Glenkinchie Distillery in the Scottish Borders

Still recovering from the wedding, Jess and I slept in until Jon was instructed to wake us (because Malcolm was hungry and we were walking to breakfast). On the way there, we encountered the village’s most exciting scandal of the century, which was that a couple purchased a house, and within a week the police had broken into it. The village will never recover, especially given that a car was stolen from the village 6 years ago as well. Both members of staff at the cafe were home sick, so we turned around and walked back through the forest to find something at home.

Jono was kind enough to provide another Jonoism on the walk, which was the following analogy: something being ‘more serious than a dog shitting’. Thanks Jon.

This little Jack Russell Terrorist Harry has suffered the same fate as Hazel, of refusing to do anything he’s told ever, such that he has lost all privileges. He is incapable of remorse. Only fury.

With a drizzly afternoon setting in, we joined Malcolm’s mate Ann on a tour of the Glenkinchie Distillery. Willie, our guide, had retired into his guide gig, and regretted not making the switch earlier. He was excellent. He described the whole process of making whisky from start to finish. Whisky is some chemistry involving spring water, barley and yeast, paired with something between the nature and luck of an old wooden barrel. ‘Spring’ barley is propagated year-round, by stimulating the spring-like conditions of soaking the barley, and then heating it to 1) ‘wake’ it and 2) dry it out. Unlike most of the flavour notes of whisky, the peatiness of smoky whisky is not an unrelated ester that our nose mistakes for the real thing, but rather, the direct effect of peat being burnt to smoke the warmed grain.

Once dried, the barley is ground down to a flour, and then soaked in huge pine vats to create a sort of porridge that smells a bit like cow burp (something like beer at this stage). Once the porridge has done enough fermenting, the beer/ish water is transferred to the copper distilling vats, where some bitter impurities are absorbed by the copper itself. The alcohol is evaporated out into copper pipes, that are subsequently cooled to return the contents to a liquid state. This distilled liquid is the beginnings of whisky: the ageing in barrels is essential.

The barrels are typically made from oak, and have previously been used to mature wine, sherry or bourbon. The insides are fired to create a charred lining, which reseals the barrel, and creates a lining capable of absorbing and sequestering further impurities (undesirable flavours). After three years, the product can be described as whisky, but this young whisky is still quite harsh: whisky is ideally aged for 12+ years in the barrel before being decanted into bottles.

With Jon leaving us to go and hang with some friends, Jess bought a bottle of whisky with him, rather than her wife. Photographic proof of said decanting. I’m fine. There was haggis chocolate for sale, which I’m told just contains the spices used in haggis, rather than the actual haggis.

Ann works in the Scottish distillery space, specifically working towards more ‘field to bottle’ distilleries where the barley’s terroir is both known and appreciated, rather than the whisky production purely being about the post-harvest process. We had great chats with her about food quality and equality, and the trajectory of food miles being a consideration for purchasers of alcohol as well as food.

She had just spent a few days at a family gathering on a Scottish island, but family barnies meant that she was happy to have an excuse to return to the mainland (that and the fact that the whole island smelled like ‘sheep shite.’) When asked about her childhood, she explained that her mother had one child in Glasgow and another in Edinburgh, which no ‘normal’ person would do. She depicted the contrast between Glasgow and Edinburgh as ‘a Glasgow funeral is more fun than an Edinburgh birthday party’.

Bidding farewell to Jon in a sudden Arctic gale, we headed home to a locked house. It took us a while to find the key: this was Marco’s expression the whole time. (That face is dog for ‘are you fucking kidding me?’

To regain his approval, Jess and I threw his final remaining toy around the garden until he refused to return the toy. He panted for about 30 minutes after we came inside. Ann just pulled out a metre-by-metre map of Scotland and told us exactly where was and wasn’t worth visiting. Our itinerary just became a lot clearer. Having freaked Ann out by explaining why kangaroos, Tasmanian devils and wombats are all capable of murder, we have headed to bed for another night of bright solstice skies.