Clydeside Distillery is located along the Clyde Walk in Finnieston, specialising in single grain malts. We took a tour to find out what makes their Scotch whisky so unique.
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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.
00:12 So we're about to do a tour of Clydeside Distillery. How are you feeling Liam?
00:17 I'm feeling good. We're at Glasgow's newest distillery. It might sound bizarre to hear about a new
00:21 whisky company, but there is one right here on the old Queen's Dock, down by the Clyde.
00:26 Yeah, it's interesting because Scotch is obviously such a big part of Scotland's heritage.
00:32 Our export is how we make money and we don't know that much about it, do we?
00:36 We do not, but we're going to learn today.
00:38 We're going to learn. See you soon.
00:40 First things first, my name is Sam. Welcome to the Clydeside Distillery. I'm going to be your tour guide for today.
00:44 This is the historic Queen's Dock of Glasgow, as it would have appeared, the height of Glasgow's industrial power.
00:50 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.
00:56 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.
01:01 And a huge amount of that trade was whisky.
01:04 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.
01:10 So we saw it fall into disuse until it was paved over in its entirety, completely filled in.
01:15 And it's now used as car parking for things like the SCC, the Hydro and the Armadillo Theatre.
01:20 Here at the Clydeside, we make exclusively single malt whisky.
01:23 That means we make our whisky from three very simple ingredients, water, barley and yeast.
01:30 We then move on to stage number one and ingredient number two, which is this stuff right here.
01:34 This is barley. Barley is a grain that grows especially well up here in Scotland and in northern parts of England,
01:40 especially up there in the East Coast where it gets a bit more heat and sunshine.
01:43 And it's been used historically for basically everything you would ever use a grain for, be it kind of cattle feed, sheep feed or as the case may be, people feed.
01:50 But it's really good at making alcohol. It's even better at making alcohol if we do something to it called malting.
01:56 This is where we take that barley and we steep it in hot water to recreate the environmental factors that it would encounter during springtime.
02:03 All that heat, all that moisture sort of tricks the barley into thinking that it is spring and it will start to germinate,
02:08 generating those internal starches that it would use for growth, but we're going to use for fermentation.
02:13 So we'll just sort of crack open just a touch, maybe fire off a couple of shoots, but before we can actually start to grow, we dry it out and then you burn it.
02:21 And in these coastal areas of Scotland where there are very few trees, they would typically use peat or turf to heat their homes instead of a log fire.
02:28 When you malt barley with a peat fire, all the heat will dry it out and the smoke gets absorbed into the wet grains
02:34 and it persists right the way through to your final finished product. This is what gives some whiskeys that very smoky flavour.
02:39 If you've ever had a whiskey that tastes like someone's just put out their cigar in your drink,
02:43 or was taking a big old patch of wet grass, set fire to it and rammed it into the bottle while you weren't looking, this is where that flavour is coming from.
02:49 Once the barley has been malted, we take it across to stage two, milling. This is the first thing that we do here in-house.
02:55 We have our own mill and we grind up that barley into something called grist.
02:59 Now grist is comprised of very fine flour, the hard outer husks of the barley and the grits,
03:04 which make up the majority of our grist and have all those starches that we want to use.
03:08 So we take the grist and we move it across in 1.5 metric tonne batches into our mash tonne.
03:15 For stage three, mashing. As I say, it goes into our mash tonne.
03:18 It's effectively just a really big kind of cooking pot, kettle type situation and we add an enormous amount of piping hot water.
03:24 For stage four, fermentation. So we take that wort across to our wash backs and we add that third and final ingredient of yeast.
03:31 The yeast will then consume the sugars in the wort and produce, among other things, alcohol.
03:36 Scottish whisky as a whole, I think the craftsmanship, the centuries of minutiae and tiny detail that goes into these things.
03:47 There's moments that I've had in my university whisky society when I'm sitting down and I realise I'm drinking something that's actually older than me,
03:55 which is a very surreal experience that this thing has laid in a barrel in these beautiful climes.
04:02 Every distillery is so unique in its own right.
04:05 You go out to these more rural, departed areas and see what they're doing and in comparison to what we're doing here, it can seem very different.
04:13 But at the core, there's so much in alike, as it were.
04:18 And so just the uniqueness to every single piece that no two single malts are truly the same.
04:25 So that is the Clydeside whisky tour completed. How did it go for you, Liam?
04:31 Well, we certainly learned a lot. I had a really good time. I had a few samples and the AM of all times, but it was enjoyable.
04:39 It was really good fun. You can see the mash tuns, an amazing view over the River Clyde.
04:43 You can see the tall ship down there. It's a great location and something Glasgow should be proud of, I think.
04:49 The location is beautiful. For me personally, I find tours sometimes I can't pay attention all the time, but this one was really engaging.
04:56 I had a lot of fun. The way they went about it as well and the way that they described it, it was really, really helpful,
05:01 especially for two people that don't have that much experience in whisky.
05:06 No, we had a great time. The whisky was lovely as well.
05:09 Definitely. It's probably good to finally lift the whisky to the end in terms of that.
05:14 Probably, yeah. No, no, no. Great. Recommend this.
05:17 See you soon.
05:18 See you soon.