DISTILLERY
Another manually-controlled activity is the hot water cleaning and steaming of the wash backs, a further key area that Lora felt contributed to the charac- ter of the spirit. The nal alcohol level is 8% ABV in the wash. The stills We then moved on to the stills area, where the standard three stills for the triple-distillation of Irish whiskey were beautifully presented to both the passer-by on the street outside, and to all visitors inside the plant. They were nished in a hardy burnished lacquer skin and gleamed brightly in the sunlight. The wash still, named ‘Vision’, has a gross capacity of 16,500 litres so the 14,000 litres of wash is accommodated comfortably. The rst distillation then
takes place over ve hours and ends up with an intermediate still, ‘Virtue’, with a volume of 6,000 litres at circa 72% ABV. Virtue has an unusual history; the upper half of the neck was repurposed from the coppersmith’s yard in Alloa. It’s previous life had been as part of a Tanqueray gin still back in the 1860s at the Watney Distillery in Wandsworth, London, then at Laindon in Essex. When decommissioned and moved back to Scotland, it lay fallow until the Roe and Co project came along and the Diageo coppersmiths found a way of linking it to the main half of the still. So, it features a large boil bubble above the main body of the still, and a much smaller one at the head of the still, just before its vapours enter the lyne arm. Next up is the 4,000-litre gross spirit still ‘Valour’. Here the low wines and
wort production commenced at the end of May, while distilling started in the rst week in June. Draff is removed via a Ponndorf screw and pigging line to containment at the back of the building where it is collected for offsite process- ing into fuel briquettes. Production is ramping up at the distillery, which can produce up to 500,000 OLA (original litres of alcohol) per annum at full capacity. Production days have been longer during the com- missioning phase, but the plan is to run operations between 6am and 6pm over the next year. Two people (including Lora for the moment) are employed in production. I met with a third, Jamie Cooper, from Royal Lochnagar distillery in Scotland, who was supporting the team during the commissioning phase. He was smiling broadly as it was his last day. Fiona Sheridan is Roe & Co’s Assistant Distiller and came to the distillery via West Cork Distillers in Skibbereen, Co Cork. Most of the avour-forward plant is manually operated, with the more rou- tine activities fully automated with PLC control. An example of the manually- controlled plant is the Big Bag station in the basement, which allowed for the future blending of speciality malts into the milling process. The six wooden washbacks were produced by Joseph Brown Vats in Dufftown, Scotland and have a gross capacity of 18,600 litres, with 14,000 litres net lling capacity. There is an extraction system to externally vent all CO 2 generated during fermentation. The temperature of wort going into the wooden washbacks can be controlled using the glycol cooling of the heat-exchanger that handles wort cooling, allowing for closer control of fermentation conditions that would not ordinarily be possible in a vessel without a direct cooling mechanism. This particular feature, along with modi cations to the pitch rate of the Lallemand yeast strain, allow for a lot of exibility in the process. Roe & Co uses two fermentation pro les to deliver the avours it requires in the malt spirit produced for casking. The rst is an approximate 70 hours pro le, the second has an extended time of around 100 hours. The ratio is 3:1 long to short fermentations in the resulting spirit batch. One pro le pro- duces a spirit with ‘fruity’ character, the other with a ‘greener, grassy and fresh’ quality, according to Lora.
Distillation
The intermediate still ‘Virtue’, with its former gin-still attachment at the top of the neck
The three stills – (right to left) Vision, Virtue and Valour
Full automation in the basement, out of sight of the casual visitor
The spirit safe in action. Its original installation was at the Teaninich Distillery, within sight of Lora Hemy’s childhood home in Allness, Scotland
october 2019 I BREWER AND DISTILLER INTERNATIONAL ● 25
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