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.
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 30% alcohol.
The distillation process requires careful monitoring. We constantly check the quality of the spirit produced by using taste, smell, feel and appearance.
We distill an additional two times, eventually achieving a clean spirit of over 95% alcohol. 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.
The product is then bottled, corked, sealed and labelled, all by hand!
Finally, it is packed and prepared for shipping.