Make Your Own Scotch whisky
May 26, 2008
The actual process of making Scotch whiskey is quite simple. It requires only three ingredients: Malted barley, water, and yeast. There is no need of any enzymes, chemicals, additives, or anything artificial. Only hot steam is used for sterilizing the tanks and equipment, before making the next batch.
Step 1: Malting. Sprout the barley for two days (soak it 10-12 hours, then drain off the water and keep at just above room temperature). The sprouts should be just at the stage where there are little white shoots about 3 cm. long. Then this is dried on big screens for a couple days, so it is dry enough for grinding.
Step 2: Grinding. Grind the dried malt into a course meal.
Step 3: Cooking. The ground cereal is mixed with water in a big tan. Inside the tank is a mechanical agitator to keep the stuff stirred up while cooking.
Step 4: Separating the wort. The first cooking of the mash is with a thin liquid. Just as when you are cooking oatmeal, and it sticks to the bottom of the pan, the barley-meal would stick to the cooker tank during the process of boiling the fermented mash to produce the steam in the whiskey still. The fermentation tank has a coarse sieve screen at the bottom. After the initial cooking, the liquid is drained off into a fermentation tank. The remaining wet grains are hauled away and used for livestock feed.
Step5: Fermenting. Once the yeast is added to the liquid wort, the fermentation is completed in 2 to 3 days, as it is held above room temperature, usually about 95 Degrees F.
Step 6, Distilling. The first distillation makes 40 proof alcohol with 20% concentration. Then this liquid is run through the second still, producing 80 proof with 40% concentration. The distillate is cooled in pipe coils running inside tanks of running cold water.
Step 7: decanting and casking. The distilled product is first measured for proof, and then poured into oak casks. The very first runoff from the second distillation is not used. The reason is that it may have undesirable esthers as these boil off before ethanol starts to boil. Also, the last part of the distillation run is not used, as the proof starts to drop below 80 proof. Only the middle part of the distillation run is used for drinking whiskey. The 80 proof whiskey is put into the oak casks, and these go into a warehouse where they sit to age for 10 years. During this ten years, about 1/4 of the alcohol is lost to evaporation. The Scots call this the “Angel’s share”. The aging mellows the taste and picks up a bit of the wood flavour and colour.
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