The Whiskey Tour Starts
The Whiskey Tour Starts
After picking up our new crew member (Linus Korsholm) in Belfast, we left Ireland for the second (and last time) to head for our main destination: Scotland. Apart from being a very kind and welcoming people they have an unusual number of distilleries producing a great variety of whisky, and we have been looking forward to visit a reasonable number of those, the first of which being Springbank in Campbelltown, located just north of Mull of Kintyre.
Springbank is a bit special, since it is one of just a handful of distilleries that handle all phases of whiskey production locally, while at the same time not being owned by a huge conglomerate - it basically is, what most people would think "a distillery" actually is, but what so few actually are. For most other distilleries ingredients (mostly barley) are produced elsewhere, the malting process might be performed in a factory off site as well, and finally the storage and bottling is also handled by external partners. Many distilleries may only perform the fermentation and distillation and outsource everything else. But not Springbank; here all parts are performed onsite, though they do get much of their barley from producers outside of Campbelltown, they still have their "local barley" series made from locally produced barley, so in my mind they qualify as 'a real distillery'.
The Springbank distillery tour was perhaps the most interesting of all tours I've been on, since we got to see every phase of the process as performed in an active working factory. Springbank is surprisingly old school. Apart from an electric motor driving a belt or the mill, all processes are performed exactly as they were a hundred years ago. If Springbank where to loose electricity they would be able to continue production by just installing a couple steam engines. All other processes are hand labor. Springbank employs more than 100 people to keep this working museum operating as in the old day. This also has a huge beneficial effect on the local community.
Also, all their core machinery is very old. Their mill e.g. is 80 years old, and their boiling and fermentation equipment looked of a similar age.
The tour ended in their storage room and we had a dram of their local barley whisky in the bar and bought a bottle of their signature product the "Springbank 10" in the shop.
Next stop on our tour will be Arran distillery on the north side of the island of Arran, and then we plan to go to Islay where we will visit the Kilchoman distillery - another of the very few "everything onsite" and locally owned distilleries in Scotland.
