WHISKY BACON
What’s it like to taste the ‘angels’ share’ of Crown Royal? Calum Marsh,
You can smell it 20 metres from the door. It’s surging out, l oosed into the air: whisky, an invisible mist.
As you step closer you begin to feel it intensifying – the atmosphere seems to thicken l ike a shroud. With caution, you enter the warehouse, where the stench is so pungent you reflexively cover your nose. But it doesn’t make a difference. The air in this room doesn’t smell of whisky. The air in this room is whisky – so highly concentrated, and so noxious, that even an hour breathing it in would be fatal.
The whisky stings your eyes and smarts your lips. It caresses your skin and invades your pores. You walk slowly, alarmed and careful. You take every breath as if it were a highball poised to make you fabulously drunk.
This is a contemporary caskstorage warehouse at the Crown Royal Distillery in bucolic little Gimli, Manitoba, some 90 minutes outside of Winnipeg just along its eponymous lake. It’s one of nearly 50 such warehouses on the 360- acre property, which together house more than one and a half million 200- litre casks – with another thousand casks filled every day. A white- oak barrel will rest dormant for years in these facilities, aging. Its whisky will over time begin to seep out as vapour from the wood: this free- floating residue is known fondly as “the angels’ share.” But the angels’ share of several million barrels is too precious to forfeit – which is why the Crown Royal warehouses are built to keep all that leaking vapour in.
The result is a storehouse so astringent it could be deadly – and for visitors to the Distillery, an attraction like nothing else. Not that Crown Royal receives visitors in Gimli often. Unlike other distilleries, which regard whisky- loving sightseers as part of their daily operations, the Crown Royal Distil- lery does not offer regular guided tours or extravagant tasting excursions. If it’s a spectacular monument or landmark you’re after, this distillery will not oblige you. They make and store whisky here. That is, to the exclusion of pleasantries, pretty much all they do.
In 1968, the Distillery was founded under the aegis of Seagram’s, of which Crown Royal was at the time a subsidiary. Today, it is owned by beverage mega-corporation Diageo, but is run more or less the same way. The facility still avails itself of 18,000 gallons of fresh water drawn daily from an aquifer that runs between Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba; the employees still distill 50 different whiskies with which they produce the signature Crown Royal blend; the warehouses still store authentic Canadian Whiskey, which is defined by law as any whisky made in this country that has been aged for a minimum of three years in a wood cask of not more than 700 litres. It is this constancy, the distillers maintain, that makes it possible for a bottle of Crown Royal in 2017 to taste precisely the same as it did when invented in 1939.
Machinery grinds through production 24 hours a day at the Gimli plant. Rye, corn and malted barley are delivered by truck daily. Water in enormous quantities cooks the corn to prepare the mash. Big vats that look like mugs of frothy root beer fizz and bubble constantly: it’s the fermentation, churning madly for days until the yeast settles and dies – as meanwhile the room swelters with the heat of distillation in process. In less factory- like offices a staff of super-judicious drinkers, equipped with some of the most sensitive palates on earth, review glass after glass of newly distilled whisky by scent and taste for quality control: the slightest variation from established formula and the batch is scotched.
Gimli is a town of 6,000. It feels like – indeed it is – the middle of nowhere. And yet it is here, among endless stretches of emerald green, that more than 300 million litres of Crown Royal is diligently, scrupulously, patiently made. Over the course of almost half a century this vast flagship distillery has continued to furnish the world with exquisite rye whisky, an endeavour that must surely qualify as noble. (A single glass is testament enough to this designation.) And while the facilities themselves may remain rather less than welcoming – while the great nauseating warehouses of vapour- shrouded barrel storage aggressively defy all attempts at tourism – the product yielded in privacy is worth it.
Perhaps what it takes to make alcoholic art is an air of seclusion and secrecy.