Behind the scenes at Benromach
Anyone who visits our distillery, tucked away in the ancient market town of Forres, will witness firsthand our commitment to simplicity. You won’t find computers or automation of any kind, only a handful of distillers relying entirely on their senses and the expert knowledge of their craft.
It might not be the easiest way to produce whisky, but it’s our way. It’s how we’ve always made our single malts. Time and time again, our commitment to the handmade has been rewarded with award-winning whisky; Speyside single malts, with a touch of subtle smoke, matured exclusively in first-fill casks.
Made by hand for genuine character.
Our Mash
In each run of the mashing process, our distillers combine around 1.5 tonnes of grist (malted barley, ground by our mill) with three waters of increasing temperatures. The waters help extract the flavour and goodness from the malted barley, starting the process of converting starch in the grains into sugars. We only use local water, drawn from the Chapelton Springs in the Romach Hills. Pure and soft, this is the same water source used by Benromach for 120 years
We combine the grist and water in a semi-lauter mash tun. In this type of tun, special blades or ‘fins’ are rotated through the mash by a central spindle to help disrupt the mixture. A couple of turns of the fins is enough to produce our distinctively ‘cloudy’ wort. The cloudier the wort, the more cereal particles are suspended in the solution, ultimately leading to a complex and malty favour. In forming a cloudy wort, our distillers are able to create the mouth-coating malty biscuit notes that are characteristic to our core range of whisky. Overall, the mashing process takes around six hours per run, using 1.5 tonnes of malt and producing 7,550 litres of wort.
“We take extra time over the fermenting process, allowing the wash to linger for between 3 and 5 days in our traditional wooden washbacks to help develop the right quality of spirit.”
Keith Cruickshank
Benromach Distillery Manager
Our Fermentation
Once satisfied with the development of the wort, our distillers transfer the sugary liquid to the next stage of production for fermentation in one of our larch washbacks. As a further fond reminder of our long heritage, the larch wood used for our four original washbacks was recovered from the previous owners of the distillery, reclaimed and reassembled for use after Benromach’s reopening under Gordon and MacPhail ownership.
At Benromach, we prefer a longer fermentation for the wort, typically lasting approximately 67 to 120 hours, with longer runs on the weekends. Unusually for a whisky distiller, we use two types of yeast; brewer’s and distiller’s yeast. This combination of long fermentation and yeast types provides a more complete fermentation, with fewer bubbles than is usually expected, contributing to the development of more complex flavours.
