Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

“It can’t. Not anymore, at any rate.”

“Nevermore. Right around here is where I did that face plant off the bike.”

“Aye, nevermore. That would be a nice name for a whisky. Things are different nowadays — maybe that’s Gavin’s point. No going back, as they say.”

“I don’t mean any offense, but just how different are things? It feels to me like the island is stuck in time.”

“Only everything is different, Ray, and that’s the truth. It’s a matter of perspective. The water’s different now. The air we breathe. The whole climate. All of it affects the whisky.”

Darkness settled in and the beginnings of Ray’s reflection appeared in the passenger-side window. He hadn’t trimmed his beard in a few weeks; the locals were liable to mistake him for the wolf. “Maybe change isn’t always bad, though?”

“When I say that malt whisky is the lifeblood of this little island, I want you to understand that literally,” Farkas said. “This new RAF flight plan changes the amount of the jet fuel in our atmosphere, and our atmosphere is not only what we breathe, but what the whisky breathes. Do you mind if we make a quick stop? There’s something I’d like you to see. I know you’re expected at the hotel, so we’ll do this with some haste.”

Farkas pulled into the grounds of the distillery, which sat on a hill and took up a large chunk of downtown Craighouse. Not that Craighouse had much in the way of a downtown. The distillery compound contained two white plaster structures that stood three or four stories tall. They had been built on top of some old, painted-over ruins and were big enough to be seen all the way from the mainland. A warehouse of blue sheet metal loomed above them and the height of the smokestack dwarfed that. The hotel across the street was even larger. People were already gathering over there and Ray was eager to join them, but not before a free tour of a working distillery.

They got out and Farkas conjured a key ring the size of a basketball hoop and festooned with more keys than there were cars and houses on Jura. For decorative purposes, three oak barrels stood in a pyramid next to the entrance. “I thought you didn’t lock your doors here,” Ray said.

“Aye, I know you’re teasing me, Ray, but you understand that our distillery, she’s a different story — she must be locked or casks would be drained dry before you could blink.”

“By who, Mr. Fuller and those guys? They do seem like troublemakers.”

“By me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve awoken here after one of my new-moon escapades, my hands in the cookie jar, as it were. I cannot always control my own actions, Ray, and that’s the sad truth. Besides, seeing as I’m still considered an outsider on Jura, I don’t feel quite as obliged as some of the others to obey every little superstition.” Farkas found the light switches and revealed a reception area. “Now follow me,” he said. “We’ll do the short tour now, and I’ll show you around the whole works another time.”

Rooms were filled with a network of tanks and tubs and tubes: the equipment that produced all that delicious single-malt scotch. The distillery turned out to be a highly technical operation; this was no backyard still, but rather a modern facility that used computers and specialized, carefully calibrated machinery for maximal yield and quality. Farkas led him to a grimy room containing two huge wooden vats suspended up high on a catwalk. Their shoes clanked against the metal steps. The pungent stink reminded Ray of one of those extinct, old-timey bars in Chicago and Ray saw why: the tanks looked like swimming pools full of stale beer.

“Here put these on,” Farkas said and handed him a pair of sweaty rubber gloves and an oar from a rowboat. “I use only Scottish barley, though much of it comes in by ship. We let it germinate in one of the buildings out back for two or three weeks until it’s ready to get dried in the kiln, which is where it picks up that peat flavor. After that, we grind it to a fine grist that we brew with hot water in the mash tun. What you’re seeing here is the fermentation. We take the wort and add the yeast until we have what might in lesser hands form the basis of beer. We have machines to stir it during the wash, these blades that rotate automatically, but I prefer to do it by hand when I can. Watch me now. Skim the paddle across the top of it, like so.”

Farkas moved with more precision than his frame and usual level of intoxication led Ray to believe possible. He stretched over the railing and stirred the very top of the broth.

Ray followed his lead, but the sweeping motion was more challenging than it looked. “Is this the wort — is that what you called it? — that gets distilled?”

“Right you are! Now don’t chop at it, Ray. Gently now, that’s it. Once I have this where it needs to be, it follows through there to the stills.” He pointed to the pipes leading through the wall to another room. The door sat beneath the smaller of the two tanks. They climbed back down. A sign affixed to the low catwalk said MIND YOUR HEAD. Good advice.

Ray didn’t grasp the nuances of the entire process, but Farkas appeared to be in a rush to get upstairs. He had come fully to life inside the distillery and moved like a man half his age. The whisky-to-be flowed from the vats, through the walls and into the actual stills, eight containers shaped like big butt plugs that stretched to the ceiling. That was what they looked like. More tubes led at right angles from the tops of the stills to some holding tanks in another room.

“When the whisky’s good and ready, and not a moment before, I store it in oak casks to put some years on it. And it might just interest you to know that some of those casks come from none other than your America. We buy them from the bourbon manufacturers as a matter of fact, so however much our Gavin wants to cry about outside influences — that’s what he calls anything that didn’t originate on Jura — the malt he’s drinking relies on your people for its flavor. Try to keep up,” Farkas said.

Ray followed him downstairs and outside, through a courtyard and to a barn topped with a pagoda-shaped cupola. A bank of clouds approached from the seaside.

“We have one more stop. Once the malt has been casked, we store it in here. Three years is the absolute minimum, and even that is a disgrace. A good whisky doesn’t even know its own name before the age of twelve, and that’s the problem with that cack you’re carrying around in your pocket tonight, I might add. It has no years on it yet. Again, like your America. Now feast your eyes upon this.”

He pulled open the doors and Ray beheld the kingdom of heaven. The warehouse contained hundreds of casks of single-malt scotch stacked to the rafters. A row of open-air windows near the top welcomed in the evening mist. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Aye, that it is. We house the whisky here for decades in many cases, and you’ll notice that the casks get exposed to the elements, to the rain and the sea air. See those wee little ones? Those are called pins and contain four and a half gallons. The next one up, a firkin, holds twice that. Most of these are barrels, which hold thirty-six gallons of liquid gold. While I’m sad to report that we don’t have one on the premises, the biggest cask of all is called a butt and it contains one hundred and eight gallons. The size of the cask and the location, that’s how every malt gets its distinct flavors. And from the geographical location of the distillery and the tiniest variations of coastline and altitude too. Is it made inland, as in the Highlands? Or perhaps near the water in a small bight such as we are in Craighouse. Over on Islay, you have Bowmore sheltered in a deep bay, but also Ardbeg or Lagavulin smack on the quay and exposed to the full teeth of the sea. Over there they will rotate their casks for consistency — for uniformity — until the entire bottling tastes the same. Bah! With my malt, I can tell you from appearance how long it has aged and, from the taste, where in my warehouse it slept. So if you ask me if the change in our atmosphere is all bad, if the pollution and the rising temperature of the globe and the deforestation is all bad, I say aye. Aye! Because it means the end not just of this bottle”—he took a small pull from his own flask, closed his eyes—“but the end of an era. I’m a historian, if you will. The bottle of single malt is a time capsule. A record of the natural life of Jura.”