In the world of whisky making, every distillery tells its own story of birth. At Ardgowan, that tale began not with delivery of the stills, but with the arrival of a modest yet crucial vessel: the grist case, a five-tonne capacity square with a conical base that heralded the first distillery equipment delivery.
Like pieces of a giant industrial puzzle, the distillery's entrails arrived one by one. The mash tun made perhaps the most dramatic entrance — a behemoth split in two, its five-metre diameter too vast to transport whole. The hemispheres were lifted into position on their framework within the distillery and they then sat patiently waiting, like a butterfly's chrysalis before transformation. While they waited, their siblings arrived: the hot water tanks, pot ale charger, and intermediate spirit receivers all found their homes. Six washbacks, each with a capacity of 34,000 litres, are ready for duty. Then came the crowning glory — the copper stills, hoisted into place like copper giants taking their thrones.
The mash tun's marriage was worth the wait. When the time came, the two halves were finally winched together in a masterclass of precision engineering. A spectacular stainless-steel seam now traces its way across the floor and up the wall to the vessel's conical roof — a surgery scar that tells of its unusual birth.
This isn't just any mash tun — it's a full Lauter mash tun, representing the pinnacle of mashing technology. The craftsmen from Briggs of Burton speak of it with justified pride. Its rakes rotate and then lower and raise their arms in a dance through the mash coaxing every possible gram of sugar from the grist.
The journey of malted barley through the Ardgowan distillery is a carefully choreographed process that begins in the malt silos. The grain descends through a high-tech gauntlet: first through a destoner and then a magnet that snatch away any unwanted gravel or metallic stowaways, then through the embrace of a four-roller mill. Here, the malt is transformed into grist: a precise blend of flour and husk that holds the key to perfect drainage in the mashing process.
In the grist case, four load cells act as digital scales, measuring with precision until exactly 5,000kg of grist rests in the bin. It's a dusty business — where there's milling, there's the risk of dust explosion — but modern dust aspirators catch and recycle dust particles, keeping the air clean and the process safe.
The magic really begins during mashing-in, where grist meets water in the Steeles masher. It's a controlled process of temperature and timing, with weak worts from previous mashes joining fresh hot water in precise ratios — typically 3.5 to 4.0 litres of water for every kilogram of grist. The malt's natural enzymes spring to life in this warm embrace, transforming starches into the sweet wort that will eventually become whisky.
The final act is one of clarity — literally. The wort circulates through the mash tun in a process that's part science, part art. The goal isn't crystal-clear clarity, but rather that sweet spot of haziness that will create the desired flavour profile in fermentation and distillation.
The Phase One project is designed to produce 830,000 litres of pure alcohol per year or in excess of 1.3 million litres of new make spirit at an ABV of 65%. One of our earliest design decisions was to size the malt and mashing system to be capable of doubling this capacity without needing to change the equipment or the building. So, while the mash tun may seem oversized it is designed to allow for a future doubling of distillery capacity.
At Ardgowan, each vessel, each process, each careful measurement comes together in a sophisticated industrial ballet. We deliberately chose a semi-automated process. While the complexity of mashing and the energy recovery from the thermal vapour recompression is automated the key to our unique spirit the fermentation process and the operation of the spirit still are manual. Our distillery operators will manually open valves, manually change hoses, and manually nose the new make giving a human soul to our unique Ardgowan single malt whisky.
Read earlier instalments in the Building Ardgowan Distillery series here.
