00:00I'm Rosin Derskin, Food and Drink Editor for The Scotsman and I'm here at our Gown Distillery in
00:04Inverkip which is the lovely building behind me that's under construction still. It's a momentous
00:08day for the team here as the stills are arriving, we're just waiting to see them. We're about eight
00:13or nine months away from the distillery being in full production and open to the public in the
00:17summer sometime next year. So yeah we're just excited to see the stills and so are the team
00:22and we're going to speak to some of them later on. At this point in time I'm so happy, I'm so
00:28delighted. This project has been eight years in the making so I got to tell you it feels really
00:34good. Here at the distillery we're you know only 1,500 meters from the mouth of the River Clyde
00:43so just across the water we have Island, just across the river itself we have the Highland
00:50and here we're Lowland. So we're actually sitting at a nexus point between Highland,
00:55Island and Lowland and what we want to make is a great robust spirit, very fruity, able to stand
01:02up to a lot of sherry maturation. So something Highland Speyside is what we're going for. We had
01:08this crazy idea for Infinity Casts. Infinity Casts are based on a specification that we developed
01:15at our Gown Distillery. The idea behind the cast is that they're big, they will stand up to
01:21long maturation periods and what we hope is that this will give us an exceptional spirit
01:28in the Infinity Cast. Well the Infinity Cast was made especially for us. I mean normally people
01:34use a range of casts for maturing their whiskey but about 75 to 80 percent of our whiskey will
01:40be matured in sherry casts. So what we wanted to do was create a cast which is slightly different.
01:45It's a little bit bigger than the traditional sherry but it's also toasted precisely to our
01:50specification. So we're looking for something really special from that wood. This is, you know,
01:55it's so great. Over here we have the distillery and I mean that's a building and we've been at
02:02that for just over a year now. We started construction in October last year. So just
02:06over a year we started construction but that building site becomes a distillery once those
02:10copper stills go inside. The stills behind us, I mean they're traditional Scottish pot stills but
02:17we've actually added thermal vapour recompression onto the stills and this allows us to recover
02:24about 40 percent of the heat that's used in the distillation, recycle that and use it again.
02:29So it's about us creating a lower carbon more sustainable distillery. It's an exciting day, the
02:35stills are coming. So can you tell us what point we're at with the distillery build? The distillery
02:41build is about seven eighths done. The stills will be the last of the stills, oblique
02:47mash tins, oblique wash packs to go in. So we're looking at all being well. We're looking at
02:55starting distillation in April, May next year. The new spirit we're hoping to be has an element of
03:01the sea air which is more or less just behind us here. It'll be a sweet estuary sea air new spirit.
03:08That's the plan. The cask program we've got here is very unique, totally unique in the
03:12Scotch whisk industry. We're filling the majority of our first year casks into infinity casks,
03:19i.e. they're 700 litre casks, first filled sherrys. The casks themselves have already been built in
03:25Spain and are being seasoned with sherry at the moment. So basically the casks that we're filling,
03:31no one else has ever filled them before. With the size of the cask it just means that the maturation
03:36takes longer. So the plan would be that these casks, if we fill them next year, would probably
03:42be at the earliest 2032, 2033 before they'll be bottled. The still house itself, as you rightly
03:52say, has a pot still element to it as well. So there is small runs available that we can do,
03:58whether that will be for ourself or it may well be for private individuals or private companies to
04:04do a small run. But yes, both are available, both in the same still house. A lot of the
04:08whisky projects nowadays are all about education because there's so many
04:14distilleries opening up all over Europe. They can call it whisky but they can't call it Scotch,
04:18obviously. So we want to be at the forefront of trying to educate people all about the
04:24provenance of Scotch whisky itself and I think we've done a great job here as the majority of
04:29the whiskies that you see behind me or at the side of me have nearly all won national if not
04:36international awards. So we're on the right track at the moment, it's just keeping it there.
04:40Can you tell me why you moved into this role? Yeah, when I was approached about this role,
04:48from the minute I first heard about it, it just seemed so exciting, just so ambitious, so exciting,
04:54so radical. I just fell in love with the project and then meeting the team just sealed that.
05:00It's such a lovely team here, really. Everybody is so passionate, so involved. It was the place for
05:06me and even being on site today, my first day, it feels like home. It's something I'm looking
05:11forward to. You're right in that Wales doesn't have the Scotch whisky regulations, obviously,
05:16but I was part of the team that brought in and that introduced the Welsh whisky geographic
05:22indicator for single malt Welsh whisky in the last couple of years. So I've got some
05:27knowledge of that. It'll be a new challenge, but then a new distillery is going to be full of new
05:31challenges. And what are you most looking forward to about your new role? Being able to put my stamp
05:35on the distillery, being part of the team, being able to develop this dream and get it off the
05:41ground. I didn't spend my whole career in South Wales at Penderyn thinking at some point I'm going
05:47to move to Scotland. It wasn't that that was something I had to do. But seeing what Gillian
05:53had done, and not only Gillian, but all of the women in the industry before her and since,
05:58was really inspirational. And knowing that that was something that was accessible to me
06:04was really important.
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