BUNNAHBHAIN
The four-mile road to the village of Bunnahabain (BUNE-ah-hab-hain) is narrow, steep and serpentine. When the distillery of the same name opened in 1881, the owners constructed the path to the main road for horse-drawn carriages to bring coal and barley to the facility. Today, however, 40-foot trucks use it to take whisky away to be bottled.
The narrow road made for a hair-raising encounter on a drive up the hill, as an enormous truck careened down it. When my friend Jeroen Hanselaer, a Belgian photographer, and I reached the top, a sweeping view of grand Victorian-era buildings and a tremendous pyramid of empty oak barrels stacked six-high-by-13-long came into sight down a shallow slope to Bunnahabhain Bay.
We parked and followed Barnard’s path through the stone “noble gateway” into a courtyard surrounded by gray production buildings. “Some say it feels like a cathedral, some say it reminds them of a prison,” Robin Morton, a stillman, told me with a hearty laugh.
Morton spends much of his day at a computer screen, which, he’s quick to point out, only monitors the stills’ activity, not control it. So to heat the stills, he walks over to the steam wheel and cranks it. Nonetheless, that monitor does make things a little easier: When he started, he had to measure the flow rate of the spirit with a wood stick. Now he reads the measurements from the glowing screen.
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BOWMORE
As far as Scottish island distilleries go, Bowmore is particularly urban. Built in 1779 in Islay’s capital village of the same name, it’s a collection of whitewashed buildings on four seaside acres, just off the main throughfare, which lined with a bustling grocery, a hardware store, gift shops and a bank.
In the cement-floored malt barn, a single beam of light streaming through a small window gave the large, stark room the luminosity of a Vermeer painting. A man was pulling a rake-like instrument across a barley-strewn floor, making furrows so air could circulate through the germinating grains. Bowmore is one of the few distilleries in Scotland to use the old-fashioned floor-malting method. Today this part of the malting process is typically done in industrial-size drums at giant plants.
Heather, my genial guide who wore stylish glasses and her hair in a loose pony tail, scooped up a fistful of barley and instructed me to crush a single soft sprouted granule between my fingers ? the 2maltster’s rub.” It was silky and chalky, moist enough to absorb the peat smoke that ultimately gives whisky its characteristic flavor.
After wandering through the still house and the cold, dark warehouse known as the No.1 Vaults, which has been used to age whisky since Bowmore was founded in 1779, making it reportedly one of the oldest maturing warehouses in the world, my friend and I kicked back in the modern cozy tasting room, which has expansive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the sea. I sipped the 12-year-old single malt, the youngest sample in the tasting flight of four ? a softly peated drink that smelled of sea spray and grain.
During Barnard’s visit here, he wrote, “The Distillers say the proximity to the sea favours the various processes of malting, brewing and distilling.” As I watched the mist fly off the swirling “white horses,” local parlance for the waves of the cobalt Atlantic as they crest and slam against the shore, I appreciated one of Islay’s whiskies’ most cruicial ingredients: the local air.
ARDBEG
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As we approached Ardbeg, a cluster of buildings with pagoda roofs that appears like an oasis of civilization amid expanses of green hills, Barnard ’ s description rang clear: “ a lonely spot on the very verge of the sea, and its isolation tends to heighten the romantic sense of its position. ”
After being led through a few more equipment rooms, we emerged into a sunlit room with a pitched churchlike ceiling.
In front of us were six huge washbacks, vessels in which yeast feasts on sugary solution, generating bubbly accitivity on the golden liquid surface as it turns starch into alcohol.
Through a small window, far past those low cresting “ white horses, ” I could make out Northern ireland ’ s hills of Antrim. Long before trucks existed, the narrow pier right outside was primary access to the rest of the world: Barley and yeast came off boats, whisky was sent out. It was easy to envision the ships in gridlock on the now bare waters.
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BRUICHLADDICH
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This distillery ’ s whitewashed buildings with turquoise-framed windows surround a small courtyard with an entrance just off the main road that runs along the shoreline. Observing the scene from the mash house, Barnard described it as “ one of the finest and most healthy spots on the island. ”
I peered down into the mash tun, a massive iron vessel where giant curved rakes revolved through seven tons of grist steeping in 21,000 liters (or nearly 5,550 gallons) of piping hot water, giving off a heady peat smell that called to mind a smoldering seaside campfire and hot tar.
This porridge-like mix would become Octomore, the smokiest single malt on the planet. Spending time in a room heavily infused with the aroma of smoked grains cooking made my sweater smell like iodine and ashes for days. I found it delightful.
A study in gears and grace, the nearly seven-foot deep mash tun is the stuff steampunk dreams are made of: a contraption of cast iron, steel and bronze. The nearly 150-year-old machine is one of several pieces of equipment that was restored to its Victorian-era glory. The distillery, which opened in 1881, was abandoned in 1994, then resurrected by an English wine merchant in 2001.
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LAGAVULIN
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The craggy ruins of Dunyvaig Castle that captivated Barnard are still a vision of faded majesty as we approached Lagavulin, the last distillery on my visit. Perched on a peninsular rock, the ruins dominate the distillery ’ s seaside panorama.
The crash of the waves was drowned out by a mechanical rumble when my tour guide, George Crawford, the distillery manager, led us into the mill room where a lofty antique-looking steel contraption pulverizes barley into a coarse powdery grist. It always amazes me that these fine particles will become elegant, complex Scotch whisky. Ms. Crawford, affable yet matter-of-fact, put a handful of milled grain on a screen in a shoebox-size, weathered wood box, shut it and shook it ? 50 times up and down, 50 times side to side. This, she explained, is how they make sure each batch of barley isn ’ t too fine or too coarse, quite a remarkable thing to do by hand, considering Lagavulin makes 2.4 million liters of spirit annually. (It was merely 284,000 liters in the 1800s.)
“ Sometimes the most basic thing can do the job you need to do. You can get a machine, but we trust our guys to count to 50, ” she said with a merry shrug.
