Production Process

We are proud of our distilling techniques and believe that you deserve to see how products you consume are made. Here we outline the steps we follow to produce our fine spirits.

Mashing - Distilling - Maturing - Finishing & Bottling

Mashing
	We begin by making a mash, or beer, from the grain. We start with a premium Canadian two-row malted barley. This is the only grain used for our Single Malt Whisky and Single Malt Vodka.
	We mix the grain with hot water in our mash tun to convert the starch in the grain to sugar. This is known as saccharification. When complete, we cool the mash down.
	The mash is transferred to one of our fermenters where we add yeast. The yeast converts the sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. We prefer a slow fermentation as it creates better flavours in the final product. We patiently wait several days for the process to be completed.
Distilling
	The mash is then pumped into our 450 litre pot still. Unlike other distillers, we distill "on the grain", meaning we do not separate the liquid from the solid in the mash. We believe that this enables more flavour and character to be present in our product. Since the still is much smaller than the volume of mash, it requires several runs of the still to use all the mash.
	The first distillation is a "stripping" run. The objective is to extract the alcohol from the mash. Essentially, the mash is boiled and since the alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, the vapours are separated and condensed to produce alcohol. We start with a mash of 8% to 10% alcohol and produce "low wines" of about 45% alcohol.
	The distillation process requires careful monitoring. We constantly check the quality of the spirit produced by using taste, smell, feel and appearance.
	For vodka, we will distill an additional two times, eventually achieving a clean spirit of 95% alcohol. Whisky is only distilled two times in total, with about 70% alcohol produced. In both cases, we make "cuts" to separate the fractions (heads, hearts, and tails) to ensure only the highest quality spirits are used. Heads are the first outputs off the still. They consist of undesirable volatile components such as methanol and acetone and are discarded. The Hearts fraction is mostly ethyl alcohol and is the desirable output. Tails consist of fusel alcohols. We collect the tails separately and redistill them.
Maturing (Whisky Only)
	After distillating new make whisky, we transfer it to oak casks for maturation. (Vodka is never aged.) It is thought that up to 80% of the characteristics of a whisky are derived from the wood in which it matures.
	By law, the whisky must remain in the cask for a minimum of 3 years. We will monitor our casks as they age and only release them for bottling when we are satisfied of the product quality.
Finishing & Bottling
	For our vodka, we dilute the 95% alcohol from the still to 40% and then chill-filter it to make sure it is crystal clean and that it sparkles. We filter our whiskies, but do not* chill-filter them!*
	The product is then bottled, corked, sealed and labelled, all by hand!
	Finally, it is packed and prepared for shipping.