How Lagg makes its spirit
Lagg was to be fully peated from the start, and uses malt peated to 50ppm with peat from the Highlands.1,3,9 Omand calls Lagg's peated whisky much gentler than Islay's, and has said it chose peat because the island's illicit distilling used peat kilns.1,3,9 Crisp Malt supplies its malt.1,9 About 94% of its barley comes from the east coast of mainland Scotland, and for a few weeks a year it uses barley grown on Arran.1,9 Its water comes from a borehole near the distillery.1,10 Its raked mash sends cloudy wort, the sugary water from the mash, to fermentation, which the distillery says puts more focus on nutty, earthy characters.5,9 It says its cloudy wash gives the spirit a heavier, grassier, and earthier flavour.5,9 It has four washbacks, the tanks where the wort ferments, all made of Douglas fir.1,9,10 Fermentation with M strain distillers yeast takes about 55-60 hours.9 The spirit is distilled twice.9 It has one wash still and one spirit still.2,5,9 The wash still is shaped like a bulbous onion and the spirit still like a lamp glass.1,9 Both are short and fat, with a downward sloping lyne arm, the pipe from the still head to the condenser.1,9 Steam heats the stills, and shell and tube condensers turn the vapour back into spirit.1,9 Whiskypedia gives its capacity as 0.75 million litres of alcohol a year, and Wikipedia gives about 500,000.1,2
