UNSUNG HERO
Glentauchers
A distillery where tradition meets the modern world, Glentauchers is prized by owners Chivas Brothers as a place to train new distillers and is also leading the way in achieving carbon neutrality, as Gavin D Smith reports
PHOTOS: PETER SANDGROUND
PICTURED: Glentauchers distillery as seen from the A95 near Keith on Speyside
ABOVE: As a traditional manually operated distillery, Glentauchers plays a key role in training new generations of distillers for Chivas
Speyside lies at the heart of Chivas Brothers’ Scotch whisky operations. It is home to 11 of the company’s 12 malt distilleries, with the ‘outsider’ being Scapa in the Orkney Islands. Central to Chivas’ Speyside activities is the town of Keith, where it owns Strathisla and Glen Keith distilleries.
Keith is also home to a vast array of bonded warehouses and blending and filling facilities, where the malt components of the likes of Chivas Regal, Ballantine’s and Royal Salute blends are brought together and filled into road tankers, which transport the spirit south to Central Belt locations where grain whiskies are added and the process of blending is completed prior to bottling.
Just four miles west of Keith, close to the hamlet of Mulben and right beside the A95 road that leads to Craigellachie, stands Glentauchers distillery. Along with the previously featured Glenburgie and Miltonduff distilleries, this plant provides one of the ‘heart’ malts of Chivas’ best-selling Ballantine’s blended Scotch brand.
Glentauchers is highly unusual in that it combines the very traditional with the truly groundbreaking. ‘Traditional’ in that it is extremely manual in operation, with operatives called on to pull levers and open and close valves, and monitor cut points by thermometer and hydrometer, all due to a lack of investment and upgrading towards the end of the 20th century. However, rather than computerise operations at Glentauchers, Chivas has chosen to give it a key role in training new generations of distillers, who are able to experience the entire hands-on process before moving on to more modern distilleries that usually rely on higher levels of automation.
Glentauchers is ‘groundbreaking’ in that during 2022 it became the first Chivas distillery to achieve carbon neutrality. As a Chivas Brothers spokesperson explained at the time: “Heat recovery technologies, including Mechanical Vapour Recompression (MVR) and Thermo Vapour Recompression (TVR), are designed to capture and recycle heat generated in the distillation process that would otherwise go to waste.
“To date, these have reduced total energy consumption almost by half (48 per cent) at Glentauchers distillery, reducing the site’s total carbon emissions by 53 per cent as a result. This represents an energy saving equivalent to powering 4,979 average UK homes, more than all the houses in Keith for an entire year.” Subsequently, measures to reduce energy consumption along the lines of the Glentauchers model have been rolled out across the Chivas estate of distilleries.
Glentauchers is a product of the great 1890s Scotch whisky boom, which saw so many new distilleries constructed in north-east Scotland.
The site was chosen partly for its first-class water supply and partly for the proximity of the railway network, linking Aberdeen with Inverness.
In 1897 James Buchanan and Co Ltd and the Glasgow whisky merchants WP Lowrie & Co Ltd formed Glentauchers Distillery Co to build Glentauchers, which came on stream in June the following year. In 1906 Buchanan took total control of Glentauchers, also acquiring 80 per cent of WP Lowrie, which had been experiencing financial difficulties for several years.
Glentauchers malt made its way into the highly successful Buchanan blend and Black & White whiskies, and an intriguing aspect of the distillery’s early history was a period of experimentation which started around 1910. This took the form of ‘continuous pot still distillation’, which involved running a 100 per cent barley mash through an adapted pot still. Convalmore distillery at Dufftown and Lochruan in Campbeltown, both in the ownership of Buchanan, were also included in this relatively short-lived period of experimentation.
In 1915, James Buchanan & Co Ltd merged with John Dewar & Sons Ltd, creating a company ultimately known as Buchanan-Dewar Ltd. Between 1923 and 1925 a new spirit store was built at Glentauchers to the design of Charles Doig, supervisor of the original construction project, and alterations to the maltings and mash house were also undertaken. Buchanan-Dewar Ltd became part of the Distillers Company Ltd in 1925, operating under the auspices of DCL’s Scottish Malt Distillers subsidiary from 1930.
In common with so many Scottish distilleries, the number of stills at Glentauchers was increased from two to six during 1965/66, when the still house, mash house and tun room were reconstructed in their present form. Glentauchers was silent from 1985 to 1989, when it was purchased by Allied Distillers, and production recommenced three years later. At this point, Glentauchers spirit became a component of Allied’s Teacher’s blend. Along with fellow Speyside distilleries Glenburgie and Miltonduff, Glentauchers entered Chivas Brothers’ ownership following that company’s acquisition of Allied Domecq assets in 2005.
When it comes to the character of Glentauchers, Sandy Hyslop, director of blending & inventory at Chivas Brothers, says: “Glentauchers’ new spirit evokes sweet citrus notes, namely blackcurrant and a touch of aromatic floral aroma. Maturation in American oak brings wonderful sweetness of blackcurrant jam and smooth vanilla notes to the distillate, a fruity and aromatic characteristic note found in the Ballantine’s blends.”
Glentauchers is equipped with a 12.2 tonne stainless steel full lauter mash tun and six Oregon pine washbacks, with a fermentation time of 56 hours. Three pairs of stills are of a ‘straight ogee’ design, with each wash still having a theoretical capacity of 17,875 litres, while spirit stills each have a capacity of 14,693 litres. The distillery processes 18 mashes per week if working on a seven day basis, or 12 during a five-day week. Production runs at around four million litres of pure alcohol per year.
Proprietary bottlings are predictably rare, and comprise a 23-year-old, plus three cask strength expressions in Chivas’ Distillery Reserve Collection, exclusive to the company’s distillery visitor centres. Less than one per cent of all Glentauchers sprit produced is available as single malt, but as always, the Society comes to your rescue, with well over 100 casks of Glentauchers under its belt and more to come from another of our unsung heroes.
PICTURED: George ‘Geordie’ McDonald in the stillroom at Glentauchers