Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This is the still house here at Laphroaig and again it's very much one of the things
that makes us unique within the industry, because we have three wash stills going this
way and four spirit stills you can see behind me. The first distillation in these wash stills
you see here basically boil up the wash from the mash house get it bubbling up and in the
necks of the wash stills you can a foam, we cut the steam back and we leave it simmering.
Now as it starts to simmer this is where it produces the vapour. The first thing the vapours
do, you can see the copper stills here - the reason they're copper is to get a chemical
reaction. This chemical reaction almost changes the formation of the make-up of the vapours.
And this is what allows the spirit to keep evolving during the maturation stage and this
is the reason why copper is so crucial. What then happens is the vapours rise up the neck
and not all can get through the neck at the one time so you get what is called reflux.
The more reflux you have, the more reaction with copper, the more chemical reactions you
have so all of this changes the flavour profile. Now here at Laphroaig, we run our stills pretty
slowly compared to the majority of the industry so we don't have a lot of reflux but what
we do have the next thing up, the bit that links the still to the condenser unit - its
called the lyne arm and the lyne arms go up the way at Laphroaig and that is very unique
within the industry. There are only four or five distilleries where they do this and because
we're distilling slowly and the lyne arms go up the way, we don't push a lot of the
heavy oils or flavours over into the spirit. So even though Laphroaig's are really heavily
peated spirited, they're actually quite light bodied. It is then condensed back into a liquid
and collected in the safe. Now the liquid we collect from the first distillation we
call low wines and basically what you'll have done, you'll have taken your 8.5% volume wash
up to about 35% low wines. We just run all of the alcohol out of that, this process takes
about five and a half hours and when the alcohol is out we're finished with the liquid. In
the second distillation, you split it into three parts. Here on Islay we call it fore
shots, you have your spirit run and then your feints. In mainland Scotland they call it
heads, hearts, tails so it just depends where you are but basically it's the same principle.
What we then do here at Laphroaig, we've got the longest fore shot or head run in the industry.
We kind of recycle this back in with the low wines from the first distillation for 45 minutes
before we turn it around and separate out the spirit run. The spirit run here, we're
wanting the heavier deeper flavour that you associate with Laphroaig flavour profile and
the single malt. Now the first and the third parts that I've mentioned, the heads and the
tails, or the fore shot and the feints get recycled back with the low wines from the
first distillation. They're always mixed together and then put back in the spirit stills again.
Again Laphroaig you can see three in the first distillation and four in the second distillation
- how does that work, how can it be balanced? Well the answer is, it isn't balanced over
stills. What we do here at Laphroaig is we have another tank up the back where we keep
25,000 litres of low wines, fore shot and feints all mixed up together and then we run
the big still at the end, number 1. It doesn't run constantly, it maybe runs once or twice
over every fermentation vessel. And with this we balance over every fermentation vessel
rather than a double distillation which very much separates us from the industry as well
and allows us to keep the unique flavour profile of Laphroaig going.