Palletised Cask Filling System

Types of Whisky

 

There are a vast number of scotch whiskies on the market however for the purposes of maturation all new make spirit falls into two main categories; malt and grain. Malt spirit is produced by a batch process using exclusively malted barley. Malted barley or malt barley is produced by encouraging the barley grains to germinate by soaking them in water; the germination is then halted by drying the grain using hot air. This malting process produces enzymes in the grain which convert its starches into sugars, theses sugars are then consumed by the yeast during the spirit making process to produce alcohol. The malting process has a significant impact on the finished whisky.

 

Grain spirit is produced using predominately barley which has not been malted and a small amount of malted barley, typical 8%. Grain spirit distillation is a continuous process. Grain spirit is distilled to an alcohol by volume content (abv) of 94% whereas malt is distilled to 70% abv. The malting of the barley, the process being carried out in batches and the lower yield of pure alcohol per litre increases the cost of malt whisky considerably relative to grain whisky on average costing five times more per litre. It may be prudent reiterate that the newly distilled spirit is not whisky, it must be matured.

 

Over 87% of Scotch whisky produced is blended whisky. Blended whisky is made by combining malt and grain whisky. The characteristics of blended whisky are mainly influenced by the malt whisky elements used. As a result the malt whiskies used in producing a blend must be carefully selected. Malt whisky maturation is complex and although predictable it is not precise, as a result in order to create a blend a number of different malt whiskies of varying ages and from different distilleries are used. This results in access to individual or groups of casks of malt whisky being required, this makes racked warehousing most suitable for malt maturation. Grain whisky although influential on the final blended whisky it has much less of an impact. The maturation of grain is also much more predictable these factors combined result in access to individual batches or casks of grain whisky being unnecessary making it well suited to palletisation.