Clydeside Distillery is situated on the old Queen’s Dock down by the River Clyde and is the newest distillery in Glasgow. We took a tour around the venue and tried some delicious whisky.
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00:00 Scottish whisky as a whole, I think the craftsmanship, the centuries of sort of
00:07 minutiae and tiny detail that goes into these things.
00:11 So we're about to do a tour of Clydeside Distillery. How are you feeling Liam?
00:16 I'm feeling good. We're at Glasgow's newest distillery. It might sound bizarre to hear about a new whisky company,
00:21 but there is one right here on the old Queen's Dock, down by the Clyde.
00:25 Yeah, it's interesting because Scotch is obviously such a big part of Scotland's heritage.
00:31 Our export imports how we make money and we don't know that much about it, do we?
00:35 We do not, but we're going to learn today.
00:37 We're going to learn. See you soon.
00:39 First things first, my name is Sam. Welcome to the Clydeside Distillery. I'm going to be your tour guide for today.
00:43 As you can maybe tell from my accent, I'm not a local Glaswegian, so if you were hoping for a real rugged Highland accent
00:49 talking about your whisky, you're going to have to make do with an English accent for the next hour or so.
00:52 But I like to think I know my stuff, so we should be all good.
00:55 This is the historic Queen's Dock of Glasgow, as it would have appeared at the height of Glasgow's industrial power.
01:01 Glasgow was a real hub for trade, industry and commerce here in the UK, sort of mid to late 19th, early to mid 20th centuries.
01:07 Huge amount of ship building took place here in the city and a huge amount of trade was coming in and out of this dock.
01:12 And a huge amount of that trade was whisky.
01:15 Gradually, however, the trade ships got larger and larger and it became less and less plausible for them to be coming up the Clyde into this dock here.
01:21 So we saw it fall into disuse until it was paved over in its entirety, completely filled in.
01:26 And it's now used as car parking for things like the SEC, the Hydro and the Armadillo Theatre.
01:31 So there's still a little bit going on around here guys, but just in a very different way to how it once was.
01:36 Here at the Clyde side, we make exclusively single malt whisky.
01:39 It's a really important term that I'm going to come back to a little bit later on in the tour.
01:43 For now though, all we desperately need to know is that means we make our whisky from three very simple ingredients.
01:49 Water, barley and yeast.
01:52 So we start with our water.
01:53 This is something that's going to come up a number of times throughout the production procedure and we like to tick it off nice and early.
01:58 I can assure you all that despite being situated right next to the River Clyde,
02:02 we do not use the river water in the production of our whisky.
02:05 Like everybody else here in Glasgow, we get our water from Loch Catrin.
02:09 For those a little less familiar, Loch Catrin, proper Scottish loch, about 40 miles north of the city up in the Trossachs.
02:14 And it's been Glasgow's water supply for well on 150 years.
02:17 We then move on to stage number one and ingredient number two, which is this stuff right here.
02:22 This is barley.
02:23 Barley is a grain that grows especially well up here in Scotland and in northern parts of England,
02:27 especially up there in the east coast where it gets a bit more heat and sunshine.
02:31 And it's been used historically for basically everything you would ever use a grain for,
02:35 be it kind of cattle feed, sheep feed or as the case may be, people feed.
02:38 But it's really good at making alcohol.
02:40 It's even better at making alcohol if we do something to it called malting.
02:43 This is where we take that barley and we steep it in hot water to recreate the environmental factors
02:48 that it would encounter during springtime.
02:50 All that heat, all that moisture sort of tricks the barley into thinking that it is spring
02:54 and it will start to germinate, generating those internal starches that it would use for growth,
02:59 but we're going to use for fermentation.
03:00 So we'll just sort of crack open just a touch, maybe fire off a couple of shoots.
03:04 But before we can actually start to grow, we dry it out and then you burn it.
03:08 And in these coastal areas of Scotland where there are very few trees,
03:11 they would typically use peat or turf to heat their homes instead of a log fire.
03:16 When you malt barley with a peat fire, all the heat will dry it out
03:19 and the smoke gets absorbed into the wet grains
03:22 and it persists right the way through to your final finished product.
03:24 This is what gives some whiskeys that very smoky flavour.
03:27 If you've ever had a whiskey that tastes like someone's just put out their cigar in your drink,
03:30 who's taken a big old patch of wet grass,
03:32 set fire to it and rammed it into the bottle while you weren't looking,
03:35 this is where that flavour is coming from.
03:37 Once the barley has been malted, we take it across to stage two, milling.
03:40 This is the first thing that we do here in-house.
03:42 We have our own mill and we grind up that barley into something called grist.
03:46 Now grist is comprised of very fine flour, the hard outer husks of the barley and the grits,
03:52 which make up the majority of our grist and have all those starches that we want to use.
03:55 So we take the grist and we move it across in 1.5 metric ton batches
04:01 or into our mash tun for stage three, mashing.
04:04 As I say, it goes into our mash tun,
04:05 which is effectively just a really big kind of cooking pot kettle type situation.
04:09 And we add an enormous amount of piping hot water.
04:12 Stage four, fermentation.
04:14 So we take that wort across to our wash backs
04:16 and we add that third and final ingredient of yeast.
04:19 The yeast will then consume the sugars in the wort and produce, among other things, alcohol.
04:23 Once that wash has finished fermenting, we take it across to stage five, distilling.
04:27 Here at the Clydeside, like the vast majority of Scottish whiskey distilleries,
04:30 we operate under a double distillation or two still system.
04:34 We have our wash still and our spirit still.
04:36 We take that freshly fermented wash, goes into the wash still,
04:38 huge amount of heat, and we distill down into something called low wines.
04:42 Now, despite the name, low wines bear no resemblance to anything you'd make from grapes.
04:46 It's about twice the strength of a typical bottle of wine, about 20, 25% ABV,
04:50 and serves no real purpose other than to turn into our spirit.
04:53 Now, per the rules ordained by Glasgow City Council,
04:56 they maintain it's a particularly bad idea to have a really big building
05:00 filled with wooden barrels filled with highly flammable alcohol in the middle of a major city.
05:05 So we cannot have large-scale whiskey maturation warehouses within city limits,
05:08 as it is a massive fire risk and a danger to the public health.
05:11 So, we have a secret location out on the West Coast.
05:14 We take that new-made spirit, it goes into that warehouse,
05:16 into those barrels, as I say, minimum three years in one day.
05:20 As I'm sure many of you are aware, whiskey can be a great deal older than that.
05:23 However, we are still a very young distillery.
05:25 Our current batch was bottled after three years, four years, and four months in the cask,
05:29 which is very young in the grand scheme of things for a whiskey.
05:32 But I do believe that around then it takes on a nice depth of flavor and character,
05:35 because we use a very high quality of cask and our new-made spirit is particularly good.
05:39 Scottish whiskey as a whole, I think the craftsmanship, the centuries of
05:46 sort of minutiae and tiny detail that goes into these things,
05:51 you know, there's sort of moments that I've had, you know,
05:53 with my university whiskey society when I'm sitting down and I realize
05:56 I'm drinking something that's actually older than me,
05:59 which is a very surreal experience that this thing has laid in a barrel in
06:04 sort of these beautiful climes, you know, every distillery is so unique in its own right.
06:09 You go out to these sort of more rural, departed areas
06:12 and sort of see what they're doing and in comparison to what we're doing here,
06:15 it can seem very different, but at the core, there's so much in alike, as it were.
06:21 And so just the uniqueness to every single piece,
06:26 that no two single malts are truly the same.
06:29 So that is the Clydeside Whiskey Tour completed.
06:33 How did it go for you, Liam?
06:35 Well, we certainly learned a lot.
06:36 I had a really good time.
06:38 I had a few samples in the AM of all times, but it was enjoyable.
06:42 It was really good fun.
06:43 You could see the mash tuns, the amazing view over the River Clyde.
06:46 You can see the tall ship down there.
06:48 It's a great location and something Glasgow should be proud of, I think.
06:52 The location is beautiful.
06:54 For me personally, I find tours sometimes I can't pay attention all the time,
06:57 but this one was really engaging.
06:59 I had a lot of fun and the whiskey was...
07:02 The way they went about it as well and the way that they described it,
07:06 it was really, really helpful,
07:07 especially for two people that don't have that much experience in whiskey.
07:11 No, we had a great time.
07:13 The whiskey was lovely as well.
07:14 Definitely.
07:16 It's probably good to finally lift the whiskey to the end in terms of that.
07:19 Probably, yeah.
07:20 No, no, no.
07:21 Great.
07:22 Recommend this.
07:23 See you soon.
07:23 See you soon.