Rebuilding Diary

Winter has finally arrived at Annandale. Although there wasn't any snow at the distillery today, many of the roads leading to and from the Annan area were affected badly by wet, slushy snow, especially the M74 motorway. Nonetheless, all the key players eventually made it to the technical meeting.



The roofs on the Bonded Warehouses are now complete (see photo). This has been a huge (and hugely expensive) task! Otherwise, we've done all that we can to these buildings until we obtain permission from Dumfries & Galloway Council to reinstate the East Bonded Warehouse to how it would have been in the Johnnie Walker era. Unfortunately, a large double door was inserted into the gable end of the East Bonded Warehouse during the farming period (see photo), to allow tractors and cattle trucks to access the building. Given permission, our masons will recreate the original first-floor entrance and we'll re-build the loading platform as shown on Charles Doig's drawings. (In the photo, you can see where the cross-members of the platform would have been inserted into the wall.)  To be fair, the building inspectors working for the Council have no experience of working distilleries, so it's all new to them. (Bladnoch, approximately 90km to the west, is the only other distillery in Dumfries & Galloway.)



Most of the builders' activities have focussed on making the Maltings ready for our new 35 tonne malt bins. There will be two: one for peated malt and the other for unpeated malt. In his book entitled The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom (1887), Alfred Barnard describes how, at Annandale "...The malt is raised by elevators to the Kiln at the end of the Maltings, which is floored with wire cloth and heated with peat." On this basis, we can be nearly certain that Annandale Distillery would have produced smoky/peaty whisky. For this reason, our 'tribute' expression will be smoky/peaty but we'll also produce an un-peated single malt that's more typical of the modern Lowland style.



Geographically, Annandale is far from any other distillery (Bladnoch is the closest, then Glenkinnchie), so it's important for economic reasons that our bins can hold a full (30 tonne) lorry-load of malt. One hundred years ago, barley would have been delivered in sacks and stored in the upper floors of the Maltings. The grain would then have been dropped down to the Malting floors at ground and first-floor levels via chutes. To accommodate our new vertical bins, we've had to remove part of the first and second floors in the west part of the Maltings and insert a steel frame to support the walls and roof (shown in the series of photos). We'll also accommodate the milling equipment in the same area. However, of great importance to us, Annandale will still have capacity to malt barley on site, although this will not happen until Phase 2 of the project.



The Mash House has required major engineering work to stabilise the structure and make it ready for refurbishment. This is scheduled to start in earnest in January 2012 (weather permitting). As part of this process, we asked the builders to demolish a small 'tank plinth' outside the building which had surely been added as an afterthought. After a lot of head scratching, it became apparent that this wasn't a tank plinth at all but a header tank for the water wheel (removed in the farming era). The tank would have been fed with water from the distillery pond (which we don't own) via a large cast-iron pipe. We deduce that this tank was used to create a head of water to overcome the inertia of the waterwheel (which drove the mill). Once the wheel was turning, normal water flow would probably have kept it running. It seems that all the original valve gear is still in place so we're holding talks with our structural engineer to determine the best way to preserve this interesting feature.

As an aside, we believe that Annandale Distillery may have experienced problems obtaining sufficient water to drive the mill and the still rummagers and to cool the distillate, especially during the summer months. The two burns running through the distillery (Gullielands Burn and Northfield Burn) are often reduced to a trickle during dry weather. Luckily, we've been able to sink a bore hole down to the aquifer, 90 metres below the distillery, so we should have plenty of water for production and cooling throughout the year.