DISTILLERY
available space around Ireland.
cooling system on the roof. The fully- enclosed loop requires no further water to be consumed and helps to reduce the environmental footprint of the distillery. Lora said she can manipulate the condenser temperatures using the closed loop controls and so in uence the character of the spirit. The plan both now and medium- term is to triple distill, but allow- ance has been made to perform a double-distillation process at some stage, which will cater for potential innovations in the future. Regular operations in the distillery are automated – that is the ‘non- avour impactful’ aspects of production. Deep in the basement we nd automatic valving, ATEX-pumps and instrumen- tation like any modern distillery, mostly PLC-controlled. All the blends are collected in a gauged excise-tank at the rear – and only the previous week the rst batch of the distillery’s production was trans- ported offsite destined for maturation. Roe & Co has no plans to build its own maturation warehouses given the targeted volumes, and intend to use
Lora spoke to me at length about the cask racking and maturation pro- tocols. For current production, 80% of spirit ended up in ASB (American Standard Bourbon) casks, with the remainder primarily into re ll casks. Working with Caroline Martin, the aim is to achieve orchard-fruit notes and vanilla from the ASB casks, and some further spicy notes using the re ll casks. The whole process is further complicated by the need to process both varieties of wash. It all leads to a lot of sensory assessment and careful blending. At the tail end of our conversation I asked Lora to describe the role of the distiller here at Roe and Co in ‘building spirit character’ into the nal new-make spirit, and this is what she said: “Our role in the distillery is to lay down the building blocks for our blend- ers to rearrange and shape the whiskey of the future. I see that as a very additive process, and the key lies in managing the detail at each process stage in the distillery from raw materials selection to the moment spirit leaves site.
Karl Deery holding the nal product at the entrance to the visitors’ attraction
feints are also added and the distillation continues for a further three-hour period to give a nal ABV of 81% – and a nal volume of 1,400 litres. All the lyne arms are at a 10° angle, feeding into the shell and tube condensers. The condensers use closed-loop chilled water from a fan-cooled glycol
“Our role in the distillery is to lay down the building blocks for our blenders to rearrange and shape the whiskey of the future. I see that as a very additive process, and the key lies in managing the detail at each process stage in the distillery from raw materials selection to the moment spirit leaves site.”
26 ● BREWER AND DISTILLER INTERNATIONAL I october 2019
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