Master Distiller Blog No.06 — Walking Into a Whisky Distillery
David Hsieh
A distiller’s day, with mashing, distilling and cask-filling all running at once
By David Hsieh — Master Distiller, Tankyu Distillery | Presenter, Business Whisky Guide Podcast
Adapted from Business Whisky Guide Podcast EP6 — ‘Distilling, nice’.
A Scotch whisky distillery, more often than not, sits somewhere remote in the Highlands or out on an island, the buildings painted white. There are several stories about the white walls; the most plausible has to do with the early economics of building. Lime-wash, applied to the outside walls, holds back damp and mould; the material is cheap and easy to put on, and so in the nineteenth century distilleries and ordinary houses alike turned to the same finish. Island distilleries also tended to paint the name of the distillery in large black letters across the white — the point of which was to let supply boats coming into the small harbours read the destination from out at sea, so that malt and casks were not delivered to the wrong door. The other architectural marker is the Pagoda Roof, the tapering chimney cap above the kiln, originally there to draw the peat smoke and hot air out of the malting floor.
Step inside, and the first thing you usually meet is the malt bin. The bin has the look of a large stainless-steel water tower: dried malt arrives from the maltings, is conveyed up to the top of the bin from the loading bay and dropped down into storage. Next to the bin sits the mill, which grinds the malt into a grist of the right particle distribution, ready for the mashing step. After that, the mash tun: a great cast-iron pot fitted with rake arms inside, which keep the grist and hot water mixed thoroughly while the starch is converted into fermentable sugars. The fermentation room sits on the other side of the wall from the mash tun, lined with washbacks — some in the traditional wood, some in modern stainless steel. Wort and yeast spend several dozen hours fermenting in them, releasing very large amounts of carbon dioxide; the smell is sharp and forceful, and first-time visitors will sometimes step back.
Further in is the room a distillery is really known for — the still house. A pair, or several pairs, of tall copper pot stills stand in the middle, their outsides a deep, full gold. Steam heats the fermented wash inside; the alcohol-bearing vapour rises up through the swan neck, passes along the lyne arm and the condenser, and emerges as a colourless, transparent liquid at the other end — new make spirit, the shape a whisky takes before it ever sees oak. Because the heat is continuous, the still house is the warmest room in the distillery; on a winter day with the outside temperature at zero, inside it can be twenty or thirty degrees.
In sharp contrast is the warehouse. The light is dim, the temperature usually about ten degrees below outside, and on a winter day can fall close to freezing. There are three principal warehouse types in use. The first is the traditional Dunnage warehouse — earth floor, wooden racking, casks lying on their sides and stacked two or three high, the ceiling kept low. The second is the modern Racked warehouse, the wooden racking replaced with steel, casks stacked several stories high and the cubic capacity per square metre much greater. The third is the Palletised warehouse — casks stood upright, strapped to pallets, layered up by forklift, the most efficient use of floor space.
A distiller’s day
Once you have a picture of how the building is laid out, the shape of a distiller’s day becomes easier to imagine. The core operations at a distillery divide into three blocks — mashing, distilling, cask-filling — corresponding to the mash tun and washbacks, the stills, and the filling store. The distiller will usually arrive with a fixed list of targets for the day: one mash to complete, one or two distillation runs to finish, a handful of casks (or a dozen) to fill. The three are not done in sequence. They run in parallel — mashing, distilling and filling overlap continually in the same shift — and the distiller spends the day on the move between rooms. By the end of it, a step counter will often show twenty or thirty thousand paces.
Take a typical semi-automated distillery as an example. The distiller starts the day by setting the mash going: hot water and milled grist are run into the mash tun. At the same time, the previous batch’s finished wash is drawn from a washback into the still and steam is opened to begin distillation. While the still is heating, the just-emptied washback is cleaned out. As the new make begins to run, the distiller switches between foreshots, middle cut and feints on the basis of strength and timing, and the cuts have to be made to the minute, with a hand timer on the belt. While the distillation continues, the first runnings of the mash come off, are cooled and run into a washback, and the second hot-water charge is run into the mash tun; once the second runnings are off, the third water is added, and the third-water charge is recovered into the hot liquor tank, kept back for the next mash. When there is time in the gap, the distiller heads down to the filling store and starts moving new make into casks. At the close of the shift, the mash tun and the surrounding workspace are thoroughly cleaned to keep residual sugars from drawing fruit flies; the boilers are shut down; the day is handed over.
The kit on the distiller’s belt
Working at that density depends on a small, well-chosen set of tools that the distiller carries.
The first is a torch. Inspecting the inside of a still, checking the malt bin level, confirming a vessel has been properly emptied — all of these require a beam of light to see by. On winter mornings or late finishes, when the road around a remote distillery is unlit, the same torch lights the way home.
The second is a knife, used mainly to slit open yeast sacks and bleach drum seals, and on occasion to cut packing tape down at the bottling hall.
The third set is a marker pen, a ballpoint pen and a notebook. The notebook is for handover notes and the day’s process record. The marker pen has a specific role: it is used to mark each empty yeast sack as it is added to a washback, so that at the end of the day a count of the marked sacks confirms that every washback has had its yeast pitched. The system is old-fashioned but it is also extremely good at catching the kind of mistake an automated system would not.
The fourth is a watch — a wristwatch, or in some cases a pocket watch. A lot of the kit in a distillery has no built-in timer of its own: cut-points on the spirit run, the time it takes a still to fill, the rate at which casks are filled, are all kept by the distiller. There are usually several timers running in the distiller’s head at the same time.
Tough gloves, for cask handling. A full sherry-seasoned cask can weigh four to five hundred kilograms, the rim of the cask carries rough splinters, and trying to grip one bare-handed is a quick route to a cut hand. Even with gloves, the splinter occasionally finds its way through.
Boots — waterproof, with non-slip soles, and built with both steel toecaps and steel midsoles. The waterproofing is for the standing water and the cleaning-water runoff that distillery floors always have; the steel is to stop a rolling cask, which is much heavier than it looks, from crushing a toe.
Add those elements together and what you have is the real shape of a whisky distillery: a working production site, run on process and rhythm.
About the author
David Hsieh is master distiller at Tankyu Distillery. He has previously worked as a distiller at several whisky distilleries in Scotland. He holds an MSc in Brewing and Distilling from Heriot-Watt University, and is the host and producer of the Business Whisky Guide podcast, Taiwan's #1 whisky podcast.
About the distillery
Tankyu Distillery is one of Japan's few public-private (公設民営) craft distilleries, located in Higashikawa, Hokkaido. Founded in 2020, it produces single malt whisky and craft gin using pristine spring water from the Daisetsuzan mountain range — water so pure that Higashikawa remains the only municipality in Hokkaido without a municipal water supply. Learn more at tankyudistillery.jp.
Source
・ Business Whisky Guide podcast EP6 — ‘Distilling, nice’.
Other distilleries, brands and producers mentioned in this article are referenced on the basis of publicly available information and the author’s personal observation, in the spirit of information-sharing rather than commercial comparison or evaluation. The references do not represent the position of Tankyu Distillery.