Distillery ready: germinating and kilning barley

Keeping the conditions just right is the challenge for malting barley in the quantities processed at Station Maltings...

Chris - Oh my goodness. You weren't wrong, were you, when you said it'll be warmer in here. It's like a hurricane force wind of hot damp air coming out the door.

Richard - Yeah, so we maintain the temperature level in here around about 16 degrees centigrade air on, and maybe 18 or 19 degrees centigrade air off. So hence the nice warm feeling that we got coming through the door.

Chris - This is a bit like the ring in a circus. It's that sort of size, isn't it? The floor is a whole heap of barley and you have a device that effectively stirs it and spreads it out as though you are spreading sand around the floor of your circus ring. And how often do you turn it over then to mix it up?

Richard - So this turning machine that you can see in front of us actually moves very slowly. It takes around about three hours to get a full circumference of the vessel. So we make sure that we keep the vessel turned a couple of times a day anyway. And that keeps the rootlets from matting together. It allows the air that you can feel coming past us to evenly flow through the bed. And effectively what we're doing is replacing the air, which is around about the grain. So it's respiring, it's taking in oxygen and producing CO2 much as we would. So we are using large amounts of air to replace the oxygen and also control the temperature to the setpoint temperatures that we're after.

Chris - How long will it stay in here?

Richard - So we germinate and heat these vessels for four days. And that is the perfect amount of time to break down the proteins as we need to and generate enough of the enzymes for our customers to use in their process later on.

Chris - And then where next?

Richard - So from this germination vessel, we'll go to the kiln. It's going to be very hot

Chris - Good grief. Not even in there yet. You have to pay a fortune in Finland for an experience like this, you know, Richard. Good grief!

Richard - We don't take tourists in here, for sure.

Chris - How is the heat produced? Is this gas or electricity?

Richard - Currently this is gas.

Chris - It's incredibly hot. I mean that's sauna temperature. That's really, really hot. What's your gas bill like?

Richard - It's huge. Yes, it's absolutely huge.

Chris - The current economic climate must have made that even trickier.

Richard - Yes, it has. It's made our products more expensive. It's made the beer that everybody buys in the pub or the supermarket, it has made that more expensive and it's made the whisky, which is being laid down for the future, more expensive as well.

Chris - For people who didn't get to experience the sauna. It looked pretty similar to where we just were, except that it was 9 million degrees. It was really, really hot. But it's basically the same thing. You've got a thinner bed of malt and you're turning that for a period of time and you're just drying it out. So how long will it spend in there doing that?

Richard - Our heating process, our burn process, is about 19 hours. And then there's the filling and emptying as well. And that allows us to take the moisture maybe from about 40% going in, reduce the moisture level down, and then start to build the temperature up towards the end of the process, which we just felt there just now. And those latter stages, they start to create the flavour and colour compounds and also fix the enzyme potential. Holds those enzymes in stasis for the onward processing at brewing or distilling phase.

Chris - So despite the extreme heat in there, the enzymes in the grains do remain viable and intact. And when they go to the brewery or the distillery, they will reactivate, reanimate, and start to break down the seed.

Richard - It's absolutely imperative that we give the brewer and distiller a high degree of enzymes as well as the starch, which we're giving them. So the brewer needs the starch to then convert into sugar. But to convert it into sugar, it needs the enzyme. So we need to give them a high level of enzymes as well. And of course, once the brewer, say, has converted their starch into sugar with the enzymes, that's when the yeast can then utilise the sugar to convert into alcohol.

Chris - Where does it go next after it's been dried?

Richard - So we put it into our storage facility where we take a sample and we analyse it in our central laboratory in Arbroath. When we have a full set of analysis, we can then determine that it meets our customer specifications and we can then set it for delivery to one of our many customers from this site, either in the UK or abroad, along the lines of their schedule.

Chris - And then next stop for stuff that comes out of here is your home hunting ground where you hail from. And that's going to be Scotland and the whisky industry.

Richard - Yes, exactly. So the whisky distilling industry requires a very high quantity of malted products each year. Largely distilling malt, plain distilling malt, and a little bit of peated malt, which we produce for our customers in Scotland.

Chris - Well, I've had a blast. It's been amazing to see this. And I started by saying I've stood outside this plant on that railway station and looked up at this for so many years and wondered what goes on here. And now I know.

Richard - Well, I'm very pleased to be able to show you and allow your listeners to hear about what we do. You know, people don't really understand what it takes to get a pint of beer on the bar or a bottle of whisky on the shelf.

Chris - Are you a Burns Night man?

Richard - I definitely am. Yes. I'm going to a Burns supper in the outskirts of Edinburgh.

Chris - Do you get some freebies? Will you be able to turn up with a decent bottle of stuff?

Richard - Sadly, we don't get too many freebies from our customers, so, no. No, sadly not