Ardgowan Distillery Stills Arrive On Site

The Scotsman

The new design for the Ardgowan distillery uses low environmental impact composite cladding, timber and steel materials to create a light-filled modern Nordic long hall.  The building is designed to provide an ergonomic energy efficient distillery and to maximise the visitor experience and will incorporate a glass-walled ‘sky platform’ with views of the Clyde.  The company has already pledged their new distillery will be carbon negative and are working with specialist distillery engineers Briggs of Burton to ensure the flagship building has the latest innovations in energy reduction, heat recovery and carbon capture.  The new plans for the site on the Ardgowan Estate, 30 miles west of Glasgow, superseded a previous design which secured planning consent in 2019.  Today (4 November) marked a milestone in the construction of the distillery, as the stills arrived and will be placed in the impressive building. 'This has gone from a building site to a distillery' said CEO Martin McAdam.  The distillery should be completed by the spring, with liquid running through the stills, and visitors welcomed, in the summer of 2025.

Transcript

00:00I'm Rosin Derskin, Food and Drink Editor for The Scotsman and I'm here at our Gown Distillery in

00:04Inverkip which is the lovely building behind me that's under construction still. It's a momentous

00:08day for the team here as the stills are arriving, we're just waiting to see them. We're about eight

00:13or nine months away from the distillery being in full production and open to the public in the

00:17summer sometime next year. So yeah we're just excited to see the stills and so are the team

00:22and we're going to speak to some of them later on. At this point in time I'm so happy, I'm so

00:28delighted. This project has been eight years in the making so I got to tell you it feels really

00:34good. Here at the distillery we're you know only 1,500 meters from the mouth of the River Clyde

00:43so just across the water we have Island, just across the river itself we have the Highland

00:50and here we're Lowland. So we're actually sitting at a nexus point between Highland,

00:55Island and Lowland and what we want to make is a great robust spirit, very fruity, able to stand

01:02up to a lot of sherry maturation. So something Highland Speyside is what we're going for. We had

01:08this crazy idea for Infinity Casts. Infinity Casts are based on a specification that we developed

01:15at our Gown Distillery. The idea behind the cast is that they're big, they will stand up to

01:21long maturation periods and what we hope is that this will give us an exceptional spirit

01:28in the Infinity Cast. Well the Infinity Cast was made especially for us. I mean normally people

01:34use a range of casts for maturing their whiskey but about 75 to 80 percent of our whiskey will

01:40be matured in sherry casts. So what we wanted to do was create a cast which is slightly different.

01:45It's a little bit bigger than the traditional sherry but it's also toasted precisely to our

01:50specification. So we're looking for something really special from that wood. This is, you know,

01:55it's so great. Over here we have the distillery and I mean that's a building and we've been at

02:02that for just over a year now. We started construction in October last year. So just

02:06over a year we started construction but that building site becomes a distillery once those

02:10copper stills go inside. The stills behind us, I mean they're traditional Scottish pot stills but

02:17we've actually added thermal vapour recompression onto the stills and this allows us to recover

02:24about 40 percent of the heat that's used in the distillation, recycle that and use it again.

02:29So it's about us creating a lower carbon more sustainable distillery. It's an exciting day, the

02:35stills are coming. So can you tell us what point we're at with the distillery build? The distillery

02:41build is about seven eighths done. The stills will be the last of the stills, oblique

02:47mash tins, oblique wash packs to go in. So we're looking at all being well. We're looking at

02:55starting distillation in April, May next year. The new spirit we're hoping to be has an element of

03:01the sea air which is more or less just behind us here. It'll be a sweet estuary sea air new spirit.

03:08That's the plan. The cask program we've got here is very unique, totally unique in the

03:12Scotch whisk industry. We're filling the majority of our first year casks into infinity casks,

03:19i.e. they're 700 litre casks, first filled sherrys. The casks themselves have already been built in

03:25Spain and are being seasoned with sherry at the moment. So basically the casks that we're filling,

03:31no one else has ever filled them before. With the size of the cask it just means that the maturation

03:36takes longer. So the plan would be that these casks, if we fill them next year, would probably

03:42be at the earliest 2032, 2033 before they'll be bottled. The still house itself, as you rightly

03:52say, has a pot still element to it as well. So there is small runs available that we can do,

03:58whether that will be for ourself or it may well be for private individuals or private companies to

04:04do a small run. But yes, both are available, both in the same still house. A lot of the

04:08whisky projects nowadays are all about education because there's so many

04:14distilleries opening up all over Europe. They can call it whisky but they can't call it Scotch,

04:18obviously. So we want to be at the forefront of trying to educate people all about the

04:24provenance of Scotch whisky itself and I think we've done a great job here as the majority of

04:29the whiskies that you see behind me or at the side of me have nearly all won national if not

04:36international awards. So we're on the right track at the moment, it's just keeping it there.

04:40Can you tell me why you moved into this role? Yeah, when I was approached about this role,

04:48from the minute I first heard about it, it just seemed so exciting, just so ambitious, so exciting,

04:54so radical. I just fell in love with the project and then meeting the team just sealed that.

05:00It's such a lovely team here, really. Everybody is so passionate, so involved. It was the place for

05:06me and even being on site today, my first day, it feels like home. It's something I'm looking

05:11forward to. You're right in that Wales doesn't have the Scotch whisky regulations, obviously,

05:16but I was part of the team that brought in and that introduced the Welsh whisky geographic

05:22indicator for single malt Welsh whisky in the last couple of years. So I've got some

05:27knowledge of that. It'll be a new challenge, but then a new distillery is going to be full of new

05:31challenges. And what are you most looking forward to about your new role? Being able to put my stamp

05:35on the distillery, being part of the team, being able to develop this dream and get it off the

05:41ground. I didn't spend my whole career in South Wales at Penderyn thinking at some point I'm going

05:47to move to Scotland. It wasn't that that was something I had to do. But seeing what Gillian

05:53had done, and not only Gillian, but all of the women in the industry before her and since,

05:58was really inspirational. And knowing that that was something that was accessible to me

06:04was really important.

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