Whisky business
David Fitt, distillery manager, St George's Distillery
In March 2006, this place was a field! Nine months later, we were making whisky! When you think of it in those terms, it's just a stunning achievement. Once the idea of setting up a distillery was formed, everything happened incredibly quickly. [Founders] James and Andrew [Nelstrop] started talking about it on a Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, and by the same evening they had sketched out a plan of the entire building.
When I arrived last July, the production site was up and running, but the visitor centre and shop were still a building site. By August 17, we were open to the public! Because we can't sell whisky until it has matured for at least three years, we have to make money in the meantime, so we're actually selling other people's whiskies plus some liqueurs made using our spirit.
Steve [assistant distiller] and I also take people on tours of the production site. Obviously this is another source of revenue, but it's also about generating some excitement about our whisky.
There are always going to be people saying we're mad to be making whisky in England, but that's our big USP: we're producing the first English whisky for 100 years! From a technical point of view of course, there is no reason why you shouldn't make whisky in England; you can make a decent whisky anywhere, provided you have the right malt, water and yeast.
That said, it's a big gamble setting up a distillery from scratch - in England or anywhere else: imagine going to your bank manager and saying, 'can you give me a loan? By the way, I might be able to start paying you back in three to five years'.
It's a leap of faith. There are no guarantees that people will buy it, and I can't predict exactly what it's going to taste like in three or five years' time. But you can get a pretty good idea as soon as you've made the new-made spirit, and we're producing a very high quality product.
Quality not quantity
We've got an offer allowing people to pre-order our whisky for delivery in December 2009, and more than two thirds of the 349 cases we're going to put aside for this purpose have already been bought. But for me, that's not what's important. Good marketing is all very well, but if you want people to make a repeat purchase, you've got to make a good product.
We make two types of single malt: one peated - using 'smoked' malt - and one unpeated, or 'plain'. The plain malt is about 60% of our output and the peated one is around 40%.
When the malt arrives, we mill the grain, crack the corns open and expose the starch granules to make it into grist. Then we mix the grist with hot water, form a mash in a steeping vessel [mash tun] and allow it to sit for around an hour so the enzymes in the malt can break down the starch into shorter chain fermentable sugars like glucose and maltose.
The liquid is then pumped into the washbacks [fermentation vessels] and yeast is added to metabolise the sugars, creating alcohol, heat, flavour and aroma compounds and carbon dioxide. The type of yeast is really important; if you change the strain, you can impart subtle changes in flavour and aroma, even if everything else is consistent. We put in around 5,600l of liquid per vessel with a capacity of about 7,500l so we don't get spit and foam all over the floor!
After about four days, when all the sugar is gone and we've got as much alcohol as we can get, the liquid is transformed into a 'wash' of 7-8% abv.
To separate the alcohol from the water we heat it up in a pot still - a giant kettle containing a heating element through which steam circulates. Evaporated alcohol rises up to the upper part of the still and enters a condenser, where alcoholic vapours turn back into liquid.
But we don't just want pure alcohol [which boils at a lower temperature than water], so we boil the living daylights out of the wash, because we want some water as well. What we monitor is the alcoholic strength of the distillate, not the temperature.
The first distillate is about 23% abv ['low wines']. Then we redistill it in the second still to produce a distillate of around 73% abv. After that we add distilled water to reduce it to around 63.5% abv, the optimum strength before we transfer it to the barrels to mature.
We use first fill American white oak bourbon barrels. After they have been used once, they can't use them again as they have to use virgin casks, so they are sold on to companies like us.
We store our barrels at ambient temperature; we don't try and control the humidity. It's what will give our whisky its unique character and colour.
Some distillers add caramel for a more uniform colour at the bottling stage, but we don't want to do that. There are also no plans to chill filter the whisky [to make its natural oils solidify so that they can be filtered off, reducing cloudiness], because you can lose some flavour.
It's funny to think that I'm making something that people may not taste for 20 years. Everything I make is now sitting in storage maturing, so if we have a fire, we're stuffed!
We'll bottle a limited amount on site at three years, partly for financial reasons - we need to start making some money out of it - but also because even at three years, I believe it's going to be very high quality.
To start with, we're not going to have reams of stock to work with for blending and evening out flavour and aroma, and there are going to be natural variations in the product, but as long as we tell people that, I think that will also be part of our appeal.
Manual handling
My job is very hands on. Everything is done manually by me and Steve. If one of us is doing a tour, the other one is distilling. The only computer here is for admin and paperwork, not controlling production.
I'm obviously trying to work as efficiently as possible, but as we're not running at full capacity yet by any means, I do have some breathing space if something goes wrong.
For example, when our bore hole pump failed and we didn't have any water, I was able to delay production for a couple of days and make up the time at the weekend. Can you imagine doing that at Diageo? In a larger firm, the moment something goes wrong, the clock starts ticking and the pound signs start ringing up.
Coming here was a bit of a personal gamble for me. I was very happy at my last job, working at Greene King in Bury St Edmunds as a brewing shift manager, but when this came up, I just couldn't turn it down. I also have a very supportive wife! It was a big step as it involved moving in, literally, as we live on site. We just felt that I'd always regret it if I didn't give it a go.
I've had all kind of jobs before trying my hand at making whisky, from running wine bars in London to working in the civil service, and I've never really known what I wanted to do. But if there's a choice between something safe and something pretty daft, I'll always take the daft option!
INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON
FACTORY FACTS
Location: St George's Distillery (English Whisky Co), Harling Road, Roudham, Norfolk NR16 2QW.
Tel: 01953 717939
Employees: Two full time staff plus part time tour guides for weekends
Output: 400 barrels per year at present
Products: Single malt whisky.
Two types: one is peated - which represents about 40% of output, and the other is plain, which represents the remaining 60% of output
PERSONAL
Name: David Fitt
Age: 42
Career highlights: "Being told by a senior manager who I respected very much in a previous job that I would be welcome to return at any time if things didn't work out after I had left. I guess that was a good measure of how I had performed for him over the years."
Domestic: Married to Sarah with a daughter Imogen and another one on the way!
Outside work: "I'm an avid music fan with an extremely eclectic iPod; I also like spending quality time with my wife and daughter."
