Distillery sold and relocated to China

[ik9000]

Can't wait to try their Jorry Warrer!

JW is a blend, so they'd need a heck of a lot more than one distillery to do a good job of that.

[MrJim]

I assume like all alcoholic drinks, the water used is a part of the flavour. So unless they start shipping tankers of Scottish water to China, which won't be fresh by the time they get there, they are making a slightly different drink?

You can't make a 10yr old malt in a month, so I guess it will be a while before we find out how this pans out.

The French use the word 'terroir' to describe all the environmental factors that affect the character of wine (and other products). So things like the characteristics of the soil, the water, the farming & production practices, etc etc all contribute to the character of the final product. So as you say, you could transport an entire distillery to China, but the product you make definitely won't be the same as Scottish whiskey.

[ik9000]

The French use the word 'terroir' to describe all the environmental factors that affect the character of wine (and other products). So things like the characteristics of the soil, the water, the farming & production practices, etc etc all contribute to the character of the final product. So as you say, you could transport an entire distillery to China, but the product you make definitely won't be the same as Scottish whiskey.

Terroir is nice idea but really doesn't apply to whisky. Some places are starting to try promoting it but don't be fooled it's a brand/marketing gimmick only and simply does not mimic what is involved with wine.

Where a still is located makes little difference to whisky in terms of what comes out the still. The act, or art, of distillation sees to that. What matters is what type of grain is used, the quality of that grain, how it is treated before the mashing process; and the shape, material, and heat cycling in the stills, swan necks and cooling worms. That controls what comes out of the still in the new make, and can be very very regularised and consistently controlled with modern monitoring. Whisky then gets the art of barreling where a lot of the finesse comes in, and is shaped by woods, time, climate and storage conditions.

Most distilleries do not even grow their own grain, nor own enough land to get it in the bulk modern volume production requires. A lot of grain is imported into Scotland to supplement production - quite a lot of single malt has barley from Northern England (and further afield) where the growing conditions are better. That barley is then mass malted, peated to precise order, and killed in offsite centralised locations in the majority of cases, before being shipped to the distilleries for gristing and mashing.

The quality of water doesn't matter much for distilling as what gets used is often distilled water to begin with generally - so as long as it's not full of utter garbage to begin with pretty much any clean water will do. When the cask whisky is watered down for bottling, then what you add to it matters but generally distilled water is used for this to avoid contaminating the whisky and its carefully selected flavours, especially when you're talking about large scale production where consistency matters.

I've been to tastings where they gave you peated water to add. What's the point? You're not tasting the real whisky then. And if you bought a bottle you wouldn't then have your own stock of peated water at home to add to it. Complete gimmick IMO, though it would be cheaper for them to provide water from the brook (that is what they said they were doing) than to pay for purified stuff for the visitors I guess.

Every now and then you get a distillery with a small amount of land, who do their own 100% process. Kilchomann for example does limited runs of whisky from its own farm, malted and peated on site on its own malting floor, and then distilled, aged nearby, and bottled on their premises. The quantities are small even in terms of their own (by industry standards modest) production volumes, and across the Scottish whisky industry it is not very common at all SFAIK to have something 100% from source as it were. Having tasted it it wasn't even that great (back in 2017 at least). It's had a few more years to age since, so newer bottlings may have picked up in flavour intensity with the additional aging in the barrels. (Whisky does not age or mature in a bottle - once it's out the cask the clock stops).