This post covers how whisky is made — from the raw ingredients all the way to the finished bottle on the shelf.
Ingredients and Their Characteristics
The raw ingredients used to make whisky include malt, grain, corn, rye, and wheat. Let me explain the characteristics of each.
First, malt. Malt generally refers to barley that has gone through the malting process, which consists of germination and drying. Barley grains are soaked in water to encourage germination, and in the process enzymes are activated, converting the barley’s starch into fermentable sugars. Once germination has gone far enough, the malted barley is dried to stop it from sprouting further. That is how the malt we know is born. To make whisky from it, the malt is crushed to extract its fermentable sugars, and the resulting wort is fermented and then distilled. Whisky made from malt retains a great deal of the spirit’s own flavor, which interacts with the cask to build even greater depth.
Next, grain. “Grain” refers to everything other than barley — corn, wheat, rye, and the like. Grain whisky goes through saccharification and fermentation just as malt does, but the finished whisky, unlike malt whisky, carries little of the spirit’s own influence and ends up with a mild flavor.
Corn is the main ingredient in bourbon. Spirits distilled from corn tend to be smooth, sweet, and rich in flavor.
Rye is also used in whisky-making. Its signature is a clean peppery note with a distinctive, punchy spiciness, along with a light body and floral aromas.
Last is wheat. It is not as prominent as the ingredients above, but it appears fairly often. Its flavor and aroma lean toward the soft and gentle.
The Production process
Whisky production runs in this order: malting → milling → mashing → fermentation → distillation → maturation → blending → bottling.
Malting is the process of producing malt. As mentioned above, barley is soaked in water and allowed to germinate and sprout. In the process, the grain’s starch turns into water-soluble sugars, which makes the fermentation to come much easier.
Milling means grinding: the dried malt is crushed into a fine powder.
Mashing means saccharification: the ground grain goes into a vessel called a mash tun with hot water to draw out maximum sweetness. The malt’s starch converts into maltose, producing wort. The wort — now holding sugars suited to fermentation — is then transferred to a fermentation vessel called a washback.
Fermentation adds yeast to the wort inside the washback. Timing varies enormously from distillery to distillery, but it runs about 48 hours. The result is called wash, and its strength is a mere 8% ABV.
Now for the main event: distillation. Whisky goes through a first and a second distillation — the first in a wash still, the second in a spirit still. In the first, the wash is distilled into alcohol vapor that rises up the still and condenses, producing what is called low wines. The second distillation separates the run into three parts: the foreshots, the middle cut, and the feints. Only the middle cut — the heart of the run — is collected and used as spirit. The reason: the foreshots contain acetone and methanol and cannot be drunk, while the feints carry too many impurities to be of much use.
Then comes maturation. Each whisky style has a minimum time it must spend in oak to earn its name — for Scotch, the benchmark, it is three years — though most whiskies mature far longer. Through maturation, the spirit takes on the cask’s aroma, flavor, and color. The alcohol bite that jumped out of the raw spirit settles down, fusing with the character of the oak and turning smooth. The longer the maturation, the weaker the spirit’s influence and the stronger the cask’s. In addition, the strength of the liquid inside gradually falls over time, and — though it varies by environment — evaporation shaves off a certain percentage of the volume every year.
Blending is the mixing of matured spirits. Apart from special limited editions and vintages, most whisky is made by blending multiple casks. This step is essential for a distillery’s product line to taste consistent year after year. Fill the same spirit into the same type of cask on the same day, mature the two side by side for the same length of time — and after a long maturation, they still will not taste the same.
So to preserve a distillery’s identity and keep its flavor and aroma consistent, hundreds of casks, each with its own personality, must be harmonized into the intended profile. For this staggeringly demanding work, distilleries employ specialists with exceptional noses, palates, and memories — known as malt masters or master distillers.
The final step is bottling. Bottling is exactly what it sounds like: the finished whisky goes into bottles and becomes a product. Fill a well-sterilized bottle with whisky, apply the distillery’s label, seal the neck with a cork — and it is done.
Sales
Whisky made this way generally reaches the market through two channels.
Most whisky is sold directly by the distillery that made it. The distillery builds a product lineup — [Distillery] 12 Year, 15 Year, and so on — and every year the master distiller blends to match those standards. New casks are drawn on every year, but what consumers expect is the same taste as before, so even the most brilliant master distiller cannot make use of every cask.
If a cask has matured in a direction too different from the existing lineup or the distillery’s house style, it will be hard to use. That does not mean the spirit inside tastes bad — its direction is simply different. And no one throws away precious spirit matured for years, even decades, merely because its direction differs. So what happens to it?
When a distillery ends up with spirit that points a different way, it usually passes it on to an independent bottler. Independent bottling means a company that, instead of distilling itself, buys spirit from other distilleries, then blends, brands, and sells it. The bottler typically puts its own brand on the label and notes underneath which distillery the spirit came from. For consumers, it is an appealing chance to taste a whisky with unfamiliar flavors and aromas from a distillery they already love; for the supplier, it means precious spirit is sold rather than wasted.
Thank you for reading.
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