Stretching from Inverness in the west to the watershed of the river Deveron in the east, Speyside may only be 75 miles wide, but the undulating hills and winding roads are home to an economic powerhouse. In these watercolour-worthy landscapes, whisky is big business. Exports earned £139 every second in 2017 – totalling £4.36 billion – with sales accounting for 20 per cent of all UK food and drink exports, while 1.7 million whisky tourists topped up the local economy to the tune of £53 million. Who's buying it? Exports to Singapore, from where a large proportion of whisky is then shipped to Southeast Asia and China, rose 29 per cent to £291m in 2017.
Located at the heart of the region on the 370-acre Easter Elchies estate in Craigellachie, Moray, is the new £140m Macallan distillery and visitor centre. Belying the traditional image of Scotch whisky-making is its “future-proof” production facility, which caters for the ever-increasing demand for single malt while providing a luxury playground for the whisky connoisseur.
Founded in 1824, The Macallan is the world's leading international single malt by value. It's an unashamedly luxury product, with each bottle aged for a minimum of 12 years. Bond drinks it, Don Draper guzzles the stuff – and thanks to a Netflix deal, anyone with anything serious to celebrate will be seen sipping it on screen. In April 2018, two bottles of the rarest Macallan in existence sold for $1.2m (£930,000).
Edrington – the owners of The Macallan - isn't the only company investing heavily as demand for Scotch soars. Diageo has announced plans to invest £150m to upgrade, and in some cases re-open, 12 distilleries, the centrepiece of which will be a Johnnie Walker “immersive visitor experience” in Edinburgh. Away from the corporates, more than a dozen new small-batch distilleries are expected to open in 2018, including a £5.8m privately funded Holyrood distillery that will become the first to produce single malt whisky in the city of Edinburgh since 1925. And LoneWolf, a distillation subsidiary of BrewDog, based in Aberdeenshire, will start producing whisky this year using the only triple bubble still in the world.
For The Macallan, the vital concern is how to maintain 194 years' worth of heritage in a new state-of-the-art distillery? "Consistency is the most important thing in this whole process," explains Nick Savage, The Macallan's master distiller, whose team spent two years fingerprinting the old production methods and understanding the unique variations and tolerances. "Increasing production by one third but not impacting on the final product is an enormous challenge, and no matter how impressive the building, if in 12 years' time [when the first bottles originated in the new stills will be ready] we realise we've got it wrong, we're in serious trouble."
Tasked with averting any serious trouble was Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the architect firm responsible for the design of the Leadenhall Building and the Pompidou Centre. The brief was far from simple; build an entirely new, super-sustainable distillery capable of producing one third more whisky than the original facility, while maintaining the quality of one of the world's most successful single malts, all on a restricted plot considered an “area of great landscape value”.
The result is a surprisingly subtle subterranean structure built by local firm Robertson Construction that measures 120m long, 68m wide and 24m at its highest point. Some 20,000m3 of concrete and 700 tonnes of steel were used in the build, and the 14,000sqm undulating living roof is made from 380,000 individual components and is one of the most complicated wooden structures ever built.
Positioned a short stroll from the Easter Elchies House, a Highland manor built in 1700 and a key piece of Macallan iconography, a stone path neatly links the old and new, and while the grass-covered domes (looking strangely like high-end Teletubbies dwellings) and full-length glass draw you in, the lavish nature of the development – described by Savage as "a skyscraper on its side" – isn't fully appreciated until you walk into the 8,100sqm reception and see two vast glass walls: one is 18m tall and displays more than 800 bottles of whisky; the other provides a monumental widescreen view of The Macallan's new 15-million-litre modular distillery.
In order to achieve this aesthetic, the architects had to create the world's largest fireproof glass wall. "The main problem was that, while the distillery and visitor centre are technically in the same building, they have very different sets of building regulations," explains Toby Jeavons, associate partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. "In order to achieve a two-hour fire rating, we needed to implement a deluge system that washes the glass in cold water in the event of a fire. While this is a pre-existing technology, we had to prove it would work on this scale [by setting fire to a sample in controlled conditions] while maintain the clarity of the wall between the two spaces. From a building regulation point of view, the glass wall is actually considered an outside wall."
The glass wall is one of many isolated innovations implemented in order to get two contrasting industries – global whisky distillation and tourism – to seamlessly coincide. The Cave Privée is another; the Tony Stark-style private cellar has been dug out beneath the tasting bar and its 952 open bottles of The Macallan to house the rarest of private casks (rental starts at around £30,000 a cask) in temperature-controlled bonded warehouse conditions while still showcasing the money-no-object luxury appeal of the brand. It's needlessly lavish, but beautifully executed.
But as impressive as the glorified warehouse is, it's the modular distillery layout and cutting-edge control system that is enticing whisky towards the future. "In a traditional distillery, the fermentation vessels will be in one space and the product process will happen across several rooms, with mash tuns and stills being separated," explains Jeavons. But, being architects, they came at it from more aesthetically pleasing perspective. The circular pods, each capable of producing five million litres of spirit, house the distillation vessels and copper stills together which helps to "celebrate the beautiful copper stills but also works from a vertical point of view as the copper stills are hotter so need to sit higher, which also means visitors can get closer to the distillation process".
These copper stills are of huge importance to The Macallan’s legacy. Smaller than average, they "create a robust, heavy spirit that matures well over many decades, and create the whisky's signature mouthfeel", explains Savage. The original stills were made by local coppersmiths Forsyths, so through a combination of 3D imaging and – handily – the original 1950s blueprints, they were able to hammer out 36 exact replicas.
But, while pretty, siting the stills so close to the fermentation tanks would play havoc with the internal temperatures, which need to be below 33-34 degrees Celsius. So a new heat-exchange system has been implemented, which accurately cools the wash, instead of using inefficient cooling jackets.
These three pods, combined with a 17-tonne mash tun (the vessel used to convert the starches in crushed grains into sugars for fermentation) can produce 15 million litres of spirit per year – and 90 per cent of the power required to do this comes from a nearby biomass plant, with cooling waters pumped straight from the River Spey. And, unlike the haphazard expansion most distilleries are forced to undergo, if production needs to be increased, two more still pods and a second mash tun can be added to make 25 million litres.
Savage admits it was a bold move, but the result – and the bank of computers monitoring each step of the process – gives his craftsmen much greater control. "It's not automated to the point where we don't need people, but [the modern plant] allows us to do our jobs more accurately and provides a greater level of information. Previously we'd have measured density with a basic hydrometer, but the new density meter can measure returns of 0.01 per cent.
"Because we've been able to monitor every single measurement and reading from the original plant," explains Savage, "we're confident that the new plant's output will be indistinguishable from the original, but that is just the start. We now have a state-of-the-art distillery producing The Macallan, but the next phase is how we can use the technology to secure our future. We've got the tools to improve performance and evolve, without compromising on the whisky that's brought us here."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
