A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Please, no more. I’ve had enough of death.’

  ‘I know. But it’s something I blame myself for as well. I should have found him. I know every part of this country better than any man around. And I have a dog who lives by his nose. And we failed …’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘could we go on? It is useless to talk of what might have been. My father need never have made that last journey into Szechwan, either. William need never have come to Cluain. For that matter, I need not have come. But I am here. Shall we go on?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Had it created a coldness, this refusal to allow him to speak of this unfounded guilt he felt? But I could not bear it for him, and for my grandfather as well; they would feel as they must. I had my own thoughts to live with. We went on in silence to the great drying kilns, and his explanations were brisk and precise ‒ that is, if anyone could be precise about what began to appear a very complicated process. How was it, I wondered, that they talked about illegal stills in the mountain country that could be dismantled and carried away, when it seemed that all this great plant was needed to make that warm glowing liquid I had tasted for the first time the night before. I asked Callum Sinclair this.

  ‘What’s made in those little illegal stills isn’t brewed for the pleasure of tasting it, but to knock a man insensible.’ He pointed to the drying kiln. ‘That’s what’s at the bottom of those odd chimneys you see in every distillery.’

  ‘They reminded me of Chinese pagodas …’

  ‘We dry it over peat fires to give it its flavour ‒ that, and the barley, makes Scotch different from the American whiskies, their Bourbon and rye. There’s no particular mystery about making Scotch. It needs skills ‒ traditional and ancient skills. Perhaps it needs a climate like ours ‒ not just to mature it, but because the climate breeds the need for it. Those illegal brews are made, I think, just to help men forget what sort of winter they have to live through here …’

  As we walked we came on two men bent over the task of resoldering the joint of a pipe. I guessed Callum Sinclair had been with them when the noise of Big Billy had called him away. He punctiliously introduced both men to me, and both stood up and offered a murmured welcome. ‘James Macfarlane, Miss Howard. John Murray …’ As we moved out of earshot, he added, ‘A distillery runs on very few workers ‒ all are skilled ‒ and all are valued. A distillery man is a very special breed. You won’t find too much need of workers’ unions here. They know their value ‒ and so does Angus Macdonald.’

  He continued on, and I tried to remember, and most of it went over my head. After drying in the kiln the malt was left for about six weeks, screened for impurities, and separated from the dried-up rootlets. ‘The rootlets we call malt culms, and feed them to the cattle. After we’re rid of all that we grind it up ‒ it’s called grist then ‒ and it goes into the mash tuns.’ He led me on to another room, containing four huge circular vessels. ‘Three thousand gallons,’ he said laconically. ‘The grist is extracted four times with hot water ‒ each lot of water higher in temperature until we reach about eighty degrees for the last. Only the first two extractions go on to the fermentation stage ‒ we keep back the third and the fourth to form the extractions of the next batch of grist. All this mashing here is to reactivate the ferments which were stopped during the drying. Have you ever heard of enzymes ‒?’

  ‘I’m not a chemist.’

  He nodded. ‘The old man will be asking you questions. Even if you don’t have any answers, at least it helps if you’ve heard the words. Well … let’s keep on. The first two extractions from the mash tuns are called worts. Once we have the worts we haven’t any more need for the barley, and that goes to the cattle, too. We cool down the worts to about seventy to eighty degrees by passing it through this heat exchange. Cooled down to this temperature, we run it into the washback, and add the yeast. Through here …’

  I scrambled after him, ducking under pipes and stepping over some, the ends of my skirts getting damp from the little uneven places in the floor where water ‒ or was it some of the products of the distillations ‒ had collected. No, it would be water. Angus Macdonald ‒ and, I thought, Callum Sinclair ‒ would never have tolerated a sloppily cleaned floor. Big wooden circular vessels again ‘‒ made of larch,’ Callum Sinclair said. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well you’ve come in the silent season. It’s a pretty violent affair when the yeast begins to work on the worts ‒ it keeps bubbling all the time, and the men have to keep stirring it with birch sticks to keep it from boiling over. Maybe you wouldn’t like the smell, either. It gives off carbon dioxide. The whole business takes about thirty-six hours ‒ which is why I think we all need our time out of the distillery to get our lungs cleaned out. If you were a chemist now …’ It was growing to be a joke. ‘… I would tell you about the enzymes first producing dextrose from the maltose, and then converting dextrose into alcohol and carbon dioxide. But you’re not a chemist.’

  ‘When will it be whisky?’ I demanded.

  ‘Patience. This is where we begin dealing with Neil Smith, as an excise officer. With me, or Angus Macdonald, he’s calculated about the amount of spirit that the worts should yield, from the specific gravity of the liquid at the beginning of the fermentation, and at the end. The liquid at the end of the process is a clear mixture of water, yeast and a bit over five per cent volume of alcohol ‒ that’s about ten per cent proof. We call it the wash. This is what the pot stills have been waiting for.’

  ‘Whisky,’ I said faintly. No matter how they scoured and cleaned, the smell would forever be there, locked deep into the wooden containers, the roof beams, the cracks in the stone floors. I wanted to be done.

  ‘Not quite,’ he said. And he led me through a doorway and out on to a kind of gallery that looked down at two huge copper vessels, pear-shaped, almost, with long necks curved at odd angles. ‘These are the pot stills,’ he said. ‘These are the heart of malt whisky. Let Angus Macdonald tell you about the patent stills ‒ that’s the spirit they mix with the pure malt to make a blend. But when someone says a pot distilled whisky, they mean what comes out of these two beauties here. Distilling is just turning liquid into vapour ‒ the wash in this case ‒ and condensing the vapour back into liquid. This is where it’s done. The first one, the one with the big neck, is the wash still, and the other is the low-wines still. All distillers have their fantasies about their own pot stills. When Angus Macdonald has to have a part of one of these replaced because the copper is wearing thin, he will personally go and see that every small dent that might have been banged into the first still by accident over the years is reproduced ‒ he does it with his own hands. There are some distilleries where they won’t even disturb the cobwebs in case it somehow alters the kind of brew they finally get. We’re not quite that daft at Cluain.

  ‘We heat the wash by coals, and there’s a copper mesh called a rummager dragged around the bottom of the still to keep the insoluble stuff in the wash from burning. The distillate is driven up the neck of the still, and into a coiled copper pipe ‒ it’s called a worm ‒ that’s buried in a tank of cold water. The alcohol is driven off first because it boils at a lower temperature than water ‒ when it’s all driven off what’s left in the still is called pot ale or burnt ale, and we just run it to waste. The distillate is called low wines …’

  ‘No whisky yet?’

  He shook his head. ‘The low wines pass through the spirit safe ‒ the Excise has locks before and after on that. We check thermometers and hydrometers to see when all the alcohol has been driven off the wash still. When the distillate leaves the spirit safe it goes into that tank there, the low-wines charger, where it’s mixed with what we call the foreshots and the feints ‒ I know, I know …’ He sought to soothe my bewilderment with a gesture. ‘It’s hard to put this in order, but the foreshots and the feints are the rejects of the second still, the spirits still, so I’ve jumped ahead of you here. Can’t help it ‒ whisky is a sort of backwards and forwards thing at this
stage. The mix of the low wines, the foreshots and the feints all go into the spirit still ‒ that’s always smaller than the wash still. Then it’s heated again, and the whole process of the distillate is repeated ‒ up the neck of the still, and down through the worm to cool it. This time we run it off in three sections. The first part, the foreshots, is highly impure whisky ‒ the middle running is what we want, and we send this into the spirits receiver. This comes over at twenty-five over proof, and we keep collecting it until it’s down in strength to about five overproof. What’s left is the feints, and that’s impure whisky, too ‒ so that’s how the foreshots and the feints are waiting in the low-wines charger to mix with the next batch from the wash still.’

  ‘How can you tell what’s the real whisky, and what’s the foreshots and the … the feints?’

  ‘Over here.’ He led me along the gallery and down more stairs ‒ what a warren the place was, almost without logic, as if bins and kilns and washback and stills had all been fitted into the buildings as best they could. We seemed to have doubled back on ourselves several times. How William’s engineering mind would have hated the jumble, have longed for a smooth, orderly progression.

  ‘This is the spirit safe, here ‒ and we control what goes into the spirits receiver by using these taps. It comes down to the simple ‒ and difficult ‒ fact, that it’s here we decide what’s acceptable whisky.’

  It was something like a brass trunk with glass sides and top, fitted with measuring vessels and hydrometers. There were large brass padlocks on each end of it.

  ‘We don’t taste it, you see. The Excise doesn’t permit that. They know every drop that goes through this safe, and we have to account for it. There’s no hard and fast rule for deciding when we turn the distillate into the spirits receiver ‒ when it stops being foreshots and becomes whisky, and then when it turns into feints. It comes out as colourless liquid, of course, and when water is added, the foreshots will become cloudy. When it is clear, we judge it to be true whisky.’

  ‘Who judges?’

  ‘Angus Macdonald used to do it. Now I do.’

  ‘You’re responsible then …’

  He nodded. ‘It’s something of a nicety to decide when the liquid is a true potable whisky. An error ‒ running the foreshots into the spirits receiver too soon, or letting it run on until some of the feints get into it ‒ isn’t anything you find out about immediately. With a good whisky like Cluain’s, you’ll maybe find out a dozen years later when you compare one batch with another, that it’s not quite as it should be. It hasn’t maybe got quite the flavour and character and bouquet that Cluain’s distilling should give it. But Angus Macdonald doesn’t seem to have made mistakes in his time. We’ve yet to find out how many I have made.’

  ‘Why would one whisky be different from another? … aren’t all malts made the same way?’

  ‘No one has ever answered that. I suppose it starts with the water. The shape and size of the stills have something to do with it ‒ some say the higher the still the better, because fewer impurities will get through. The angle of the lyne arm connecting the head of the still to the condensing unit has a lot to do with it ‒ or so they say. But you’ll not find a chemist anywhere who can tell you precisely what makes a good malt. They haven’t turned it into a science yet ‒ and I don’t think they ever will. The knowledge, the way of doing it all, is passed on. You often get generations of families working in distilleries.’

  ‘That was why my grandfather wanted William ‒’

  Then I was sorry I had said it. Callum Sinclair’s face hardened; he had, after all, told me that he was responsible for the judgement of what was good enough to be called Cluain’s whisky. I had offended him ‒ in more ways than one. I had to keep reminding myself that no one knew if, in his case, the skill was something he had as an inheritance, or merely learned. Did he ever, I thought, look around the faces at the distillery and wonder if it was from one of them his hand and eye had learned the knack?

  ‘William,’ he replied, ‘knew something about chemistry and he was nearly qualified as an engineer. It would have been a whole new career, and many years, before he could be called a distiller. But, yes ‒ your grandfather wanted him. Was it so strange? William was …’

  He never told me what he believed William had been. Instead he turned abruptly away from the spirit safe. ‘I don’t hold the key to the warehouses, and I won’t ask Neil Smith to open up for us. He’ll follow you around like Big Billy. Ask Angus Macdonald to show you what’s there. Is there anything else you want to know?’

  He was back to the man he had been in the kitchen. Deliberately rude, determined to show me how little I mattered.

  I put out my hand and plucked angrily at his sleeve. ‘You haven’t finished. I’m sorry if I’ve said the wrong thing ‒ but you told me I’d never understand it all in the beginning, and it isn’t just distilling one needs to understand in a place like this. You know well enough what I’m talking about. And then, you said yourself that my grandfather will be asking questions. Am I to say you stopped short …?’

  He sighed, and his shoulders seemed to relax a trifle. He looked at me with faint indulgence, as if I might have been an importunate child. ‘Very well, Miss Howard. There’s hardly any thing left, so you might as well have the rest of it, and don’t blame me if your head is spinning, and you can’t remember any of what I’ve said. But now ‒ you’ve got your whisky at last ‒ true Cluain whisky, distilled with care ‒ you could say love ‒ in its traditional manner. What you get into the spirits receiver is about one hundred and twenty proof. It’s colourless, extremely pungent, and would lift your head off to drink it. Though it’s also a tradition that the Excise turns a blind eye to the men having their dram of unmatured, unbonded whisky every day. It should kill them, but it doesn’t. They grow to ripe old age in the trade, and you’d never think of laying off a distillery worker just because he’s an old man. I think myself they’re like herrings in brine. They’d dry up without it.’

  ‘Do you drink it like that?’ I was thinking of the potent, but marvellously smooth distillate I had tasted the night before.

  ‘Are you asking if I have the tastes of a gentleman? Well, I couldn’t answer that. But I don’t drink immature whisky.’

  ‘Why do you twist things …?’

  He gestured. ‘Oh, let us not go on! You’re nearly finished with the distillery ‒ and with me. Let’s get to the end of it, and we needn’t worry about what my habits or tastes are. Your grandfather wouldn’t encourage it.’

  ‘I don’t care what my grandfather ‒’

  ‘Miss Howard, you are keeping me. I have other things to do. Now, shall we go on?’

  I nodded, clamping my mouth down on words I wanted to spill out. ‘We add our spring water now before running the spirit into casks, which brings it down to about one hundred and ten proof. The casks are made of oak, and by preference they will have been used for storing sherry. This, over the years, gives a smoothness and a colour to the whisky. The size of the cask is a matter of choice ‒ the smaller the cask, the faster the maturing. But there’s a catch to that, though. The smaller the cask, the more whisky you’ll lose through absorption by porosity. The oak has to be porous, to a degree, because the whisky has to breathe, without actually leaking. So you will lose something, whether you store it in thirty-gallon casks, or hogsheads of fifty-five or sixty-five gallons. You’ll mature more quickly in smaller casks, but you’ll lose more. You’ll not only get a loss of volume during maturing, but you’ll lose strength too. The humidity in the warehouse affects both the volume and the strength. The drier the place the more you lose in volume. That’s why the blenders come and buy it here at Cluain and leave it with is. There’s nothing quite like the dampness of a Highland warehouse. Then to bring it down to whatever proof is required, water is added at the boiling stage. But here at the distillery, when you are offered a dram it will always be of high proof, and our own spring water added to cut it to your taste. Anothe
r of the little mystiques of the art.’ He half turned and began to walk away from me. ‘I think that’s all I can tell you. Angus Macdonald will fill in the romance and the tradition of it all. Things he fed to your brother … But whisky is business, Miss Howard. Big Business. Those who make it had better know what they’re about.’

  I followed him silently through the warren of passages and stairs to the door at which I had entered. It seemed a long time ago; he was right; I would not remember much of what he had told me about the distilling of whisky, but I had learned more than I had come to find out. I had learned about William and my grandfather. I had learned a little about Callum Sinclair.

  As if he had made a sudden decision, he almost flung the spanner on to a bench beside the door, and took up his sheepskin. He opened the door for me, and at once I heard that familiar hissing sound. But now, when Big Billy and his flock rounded the corner of the warehouses and dashed across the road, the gander seemed suddenly to come to a sliding halt on the cobblestones. With one gesture of his hand Callum silenced them, and Big Billy turned haughtily and drove his way back through the flock, all of them falling in behind him, only little gobbling murmurs coming from their throats.

  ‘Will Big Billy remember me?’

  ‘I think so. He’ll try to see how far he can go in frightening you. But he’ll learn soon enough that you belong here, and after that it’s a matter of facing him down. Neil Smith would probably enjoy seeing you too terrified to step outside the garden ‒ but you must try not to give him and Big Billy that satisfaction. You have to show both of them that you have the right to be here.’

  ‘Do you think I have?’

  He pulled the door closed with a bang. ‘I wonder why you bother to ask me? It’s none of my business. But since you have asked … Like William, you have a right here so long as you don’t give it away, or have it taken from you. His went by accident ‒ almost by default. I wonder what you will do with your chance?’