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So here we are in the mash house now. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take you through
this box it takes you through the stages we've done so far. This one here, this is barley
- what we started off with in the floor maltings. The process of floor malting will take us
to this, this is the malted barley so slightly different colour. What we will do, up to this
period, we will have it in bins and rest it for three weeks just to let the kind of yield
become higher within the malted barley. What we then do we grind it up through the mill
and it'll form this stuff here. This is grist and the grist from the mill will take about
five and a half tons to give us one mash in this vessel here. This is the lauter tun and
the mashing process is split into five stages. What we do is the first stage is to mix the
grist with the water from the Kilbride Reservoir together and we basically mix it up. The temperature
it is mixed at is crucial to get the maximum mix as well, so 63.5 Celsius they're mixed
at. They are then left to fuse for about 15 minutes again activating some of these enzymes.
And how the mash tun works is basically the grist will float on a bed of water and we'll
start to drain it off through, out through the plates below and then into one of these
vessels as you can see behind me. So first flush out 25,000 litres behind into the vessels,
we then start to use the Kilbridge water again and we spray on top and we call it sparging,
this is the second or third part of the process. We just do another couple of flushes into
the vessel. When that's done we'll basically take another flush in and recycle it back
to the heat tanks behind us here and what this does is any flavour or sugars we have
left in the grist we'll recycle them back into the next mash. The last part of this
process is the rack arms in the lauter tun here, they'll start to go counter clockwise
and this pushes the spent grain out through a whole in the floor and out to the big grey
tank we have out the back here. We then have lorries come in and they'll take this away
to be used for cattle feed on the island.
Now we do have another process in the mash house here, it's the fermentation. I'll take
you over and show you what happens during that process. So this is us in the fermentation
area and we have six vessels in this area and each one is at a different stage. What
we do at this point though, after we've extracted the sugary wort from the mash tun, we add
this stuff here now this is yeast and this is basically the magic ingredient. What'll
happen is all of the sugars and flavours we've extracted from the malt we add yeast and it
turns the sugary liquid into an alcohol. And the process is very quick, just over two days
and with each vessel being at a different stage you can see the fermentation process
gets really vigorous at some points during the fermentation and then it kind of settles
down and turns into this liquid we have in here. Now in this vessel we have a completed
fermentation, so I'm just going to take a quick sample of that and show you the liquid
we have here. It also gains heat during the fermentation so from setting it at 18 Celsius
as it ferments it builds up to maybe 34 Celsius and the temperature point is crucial so that
we don't kill our magic ingredient in here. So nice kind of cloudy liquid here, this is
8.5% volume so it's a nice warm beer, strong beer as well. Very, very peaty, very heavy,
very bitter and quite yeasty as well - and very sweet. Yep, just as expected, really
like liquid smoke at this point because before we distill it, this is almost three times
the concentrate you'll get in the final spirit as well. Now this is ready to be pumped over
to the still house to be distilled and we have an intermediate vessel called a charger
in between - it will be pumped over there in the next few minutes ready for distillation.