gives whisky its characteristic flavour.
During Barnard’s visit here, he wrote, “The distillers say the proximity to the sea favours the various processes of malting, brewing and distilling.” As I watched the mist fly off the swirling “white horses”, local parlance for the waves of the cobalt Atlantic as they crest and slam against the shore, I ap- preciated one of Islay’s whiskies’ crucial ingredients: local air.
Ardbeg
As we approached Ardbeg, a cluster of buildings with pagoda roofs that appears like an oasis of civilisation amid expanses of green hills, Barnard’s description rang clear: “a lonely spot on the very verge of the sea, and its isolation tends to heighten the romantic sense of its position”.
We were greeted by the distillery manager, Michael Heads, a casual avuncular fellow with white hair who introduced himself as Mickey. He brought us to a neighbouring building and led us through a long, sepia-hued chamber with deep empty wood vessels on either side of a narrow planked floor.
After being led through a few more equipment rooms, we emerged into a sunlit room with a pitched churchlike ceiling. In front of us were six huge washbacks, vessels in which yeast feasts on sugary solution, generating bubbly activity on the golden liquid surface as it turns starch into alcohol.
Through a small window, far past those low cresting “white horses”, I could make out Northern Ireland’s hills of Antrim. Long before trucks existed, the narrow pier right outside was the primary access to the rest of the world: Barley and yeast came off boats, whisky was sent out. It was easy to envision the ships in gridlock on the now bare waters.