Day in the Life of a Scotch Whisky Distiller

My first job out of KPU Brewing School was at The Borders Distillery. I moved from Vancouver, Canada to Hawick, Scotland just to work there as a whisky distiller. It was quite an adventure, so I’m delighted to showcase it here on this blog.

The Borders Distillery is located in Hawick, Scotland. It is the first distillery in the Scottish Borders in over 180 years, as the last distillery in the Scottish borders shut down in 1837. They only started producing spirit in March of 2018, and since the spirit needs to mature in the cask for three years and one day to legally become scotch whisky, we are still waiting for it to legally become Scotch.

While I was working there we were lucky to have Jim Casey working at the distillery. He had over 41 years of experience working as a distiller, and previously worked at the Glenkinchie Distillery. He helped train all the young distillers at The Borders Distillery.

8 AM – Distillery Start-Up

For me, a typical work day there started at 8am. The first thing we did was turn on the gas boiler so that we had enough steam to heat up our stills. We had a mash house on one side and a still house on the other of the distillery. One person was in charge of running each side of the distillery production house.

In the mash house we produced the “wash”, which you can think of as being beer. The wash was fermented for an average of 86 hours in a vessel known as the washback. It was fermented until the alcohol percentage was 8% or more, and then it was transferred to the still house to be distilled.

In the still house we had a pair of spirit stills and a pair of wash stills. Each pair of stills handled a different distillation. The spirit that ultimately became our scotch whisky had to undergo two distillations. The first distillation took place in the wash stills. What was collected from this first distillation was known as the low wines. It was 25-30%abv and had a lot of flavours in it that we didn’t want. To further concentrate the alcoholic strength of the spirit and to create a more elegantly flavoured spirit, we did a second distillation in the pair of spirit stills. Then it was ready to put inside the oak barrels to mature in.

4PM – Distillery Shift Change

Our work day usually ended at 4pm when we’d finished running a distillation through both pairs of stills. There was a lot of fluctuations in our work days though, since it depended on the production demand. Some months we had to run two sets of distillations per day, so there would be one shift from 6am-2pm, and another shift from 2pm-10pm to get this all done. The last I heard they were moving to three sets of distillations per day. For a more comprehensive summary on the production process at The Borders Distillery, click here.

Anyhow, it’s much easier to just show you what a day working as a whisky distiller is like through video, so please check out the YouTube video below. This video is also the very first distilling video I ever made, so it has a bit of a soft spot in my heart.

Watch it on YouTube Below