Raw Spirit

by Iain Banks

  I have to confess an interest here; I had the great good fortune to be born to parents who loved me and did all they could do to give me the best possible start in life. I was an only child and so I suppose I had all the love they had to spare, and perhaps I was even more cherished than I might have been otherwise because my parents had had a child a couple of years before me, Martha Ann, who was born with spina bifida and died after only six weeks.

  For whatever reason, I started life with all the taken-for-granted advantages of the only child, plus a few more, maybe, because my father – faced, say, with the best cut of meat from a joint – would smile and wave it aside and say, ‘Oh, let the boy have it. He’s growing.’

  And that was always the way it was, and so I grew up kind of assuming that matters should be arranged largely for my convenience and I should have the pick of things. In fact, this assumption of superiority was so ingrained that I usually wouldn’t even mind if somebody else was occasionally given precedence. I’d just smile tolerantly and think that was nice for them; really whatever they’d just got should be mine, obviously, but it was good that other people got a share of the spoils now and again, even if they didn’t really merit it, and I could even take pleasure in my own – albeit imposed – magnanimity.

  The only area where I conceded rank on a continuing basis was in general smartness; there was a pretty blonde girl in my class in North Queensferry Primary School called Mary Henderson. Mary always came top in tests and I was always a worshipful second (there was one time after she’d been off school ill for several weeks when the positions were reversed, but even in Primary Two I knew that didn’t count). Brains and beauty. Naturally I fell as completely in love with her as it’s possible to fall at such an undeveloped age, and Mary became my first girlfriend, from the age of five to when we were both nine, and I left the village. It didn’t entirely end there – not that she ever knew – because I kind of fell hopelessly in love with her when I was fourteen, but that’s another story. We kept in sporadic touch and, years later, when she was working for a firm of lawyers in Edinburgh, she sold me my first flat in the city.

  In any event, I had a happy childhood.

  A lot of people who’ve read The Wasp Factory and have fallen for those old nonsenses about people only writing about what they know and first novels always being autobiographical seem to think I must have had a really awful, disturbed and even abused childhood, but it just ain’t true.

  Years ago the launch party for Canal Dreams was held in Edinburgh. This was a first for me; all my book launches until then had been in London, however my publishers had finally given in to years of me whining that we always had these shindigs in London where they were frankly a bit lost in amongst all the other launches and general media clutter; wasn’t it time to have one in Scotland where it might be a bit more of an event? So they’d relented. Desperate, after my years of wheedling, to make sure that the evening wasn’t some awful one-man-and-his-dog affair where almost nobody turned up, I’d invited as many of my family as possible along, including my parents. The book shop was full, I’d done the usual reading and answered various questions, everybody seemed happy and I was sitting signing copies at a table when a young male exchange student from the States said, as I scribbled over his book, ‘Gee, I just read The Wasp Factory; you must have had a really disturbed childhood.’

  Ha-ha! I thought. For once I can deny this with witnesses! ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘And I can prove it.’ I pointed. ‘See that little old grey-haired lady there? That’s my mum; ask her about my childhood.’

  The guy wandered off and, a few signed books later, I heard my mother’s voice floating over the assembled heads; ‘Och, no, Iain was always a very happy wee boy.’

  Consider my case well and truly rested.

  3: Exploding Custard Factories

  ‘BANKSIE, THIS TRUE you’re writing a book about whisky?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re going to get me to drive—’

  ‘You’ll be needing a hand. Count me in.’

  Mr Jarrold and I, slightly hungover, spend a quiet, pleasant, sunny Saturday going round lots of closed distilleries so I can take photographs of the distillery names in VERY BIG LETTERS painted on their whitewashed walls. At first I’m a bit mystified that the distilleries are closed on a Saturday – I’d kind of been hoping to get off to a flier here and be able to tell Oliver the Editor how determined I’ve been to start doing my research – but then these are basically light industrial units with a five-day week which happen to have guided tours and Visitor Centres as well; they’re not – certainly before Easter and the start of the season – full-time tourist haunts, and that is part of their charm.

  We have lunch with a view of Loch Indaal and the harbour in the Harbour Inn. This was only supposed to be a snack, but somehow it turned into a full three-courser when we started reading the menu. I stare at my pudding and consider the merits of not bothering to eat it but just strapping it directly to my waist, for which it is surely destined, but then eat it anyway. Then we wander/waddle round to the Bowmore whisky shop and stock up on a case full of whisky; basically one each from all seven of the working distilleries on the island, plus an old Port Ellen. Port Ellen distillery, forming the western limit of Port Ellen the town, no longer produces its own whisky but instead provides the malted barley for five of the other distilleries on Islay, and so still plays a significant part in the island’s economy and the overall quality of the Islay whiskies.

  The Bowmore whisky shop is very well stocked indeed and I get a bit carried away, spending an eye-wateringly large amount of money effectively buying the oldest version of each of the whiskies on offer (actually, distillers don’t call them versions, they call them expressions, which I suppose does sound slightly classier. Also, buying the oldest was a bit stupid without doing more research; age isn’t everything).

  All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  We drive around a bit afterwards, taking more photos and getting very good at spotting the distinctive pagoda-shaped ventilators – relics of the old drying floors where each distillery used to malt its own barley – that tend to denote the presence of a distillery.

  ‘That’ll be another of those distinctive pagodas there, then.’

  ‘It will indeed … Hey, look! There, outside that house; a life-size plastic goose! Hey, there’s loads of them! And they’re only 35 of your Earth pounds! I’m going to buy one! Maybe two!’

  ‘You really have lost all sense of value, haven’t you, Iain?’

  ‘… wonder if they light up. Hmm? Sorry, what?’

  Whisky: the how-to bit.

  (If you already know how whisky’s made, you may want to skip this section. Well, unless you’re one of these know-all types who wants to look for mistakes or something.)

  Whisky is made from barley, which is a type of grain that grows well in Scotland’s relatively cool, damp climate. You harvest the barley, soak the stuff in water to start it germinating, then dry it off again to stop it actually sprouting too far. The idea is to turn the starch in the barley into sugar. (Barley’s not much use as it is; I mean all you can do with it is let it turn into another barley plant or eat it, basically. Sugar you can do something useful with, i.e. start the process of turning it into drink.)

  It’s during the drying process that you can add the peaty flavour. In the old days peat fuelled the fires that dried the germinating barley, and naturally some of the smell of the smoke got into the barley. Back then every distillery would do its own malting. Malting is what the whole process so far is called, and it produces malted barley, or just plain malt, hence the name malt whisky.

  Once steeped (nothing especially technical in the word – just Scots for ‘soaked’) the germinating barley would be laid out on enormous malting floors inside the distillery and guys would walk up and down, dragging boards behind them to turn the barley over now and again, basically ploughing it to let the air get at every grain. The whole malting process can take
from one week to nearly two. Only a few distilleries still do this themselves: Balvenie on Speyside, Bowmore and Laphroaig on Islay, Springbank in Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre and Highland Park just outside Kirkwall, on Orkney. The rest source their grain from specialist malt mills, specifying the level of peatiness they want.

  Then you mill the malted barley – stopping before it’s milled too finely, when it would just be flour – until you have stuff called grist.

  At this point distilleries have been known to explode.

  No, seriously. Any fine organic dust mixed with air in the right proportions will explode if there’s a source of ignition like a spark (a bad explosion in a custard factory must sound perfectly hilarious unless you’re actually present at the time), and because barley’s grown in the soil it usually arrives with a few tiny stones in it. The stones can get caught in the metal rollers in the milling machine, produce a spark, ignite the malt-dust and Bang! So distillers take some care to make sure all the stones are removed from the barley before it goes into the milling machine.

  After this you make beer in a teapot, transfer it to a bucket and then boil it in a kettle. Thereafter: barrel, bottle and serve.

  Okay, this simplifies the process a little and glosses over vast amounts of skill and potentially decades of time, but them’s the basics.

  The grist goes into a large cylindrical metal vessel called a mash tun; these usually hold many thousands of litres. Hot water is added, the resulting mixture is stirred to keep things going, the water is allowed to drain through the sieve-like floor of the mash tun and the process is repeated twice and some water’s recycled. Finally drained, the mash tun contains draff, which, converted into pellets or cake, makes a really good cattle feed (sadly for the cattle, there’s no alcohol left in this stuff, so if a distillery tour guide tells you they have ‘happy cattle’ nearby, just smile tolerantly).

  The stuff that’s drained away is a sweet brown liquid called worts – hmm – and goes into one of the unsung containers in the whole distilling process: the underback (the mash tuns and washbacks get all the attention – it’s not fair).

  Then it’s those washbacks. These are impressive big things which are usually made of Oregon pine and look like giant upside-down wooden buckets. Yeast is added to the worts and this is where fermentation happens. Looking into a washback once the fermentation process has gotten under way is very impressive; it’s a little Corryvrecken going on in there. You’d swear it’s all being kept swirling and thrashing around with a big propeller stuck in the base, but it’s all just the energy unleashed from the sugars by the yeasts. In fact the only motor in a washback is usually set into the lid to power a thin bar that revolves to knock the bubbles down, otherwise the foam threatens to overflow and escape like a cheap special effect from a bad fifties science fiction movie. Handy hint: don’t stick your head into a washback at this point and take a deep breath; the carbon dioxide has been known to knock people out.

  Once all this excitement’s died down, what’s left smells like home-brewed beer and has an alcohol content of about eight per cent, so it’s pretty strong by beer standards (it also tastes like shit by any standards, frankly, though it apparently acts as a highly effective laxative in doses above, say, about half a teacup).

  This fairly horrible liquid is then transferred to a still, the copper-constructed, deeply glamorous, photogenic part of the whole business (photogenic, that is, if they’ll actually let you take a photo; most of the Islay distilleries are pretty relaxed places and don’t mind cameras, but a lot of the more corporatised mainland ones won’t let you use cameras inside, citing the danger of a flash setting off the spirit fumes. I find this dubious; do they think people are still using nineteenth-century technology? You know; the little sticks like miniature builders’ hods loaded with flash powder which those photographer johnnies once utilised to take daguerreotypes of hackney carriages and passing Zeppelins with. I mean, honestly).

  There are two still types, usually, and they are used in succession. They are both just big kettles, heated by peat or anthracite direct flame in very traditional distilleries, or by gas- or oil-fuelled jets, or steam pipes, elsewhere. The first is the wash still; the alcohol in the mixture boiling away inside the still turns to a vapour before the water in the mixture does and rises to the top of the still to depart through a pipe called the Lyne arm. The vapour is cooled, becomes liquid and then goes to the second still, the spirit still, where the same process happens all over again.

  The liquid that’s sent from the wash still to the spirit still is called low wines; what’s left in the wash still after it’s finished its distillation – not a pretty sight or smell, as a rule – is called pot ale. Sometimes that gets added to the cattle cake too. Still no happy heifers though.

  After both stills have done their bit comes a sort of testing cabinet called a spirit safe (also quite glamorous, in a brassy, glassy sort of way) where the distillers do some fairly basic chemistry experiments to decide which part of the resulting stream of clear liquid they’re going to use. You can’t use everything that comes out of a still; the first stuff to come out is overly strong and contains too many chemicals you wouldn’t want to swallow, while the last bit is sort of all weak and pathetic and gets sent back into the wash still to try again.

  That first part is called the foreshots, the good bit is the middle cut and the last bit is the feints, though sometimes you’ll hear them referred to as the head, heart and tail.

  There’s a big rectangular tank involved at this point which receives the spirit and is imaginatively called the spirit receiving tank (another unsung container – still unfair), then it’s off to the cask-filling bit.

  Now, you could keep the spirit in bottles, ceramic jugs or even well-cleaned oil drums, but at best it would stay just as it was when it was first poured into the container (at worst it would eventually go off). The wood makes the difference. This may have been a class thing; in the old days poor people kept their whisky in bottles or flagons or a pail or something; the better off would have had empty casks in their cellars because they could afford to buy stuff like wine and sherry in that sort of bulk, and using the emptied barrels to store whisky in must have seemed a prudent and canny idea.

  These days the casks used for malt whisky are usually exbourbon barrels brought in from the States, often broken down into their individual staves (the curved side bits, shaped a bit like these parentheses) and circular ends, to save transport costs. The barrels are reassembled in Scotland and the flavour of the bourbon adds an extra depth to the developing spirit/whisky. Sherry casks provide an even more salubrious environment for young and impressionable whisky as it matures, but they cost more – about £250 a throw compared to £50 for a bourbon cask. Some of the more adventurous distilleries have used barrels which have contained other drinks, like rum or red wine, and produced some very interesting whiskies indeed (more of this later). Whatever; after the filling, it’s off to the warehouse.

  The pace slackens off here.

  A lot.

  Three years minimum by law before you can even call what’s in the barrels whisky – it’s still ‘spirit’ until those 36 months are up.

  Most whisky spends at least twice that amount of time in the warehouse (wonderful, cool, beautiful, fabulously-fragranced places) and most single malts will age for a minimum of ten or twelve years before being allowed anywhere near a bottle. The reason these dark, quiet, usually earth-floored warehouses smell so damn wonderful (it is hard even for a heathen like me not to think of them as hallowed) is that, not to over-sharpen the point, even the best-made wooden barrels leak. The fumes find their way out of the casks and into the atmosphere; they even penetrate the usually very thick walls of the average bonded warehouse, turning those walls black because there’s a particular airborne fungus which thrives on just those vapours (and which, umm, is black). This happens at a rate of about two per cent per year, so a cask that’s been sitting for ten years will have lost about
a fifth of its contents.

  This sounds wasteful but it isn’t; it’s a bit like the infant human brain losing synaptic connections as it grows and matures; what’s left – the network of strengthened pathways in the brain or the concentrated flavours remaining in the barrel – is all the better for what’s been given up. This two per cent per year loss is usually called the Angel’s Share. Presumably because the Fungus’s Share doesn’t sound quite so romantic.

  Once bottled, whisky doesn’t mature or deteriorate as long as the seal remains tight, though if it is uncorked and then – for some unfathomable reason – not finished, it will eventually go off in a year or two. (I am mildly horrified that this has been discovered.)

  Oh; and store it upright, not flat.

  That’s it.

  ‘Hello, ma darlin. How are you—?

  ‘The phone won’t stop!’

  ‘Won’t stop what?’

  ‘Ringing! I’ve had all these newspapers calling the house wanting to talk to you about us burning our passports! I’m going crazy!’

  ‘But we didn’t burn—’

  ‘Why are you always away when these things happen?’

  ‘Good timing? Ha, just kid—’

  ‘It’s not funny!’