Spirits and Distilleries
The term alcohol originated about four hundred years ago as the Arabic term for a blue cosmetic eye shadow (antimony sulphide), the term was later used to refer to any metal powder but by about the middle of the eighteenth century the term had come to mean distilled spirit of wine, probably due to the Alchemists experiments. The present sense of the word originated in about 1850, twenty years after the building of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Alcoholic drinks are available in three common forms; beer, spirits and wine, cider is a much smaller industry.
The importance of alcoholic drinks in British culture has long been recognised, the standard three basic necessities recognised by Governments were for many years food, drink and tobacco.
The distilleries producing spirits include buildings of distinctive character and they have made considerable use of railway transportation over the years.
The spirits industry uses grain to produce grain alcohol, properly called ethyl alcohol, distilled with various vegetable products to give it a distinctive flavour. In Britain the two main spirits were gin and whisky (discussed in more detail below). The English had a taste for gin, the Scots and Irish favoured whiskey and production was concentrated in those countries.
Up to the mid 18th century the British imported a lot of wine and brandy from France, but as relations deteriorated into warfare in the later 18th century many people switched to drinking Port (wine mixed with brandy) imported from Portugal.
The strength of spirits is measured for customs and excise purposes by their 'proof', which is a measure of the proportion of alcohol. It was only in 1813 that a measuring device was approved for testing the proof, consisting of a float with a tall stem graduated in degrees proof. Any spirit of 100 degrees proof or higher can be poured onto gunpowder and set alight, when the alcohol has burned away the residue of the liquid will not prevent the gunpowder lighting, 100% proof equates to about 49% by volume alcohol. One important application of this idea was British 'Navy Rum'. Ian XXXXXX advised that The British 'Navy Rum' was above proof because on the ships it was stored in the magazine with the gun powder. Occasionally a cask of rum would leak and the rum would soak into the gunpowder, however it was so strong that the rum tainted gunpowder would still ignite. The daily rum ration was considerable, nearly a pint per man. Rum is made commercially from molasses by converting the sugars to alcohol. The basic end product is a dark syrupy liquid which when watered down is sold as dark rum. White rum or Baccardi is made by further refining the stuff to remove the remains of the molasses. The British have produced some rum but a lot was imported from the West Indies.
Gin was for many years cheaper than beer, the 1830 Beerhouses Act was the first move to tax spirits and encourage people to drink the less damaging beers and ales. With the coming of the railways the Gilbey familily saw its coaching business failing and the two brothers went into the wine and spirits trade, building up the company and introducing their well known brand of gin. One of the brothers, Walter, was later knighted and made a significant contribution to the breeding of shire horses.
Despite various tax hikes on spirits by the early 1920's the country was going through about seventeen and a half million gallons of various spirits a year. The Irish went through prodigious quantities of the stuff, when the south of Ireland became independent in 1922 (taking with it the southern Irish share of the statistics) the British national consumption dropped by about half. Only in the mid 1970's did the UK's consumption again reach that seventeen and a half million gallon figure.
Incidentally the 'proof' of a spirit is twice the quantity of ethyl alcohol by volume, so sixty degrees proof means it's thirty percent by volume ethyl alcohol. I am not sure why this is.
Gin
Gin is made using rye and barley mixed with juniper berries, the process is essentially similar to beer making except that once the 'beer' is made it is put through a still to boil off and recover the alcohol, producing a very strong drink or 'spirit'. The name comes from the French 'genever', which means juniper, developed in France it found favour in Holland (hence the term 'Dutch courage') and by the 17th century the British were making their own. There were then a series of wars with the French, so wine and brandy fell from favour, replaced by port and gin.
Gin consumption boomed in the mid eighteenth century, from annual sales of about five million gallons in 1734 it rose to over seven million gallons by 1742. In 1736 the government tried to regulate things by introducing a fifty pound licence fee for gin making and a one pound per gallon tax on the spirit, but the whole country rioted and law and order broke down so the act was repealed. Most gin was sold through small specialised shops and a common sign seen outside such gin shops read; 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pence, straw (ie a bed for the night) for three pence'. In a single week in 1830 fourteen of the largest gin shops in London served 150,000 men, 100,000 women and 18,000 children with bottles. The consequences for society were rather severe, William Hogarth made a now famous engraving entitled 'Gin Lane' in the mid 18th century showing just how bad he though things had become.
In the 19th century however the laws were repeatedly changed (notably the 1830 Beerhouses Act and its many subsequent ammendments) and beer was becomming the preferred drink. Gin then became fashionable amongst the well to do ladies. Each brewer had their own recipe, some added liquorice, others included caraway and coriander seeds, and there were many other ingredients used in British gin. The equipment used was a simple still, by the mid 19th century the breweries were using continuously running and more efficient 'patent stills' but there were no particularly distinctive buidings associated with gin. As I understand it most gin was made in a building adjoining a brewery, so in the present context there is little value in depicting gin production.
Whiskey
Whiskey is of course the national drink of Scotland and it is slightly unusual in that it is stored in wooden sherry casks for several years before being bottled and sold. This causes several chemical reactions in the liquid and also taints it slightly with the residue of the sherry and the oils in the oak casks, giving a range of specific flavours. The casks used are purchased from Portugal and Spain, when the Japanese decided to break into the whiskey market they got their barrels from South Africa, however as the sherry there tastes different the Japanese Suntory whiskey also tasted different and the Scottish and Irish whiskey remained the most popular world-wide. I am informed that some Scottish distilleries now use oak casks from the American Bourbon whiskey, which is always matured in new casks and also rum and port casks. All these produce variations in the final flavour of the whiskey. There are several areas in Scotland where whiskey is distilled, the map below shows areas where I know there are distilleries, there may well be others.
Fig ___ Scottish distilleries
The whisky making process is essentially similar to that used for beer, at least in the early stages. For a malt whiskey they make malt from barley, the grain is seeped in water and spread on a malting floor to germinate for a couple of week (being turned over or 'ploughed' at intervals). This allows the natural processes in the grain to turn a lot of the starch into sugars, the malted grain is then heated in a kiln to stop the process when the maximum amount of sugar is present in the malt. To roast the malt they use peat, and the smell of the burning peat alters the flavour of the whisky. The malted barley is then ground and mixed with hot water in a 'mash tun' where the water extracts the sugar, the resulting sugary liquid is called wort (again the same as for beer making) and the residual 'spent grain' is dried and sold as cattle food. The wort is then transferred to a fermenting vat made of vertical wooden planks bound with iron or steel hoops where they add yeast. Over a couple of days the yeast converts the sugar into alcohol, in whisky making the resulting liquid is called 'wash' and it is similar in taste to beer at the same stage of production.
From then on however the process is rather different from brewing beer, the wash is placed into a 'still' (a copper container with a tapering top that bends over into a 'swan neck') and heated. The alcohol boils off, condenses in the swan neck and is collected. For malt whisky this process is then repeated a second time. There is a fair bit of skill required to judge the temperature and the quality of the liquid emerging from the condenser, the early run off is too strong and contains undesirable contaminants, the middle part of the run is the desired liquor but the later part is too weak to be used. The early and later parts are fed back into the system..
The whiskey then goes into second hand oak barrels to mature, which can take several years (it cannot legally be called whiskey unless it has been in the barrels for at least three years). Some of the spirit evaporates during this maturation period, for a 12 year old malt that can be as much as twenty percent. The barrels are stored on racks in a 'bonded store', which is securely locked and controlled by Customs and Excise. The barrels are then shipped out to the bottling plants (closer to the market), up to the 1960s the railways appear to have carried the barrels in unsheeted standard open wagons.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century the cottage industry of the 'pot still' was being supplanted by more modern 'patent still'. Pot stills are simply iron pots suspended over a fire in which the malted barley is boiled, washed and fermented to make a 'wort', this is the basis of the single malt whisky. Modern pot stills, used for making the malt whisky, are made of copper. The patent still uses a sealed pressure vessel and can be used to distil alcohols from a range of cereals, the process is fully automated these days. The stuff from a patent still is called 'grain or neutral spirits', these lack the peat smoke flavour of the kiln dried barley used in pot stills but output is increased. By mixing the 'neutral spirits' from the patent still with the 'malt spirits' from the pot still 'blended' scotch whisky was produced. The mix can contain a blend of up to 40 different batches of malt and grain whiskey.
One of the first (possibly the very first) 2mm scale layout was the Inversnecky and Drambuie built in the late 1940s and early 1950s by a Mr R.W.G. Bryant, back then he had to make everything from scratch, including the locomotives (an 0-6-0 tank and a 4-4-0 tender engine). He based his model on a Highland Railway line and included a distillery (photographs are available on the 2mm Scale Association website at http://www.2mm.org.uk). For information on the Speyside line there is a rather good, and inexpensive, book called The Speyside Line, available from the Great North Of Scotland Railway Association (GNSRA) who's website is at: http://www.gnsra.org.uk
If you want to represent a distillery there is a limit to how small this can be, it has to include a full maltings and the bonded store sheds as well as the distillery itself. The Irish industry falls outside the remit of this study, the Scottish buildings were either local stone or white rendered. The sketch below shows a suggested model for a layout, including the essential elements with details taken from several prototypes, but somewhat compressed. There is a distinctive pyramid roofed building associated with distilleries, this is the kiln where the malt is dried, the sketch shows the most common but less easily modelled roof style with distinct shoulders and neck, some distilleries have a straight four sided type (similar to those on a maltings). The remainder of the buildings are all standard 'industrial' structures.
Fig ___ Typical distillery
The structure as drawn would be some 24 inches (60cm) long. This sketch assumes the grain is delivered in sacks, which it generally was until the post war era I believe. There would also be rakes of wagons loaded with barrels, for which the Peco 'barrel load' insert in a 5 plank wagon would serve (they were transported on end, even when filled). The 2mm scale layout mentioned above used a kick-back siding arrangement, which in this case does save some space, adding a curve to the tracks also helps give it a more rural feel. If you wish to run bulk grain hopper wagons you need to add somewhere for these to be unloaded, the suggestion shown below is a simple wooden tower on the front of the grain shed extending over the track. Note that this building would, on the prototype, be rather larger, if you have additional space to play with extend this building. In front of the entire row of buildings, with the exception of the grain shed, is a platform area (shown black on the sketch below), on which there would typically be some barrels. Traffic would be vans (and possibly grain hoppers) to the left with open wagons for the barrels and some van traffic to the kick-back siding on the right.
Fig ___ Suggested track plan
As far as I am aware the distilleries received their grain in sacks, however in Scotland there were several fleets of small (ten or nine foot wheelbase) grain hopper wagons. Two are preserved at the Bo'ness and Kinniel Steam Railway and one of these forms the basis for a Parkside Dundas (formerly Westykits) 'OO' kit. These carried the grain from the ports to the local flour mills, the example shown was operated by a company based in Leith, I do not know if they were used to supply any of the distilleries.
Fig ___ Scottish grain hopper
A lot of distilleries were close by a railway but the Beeching closures of the mid 1960s left many to rely on road transport. The grain would thereafter be delivered in sacks or bulk to the nearest goods yard and taken from there to the distillery by lorry.
Distillers Ltd
Distillers Ltd were the core of the Scottish whiskey industry from the later 19th century until the tail end of the 20th. Oddly enough Distillers never put its name on a bottle of whiskey.
The change from pot stills to the more industrial patent still in the later 19th century happened when consumption was rising and there was little organisation or cooperation within the industry. In 1877 six of the companies using the new patent distillers joined to form Distillers Company Ltd. Consumption peaked in 1900, the previous ten years had seen the number of stills double but when the crash came many firms found themselves with unsaleable scotch and no business. Distillers had moved cautiously during this time and were able to buy up and close down many of the stills, converting others to production of industrial alcohol and yeast.
The first world war further contracted the industry and enabled Distillers to gain control of virtually all the stills in Britain. As they controlled almost all of the 'grain spirit' the Distillers Company was viewed with alarm by the blenders, notably Dewars, John Walker & Son and Buchanan but after thirty years or so trying to compete they were all taken over in 1925.
At this time Distillers owned only three of the nearly one hundred remaining pot stills but the depression in the early 1930's allowed them to buy up many of the smaller companies and by 1934 they dominated the scotch whiskey trade, controlling 90% of the world market.
Distillers were by this time a world wide organisation, with the end of prohibition in America sales from their Canadian partner Distillers Corporation - Seagrams Limited boomed but this lead to disagreements and a parting of the ways. The Canadians continued using Distillers in their company name until 1979 when the name changed to Segram Corporation.
Distillers were a diversified company and one of their interests was in chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In the late 1950's a German company produced a new sedative which was 'suicide proof', this looked like a winner and Distillers bought the rights for the UK market. The drug was Thalidomide and the subsequent litigation from parents who's children had been born deformed began the final financial troubles of Distillers.
The Distillers Company was badly affected by this but they were still one of the largest and most influential commercial organisations in Britain, controlling 80% of domestic whisky and 75% of exported whisky sales and including Gordons vodka and gin and another 60 or so brands. In 1986 however, having run into ever deeper difficulties, the Distillers business was purchased by Guinness PLC and absorbed. The joint operation is today called Diago.
There was a bit of a fuss at the time, one of the senior Guinness people ended up in jaol, however he was diagnosed as having a 'terminal illness' . The government decided he should be released, whereupon he miraculously recovered from the illness and was able to enjoy his convalescence with a considerable fortune in the bank.
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