How whisky is made: your simple step-by-step guide

From grain to glass, the whole magical journey

Hello, it’s Gordon Thomson from Whisky Rocks. Thanks for reading this guide for whisky virgins and anyone wanting to learn more about the spirit, written by me and the Barley magazine team.

I’m writing two stories a week, with a focus on a different slice of whisky knowledge every time.

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Making whisky is simple — and devilishly complicated. It has just three ingredients – grain, water and yeast, with the mixture being placed in different tanks and filters before being run through stills and aged in oak barrels and filled into bottles. Every single step and every single ingredient plays a key role in creating whisky’s extraordinary range of aromas, flavours and consistencies.

The main raw material for Scotch whisky is barley, Scotland’s most abundant cereal. Other types of cereals such as rye, corn and wheat can also be used, especially for blended and bourbon whiskey. Single malt whisky must be made using barley. For the purposes of this piece we’ll be sticking with Scotland’s undisputed king of the grains.

All of Scotland’s 130 odd distilleries do their own thing, have their own specifications and trade secrets honed over centuries. However, these are the main stages all of them need to follow to produce Scotch whisky.

Malting

Malting is the traditional process used to make barley germinate (sprout), essential for allowing it to release its starch reserves to be converted into fermented sugars. Originally, every distillery had their own floor maltings and undertook this stage laboriously by hand. Best quality barley would be first steeped in water and then spread out on malting floors to germinate. It was turned regularly to prevent the build up of heat. Traditionally, this was done by tossing the barley into the air with wooden shovels in a malt barn adjacent to the kiln.

In reality, since the 1970s, when demand for scotch whisky rocketed, virtually all distilleries outsource their malting to commercial companies that use automated vessels to do the hard work and can also peat the barley to various levels, if this has been requested by the distillery. A few distilleries - Balvenie on Speyside, Bowmore and Kilchoman on Islay - still do their malting in-house, but this accounts for a small percentage of their overall quota.