After our fantastic tour of @BalvenieUS (I'm linking in the US account as the UK one hasn't been active since 2017) the DrivenByDrams gang walked up the road to @GlenfiddichSMW
There's been a lot of building work in the last few years...
The obligatory group photo outside the distillery interrupted by a call from Mark's wife!
We got there in the end!
The distillery duck pond!
It's a huge place with it's own Post Box - a George 6th Hovis style box!
We'd signed up for the Solera: Deconstruction Tour which started with a run through the history of the company.
We went to see the hole into which 150 tonnes of malted barley is delivered every night.
We then went on to the HUGE Mash Tun room - four copper domed Mash Tuns working 24 hours a day.
These huge vessels each take around 10 tonnes of malt, with the mashing process taking around 6 hours and each tun producing around 40,000 litres of wort!
48 Douglas Fir Washbacks fill a number of rooms, each fermenting the wort for 72 hours .
The 'old' Still Room boasts 12 shiny copper stills with quite sharply down pointing lyne arms. They are in pairs of slightly different shapes.
With a very cramped set of spirit stills.
We were also invited into (the entrance) of the new still room boasting it's own Doig Ventilator or cupola for some reason!
It contains 31 stills in a huge L-shaped room. Yes FORTY THREE stills in total...
There was a small 'for show' spirit safe, our guide told us the new still room doesn't use them.
This is whisky production on a massive industrial scale, they now produce around 21 million litres of whisky a year.
We then visited one of the huge warehouses
There were a huge number of bourbon and sherry casks, including these 2 with window ends!
Glenfiddich also use some HUGE marrying casks for storage, not maturation.
There are also some huge tuns, again used for storage. We passed a couple of warehouses full of these tuns.
There are also a number of huge Solera Vats where the casks for the 15yo Solera (and some travel retail bottlings) are married.
Andy managed to avoid falling in the cask emptying trough!
We then returned to the "Malt Master’s Blending Room to enjoy a tasting of four cask-strength 15-year-old samples. You will also have the unique opportunity to step into our Malt Master Brian Kinsman’s role - preparing your very own version of Glenfiddich 15 year old by combining different cask samples together."
To work...
Our final results were bottled so we could take them home!
A great experience, we got to try some amazing Cask Strength drams and came home with a bottle of our own creation!
Our walk home took us past 2 other distilleries Glendullen:
and the now closed Parkmore:
Tomorrow would be our return home but not before a visit to Tomatin!
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