Activities at Kilchoman

Well day two on Islay saw me turn up at Kilchoman in the morning to see what interesting tasks they had in store for me. As it turns out we were straight to the malting floor! It was time to send the malted barley to the kiln to be dried with the lovely peat smoke. I spent the morning shovelling the barley into the chute that carries it up to the kiln. We used special wooden shovels that make the job a bit easier apparently!

Here is a picture of the malted barley. It is quite damp at this stage and tends to clump together making it a little difficult to evacuate.



After the malting floor was cleared, we grabbed a single barrel (232), distilled in 2006, loaded it into the trailer and took it to Bruichladdich for bottling. Yes you heard me, I was involved in a single cask bottling of a Kilchoman whisky barrel!! Bloody marvelous! Bruichladdich has a bottling machine that fills 4 bottles at one time. I worked that for a while and corked and labeled bottles as well. On the right you can see me wheeling a huge tub of tasty 3yo whisky to fill up the bottling reservoir. I can tell you it took all my willpower not to strip nekkid and go for a swim in that tasty amber liquid. All in all we got 252.5 bottles of salubrious whisky that are headed to France somewhere.

Did I mention I love whisky?