Clydeside Distillery

We stopped for lunch at the Clydeside Distillery. The food was great and the people were terrific. We almost immediately struck up a lasting friendship with Linnie and Sam. This was good for Elizabeth since I vanished after lunch to take the tour. This left here with someone to talk to while she waited.

Above is the preparation of the mash, extracting the starch from the barley.



This is the tank that contains the mash.

Once the starch is obtained, the liquid containing it, is drained away to vats wto which the yeast is added and the starch is converted to alcohol. In other words, beer is made.

And a frothy beer it is.

This alcohol and water mixture is then distilled in large copper pots. It turns out that copper is the way to go here. There are also sulphates in the mix and these reacts with the copper to make copper sulphate that precipitates out. Thus, the copper saves us from the poison and bast taste of the sulphates by slowly dissolving. This are replaced every 30-50 years.

All this is new here, however. By law in Scotland, it takes 3 years and a day to make scotch whisky and this distillery has not been here that long yet so they cannot sell anything they've made. But is was a nice tour and I learned a lot.