Tag: springbank whisky school

#74.3 The Springbank Whisky School

Keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’
(day 2, Tuesday)

 

TL; DR: Day two of the whisky school, filling and rolling casks all morning, watching the mashtun being filled, then more cask-rolling into the dunnage and racked warehouses after lunch. Reward came with a Cadenhead’s Warehouse Tasting of eight drams, standouts being a Palo Cortado Benrinnes 11y and old Laphroaig and Bowmore. 

(missed Part 2/Part 1?)

The second day of the school started like the first one: alarm at 6am, breakfast at 7am. That morning we got scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, a favourite of ours! Well fed, we walked to the distillery for the 8am start. It had rained during the night, so everything was wet, however the sun was shining when we arrived. That was pretty much the weather during the whole week, showers here and there, but generally sunny and not too cold…“breezy”, if you want.

Anyway, the first activity of the day was not a heavy one, just watching the steep tank being filled with water while chatting to the staff in the malting floor.

  • We don’t think this counts as quality control.

After that, it was time to get serious: our next job was rolling casks! (To note, when the Whisky School is on, the filling day is Tuesday instead of the usual Friday.) A number of casks were already aligned in the courtyard, just outside the filling room: our job was to roll them in, pass them on to “wee Andrew” (“wee” because he’s in his 20s, he’s taller than most of us) who would fill them, and once filled, closing them with a bung. Meanwhile, Gavin was keeping the records on the weight and volume of newmake spirit that went in.

  • The wait before rolling.

Once closed, we rolled the casks back to the courtyard and wrote down the cask number on the cask end with stencil and white paint. That day the casks were filled with Hazelburn, mostly ex-bourbon barrels, but also some sherry hogsheads.

  • Stencilling away.

It was a hard job, especially to get the casks positioned in the right way (with the writings up), but it took us occupied and time went quickly while rotating tasks between the five of us. We took a break for coffee at 10am, and at 11am we went to production to watch the mashtun getting filled. There, Daniel showed us how they regulate the flow of grist and hot water going into the mashtun, in order to maintain the temperature as close as possible to 63.5°C. The stream is regulated with a mechanism manoeuvred by a chain, and a slight movement can make the balance change quite quickly – not an easy job. At noon we went back to the guesthouse for lunch, this time through a shortcut in the backyard, through a scrapyard: almost romantic. A hearty soup (delicious) and sandwiches were waiting for us.

  • The mashing-in magic.

After lunch and a much needed coffee, it was time to roll casks again: this time from the courtyard to the warehouse where the Kilkerran Warehouse tasting is held nowadays (and where the Cadenhead’s Warehouse tasting used to be held). The staff showed us how to put the casks in the right way, so when you roll them on the staves they end up with the stencils facing up. The warehouse was a two-floor dunnage, and the casks we rolled in were destined to the upper floor, so a winch was needed. Upstairs, we helped put the casks on the manual lift used to position the casks on one of the three levels. We’ll spare you the intricacies of getting the right orientation of the bung depending on the spot assigned to the cask – that was tough!

Then, we moved to the racked warehouse next door, where we rolled casks on to a forklift, which the staff used to put the casks at rest in the free spots, sometimes quite high up. 

Rolling casks is a tough job…
  • …but someone has to do it.

Again, manoeuvring full casks is no easy task, and it was a good workout, but in this case being short people helped: Robert and Graham, much taller than us, had definitely a harder time!

Fortunately, this effort was well rewarded with the first tasting of the week: the Cadenhead’s Warehouse Tasting. The brand ambassador Andrew (Graham’s brother-in-law but also well known to us from festivals and tastings) took us to the new warehouse space where the tasting is held, near the Cadenhead’s tasting room.

  • Thankfully these casks don’t need to be moved…

The lineup was similar to the one we had in December, but with a few key differences. We started off with two known drams, an English single malt – the Spirit of Yorkshire/Filey Bay, fully matured in Madeira, at a low abv of 47% (the cask was almost empty at that point), and a 14y Glen Garioch finished in a rum cask (55%), tropical juiciness. The third dram was a Glenfarclas 15y (56%), that started maturing in a refill ex-bourbon barrel but was then re-racked into a Ruby Port hogshead in 2019 – more a double maturation rather than a finish. This was the first time we tried a Glenfarclas that was not in a sherry or bourbon cask, and it didn’t disappoint. Then, one of the best drams of the lineup for us, a Benrinnes 11y, first matured in refill bourbon and then in a Palo Cortado sherry hogshead for 3 years (54%). We bought a bottle, and strangely the last time we were in Campbeltown we also got a bottle of Benrinnes (but from Watt Whisky). Two is a coincidence, three is a trend…Let’s see next time. The fifth dram was a Tullibardine 11y, re-racked for the last 4 years in a fresh (aka 1st fill) oloroso hogshead (52.1%). The sixth dram was, as per custom, a peated one, a delicious 11y Caol Ila (58.2%) from a bourbon barrel – the same we’d tried in December, but we’re very happy to go over it again, as it was delicious. We also had two extra drams, a 23y old Laphroaig from a bourbon hogshead – a stunner, one of Gianluigi’s favourite drams of the whole week – and a 28y Bowmore also from a bourbon cask, again a stunner, delicate and tropical. What a tasting!

  • A much easier job.

After that Graham left, and the four of us went back to the guesthouse for dinner. That night the menu was a tasty steak pie, followed by a delicious Eton mess: Sandra really knocked it out of the park! Tired from all the rolling and dramming, we soon went to bed for a well-deserved rest.

Coming next week, more shovelling! Until then, slàinte!

Springbank Whisky School

Link: https://www.springbank.scot/whisky-school/

#74.2 The Springbank Whisky School

Barley on my mind
(day 1, Monday)

 

TL; DR: First day of the Springbank Whisky School, so exciting! We spent most of the day in the malting floor – shovelling, grubbing and turning barley while understanding all the steps before milling. We were also treated to a walking tour to discover the sites of the many lost distilleries in Campbeltown!

(missed Part 1?)

On the Monday morning, we woke up early but excited: it was the first day of the Springbank Whisky School! A shower, then breakfast in the dining room: a full Scottish fried up by the lovely Marie, but also some fruits, yogurt, and toasted bread. It was a big plate, and as per usual Gianluigi helped Teresa clean it up! At 8am sharp Donald walked us from the Still Guesthouse to the distillery (only 5 minutes or so away).

  • Big breakfast for a big day ahead.

While arriving we saw (and smelled) grey peat smoke coming from the distillery kiln chimney: maybe no pope were made on that day, but still a very good sign! We met the distillery manager Gavin introduced himself and the school, gave us some study material, and briefly showed us around: first our lockers in the staff room, then a brief distillery tour.

  • Kiln in action!

But soon after, it was time for us to get “serious” and…Shovel barley! (We’ll spare you the jingle that Gianluigi came up with, but yes, there was a jingle about shovelling barley.) A little premise here: malting is a key part of Springbank’s production: for a long time, they were the only distillery where every step was done on site, from malting to bottling. Now Dunphail distillery (in Speyside) is also malting 100% of the barley on site, while other distilleries are at 10%-30% (Kilchoman, Laphroaig, and Bowmore on Islay, Benriach and Balvenie in Speyside, Glen Garioch in the East Highlands – we might have missed some). Most of the Scottish distilleries source malt from maltsters (or send theirs to be malted elsewhere, like Ballindalloch, Bruichladdich or Daftmill). For Springbank, the decision to keep malting in-house was not by accident, as for a period between 1960 and 1992 they also sourced it outside. It was Hadley G. Wright, the former chairman of J&A Mitchell (sadly passed away in 2023), who decided to bring it back to create more jobs for the Campbeltown community.

Malting starts by taking the green barley from the bins where the lorries unload it. When ready, it is transported with a conveyer belt through three hatches into the steep tank (13 tons if it goes to the slightly larger lower malting floor, 10 tons if it goes to the upper malting floor), where it is soaked with water for 14 hours. Water is then drained, and after 12 hours the barley is soaked again for another 14 hours. After draining, it is shovelled through another hatch if it goes to the lower malting floor, or shovelled outside the steep if it stays on the upper floor. That day we were on the lower malting floor, and a pile of wet barley was waiting for us, ready to be spread. So, for about 30-40 minutes, we shovelled barley on to wheelbarrows, that we then used to spread it on the floor, under the supervision of Joey and John, who levelled out the most uneven bits. Being five (plus the staff) doing it, it went quickly, and it was already time for the 10am break, when we gathered at the washback bar for a hot drink and some sweet treats.

  • Working hard. Were we doing a good job? Oh well.

The second activity of the day was a walking tour with Findlay, hunting down the sites of lost distilleries. Having read David Stirk’s Whiskypolis book recently, Gianluigi was already acquainted with the story of the 30-odd distilleries that used to be in town. Only two survived all the shocks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that led to many closures in the 1920s and 1930s. The two are obviously Glen Scotia (formerly only Scotia) and Springbank, while Glengyle was resurrected in 2004 by J&A Mitchell in order for Campbeltown to retain its official whisky region status. And we’re happy for that, as Kilkerran (the brand name under which they sell Glengyle’s whisky, as the name is owned by another company) is a tremendous dram! Two other old distillery names live on as Springbank variants: Longrow, heavily peated and double distilled), and Hazelburn, unpeated and triple distilled. Some of the spots gave it away that there used to be a distillery – for example, Benmore is a now the name of the street, but you can still see half of its pagoda roof and the name on the old gate.

  • What remains of a glorious past.

Some others were less straightforward to spot, like the site of Lochead distillery, which is now home to…a Tesco. Apparently, when they had their application approved by the Argyll and Bute Council, they were supposed to include in the architecture something that hinted at the fact that there used to be a distillery, so they came up with “pagodas” on the roof. Pardon our French, but they look a bit shite. The old Hazelburn distillery is, instead, one of the best-preserved buildings. Some warehouses of Glen Nevis also survived. Nice touch, during the tour we also popped into Glen Scotia, where we said “hi” to Greg, who gave us the excellent Warehouse Tasting back in December.

  • The oddest rendition of a pagoda.

After the tour, it was time for lunch back at the Still Guesthouse: scotch pie, keeping it traditional. Common theme for the whole week: the food was delicious, we were (happily) spoiled! Anyway, after the one-hour lunch break, we were split in two groups, Graham and the two of us in one, and Robert and Stephen in the other. While Robert and Stephen went on to look at mashing, fermenting and distilling, we went back to the maltings, where the staff showed us all the nitty and gritty of what is done there. First, we watched the steep tank being filled in with barley, and how it gets evened out. To see how the steep tank gets filled with water, we had to wait for the next morning.

  • Step 1, filling the steep tank with barley.

Anyway, once spread on the floor, the barley is turned every four hours to keep it aerated and break up rootlets. The three of us got to turn a few rows of barley with both the grubber (manual) and the turner (electric). Every step and relevant information is noted down on paper registers, things like when the barley is turned, temperature, humidity, etc. It was quite exciting to see some old registers going back many years!

  • Quality control.
  • Turning…Less easy than we thought!

The team then took us outside in the internal courtyard, where they keep both wet and dry (under a shed) peat, and where the old oil tanker still lays, which was used before they switched to natural gas. Back inside, we went up to the last floor, which is not used to spread malt, but to store the barley from two local farms (wink, wink) waiting to be processed. It’s also where we could see the top of the malt bins (and a conveyer belt!).

  • The oldest destoner we ever saw.

We then checked out the destoner above the Porteus mill, a very old piece of equipment in a wooden box, which weighs the malt to send to the mill in 25kg “coups”. All very nerdy details, and of course we loved it!

With that, our first day was over. While the afternoon was a bit slow, it was a solid start of the school, and we were looking forward to the second day! We went back to the guesthouse, where Sandra had cooked us a delicious dinner, chicken Balmoral with fava beans and mashes, followed by a trifle: we still dream about it! We then had a couple of drams with Stephen and Robert in the sitting room, before retiring to our rooms.

Stay tuned to know more about our second day! Until then, slàinte!

Springbank Whisky School

Link: https://www.springbank.scot/whisky-school/

#74.1 The Springbank Whisky School

Getting ready to go!
(prologue)

 

TL; DR: Sooner than expected, we had to get ready for something that had been on our wish list for a long time – the Springbank Whisky School. We were so excited for this once-in-life opportunity! This is just an introductory blog post to our intense week in the wee toon, more (much more) to come. 

A few weeks ago, back in March (2026, for you reading from the future!), we ticked off one of the whisky experiences in our bucket list: the Springbank Whisky School! In a few words (but many more are about to come), it’s an intensive week at the distillery, ‘working’ and learning everything about the nitty and gritty of their production, from malting the green barley, to sliding bottles in a cardboard box, ready to be shipped anywhere. With a few drams in between, obviously. Obviously a heaven for Springbank lovers, but overall an experience that attracts many whisky nerds and enthusiasts from everywhere.

We found out about the school during the pandemic, but at the time it was closed, for obvious reasons. Gianluigi first enquired back in November 2022, after they restarted, but we were told that after losing those two years, the queue was estimated to be seven years long! Fair enough, we were ready to wait until 2029, and that was just to join the waiting list. But then, very suddenly, in October 2025 we received an email from the distillery: they were reopening the waiting list. We signed up right away, again expecting to finally do the school towards the end of 2026 or even in 2027. But that wasn’t the case, possibly because (as we learned later) after the pandemic they moved from running it 10 weeks a year to 20 weeks, halving the waiting times. When the confirmation email arrived, asking us to choose three potential terms, we realised that we could do it as early as February/March 2026: only a few months away, such a nice surprise! And so we did, we selected the second week of March, to avoid a clash with the Fife Whisky and Independent Spirit festivals. Soon after, our good pal Stephen from the Edinburgh Whisky Group, a massive Springbank fan also on the waiting list, managed to book for the same week: “los tres amigos” going to Campbeltown, yay!

  • Los tres (oh sorry, quatros) amigos.

The adventure started on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when we slowly left Edinburgh towards Glasgow, where we picked up Stephen who was visiting friends. We met him at the CostCo petrol station, so in the meanwhile we filled the tank (the diesel was “only” £1.349 per litre then….It seems so long ago!). We then swiftly left Glasgow and drove to Campbeltown, aiming to check in just before dinner. The Whisky School includes accommodation in the lovely Still Guesthouse (owned by J&A Mitchell and used by staff visiting the wee toon), a few minutes walking from the distillery, in front of the Co-Op supermarket.

The school normally hosts 6-7 attendees per week. However, when we arrived, we realised that in our term we’d only be five: the three of us, Robert and Graham. Robert is from California, but he used to live in Scotland, where he obtained the master in Brewing and Distilling at Herriot Watt University and then worked at Fierce Brewery, before moving back to the US. He’d flown all the way from San Jose to attend the school (and for a following trip to Islay)! Much closer to home, Graham lives and works in Glasgow, but since his wife is from Campbeltown, he stayed with the in-laws. Not the first time we’d met him, as we were already introduced to each other at the Fife Whisky Festival the previous weekend.

  • The Still Guesthouse, hard not to guess what this is all about.

Stephen and Robert were given two rooms on the ground floor (the “15” and the “12”), while we shared one of the three rooms upstairs (the “Single cask”). While the rooms downstairs had a shower, ours didn’t, but since we were the only two people upstairs, we still had the one bathroom to ourselves. There is also an annex, but obviously nobody used it during our term.

In the room, we found the gear provided by Springbank: a set of five t-shirts (orange, red, green, purple and black), a black jacket and a high-vis vest. On the initial form the smallest size was a unisex S (which fits Gianluigi), but they were super kind to get a XS set of t-shirts and jacket for Teresa (who is a tiny lady). After the school the high-vis vest are in the van, don’t know how good of an idea this is, since the big mark on the back with “2026 Springbank Whisky School”. A thing we had to get ourselves were the safety boots: we both got some hybrid models with all the safety requirements, but that could be used for hiking as well. Our old hiking shoes were long done (Teresa’s died last year on Ben Nevis), so we killed two birds with one stone.

  • All sorted!

All meals from Monday morning to Friday lunchtime are also provided by the school, and it is a fixed menu (obviously taking into account food allergies or diets) for the three meals. So, on our arrival on Sunday evening we had to get food somewhere, and the obvious choice for us was the Ardshiel Hotel. After a tasty meal and a pint, we went back to the guesthouse, where we met Robert.

  • A fine, fine week ahead!

We had a dram all together in the cosy sitting room, where a bottle of Campbeltown Loch blended malt (46%) and a Seven Star blended scotch (46%) were left for us to enjoy. We also found a liquor cabinet in the kitchen, where previous guests had left a bottle of Longrow from the distillery’s shop demijohn (that gets constantly refilled, in a solera-ish fashion), and some other liquors/spirits. Good find and nice way to ‘connect’ with students from previous terms (we’d also leave some of our samples for students after us), but we all concurred that it wasn’t a good night for dramming given the big start the day after. We soon went to bed to get a good rest before properly starting the adventure on the next day!

Stay tuned for the rest of the adventure! Until then, slàinte!

Springbank Whisky School

Link: https://www.springbank.scot/whisky-school/