Built for blending
The distillery went into a building that had housed a plant making glucose syrup for the confectionery industry until 2003.1
Peated
Ailsa Bay, named after a conical island in the Firth of Clyde, is a malt distillery William Grant & Sons built in 2007 within its Girvan grain complex.1,2,3 It mainly makes unpeated spirit for Grant's blended whiskies.3,4 It is not the first malt distillery there: Ladyburn made malt whisky for blending on the same site from 1966 and has since been demolished.1,2,5
The distillery went into a building that had housed a plant making glucose syrup for the confectionery industry until 2003.1
In 2010 it had eight stills, modelled on Balvenie's; by 2016 it had 16, with wash and spirit stills of the same style and size.1,8 The stills are onion-shaped with a boil ball.2 Steam heats them, and shell and tube condensers turn the vapour back into spirit.2,8,9 Four condensers are stainless steel; Dave Broom wrote that for the peated spirit, these add meatier elements and copper ones a fruitier note.2,8,9 In 2010 one wash still got a condenser made of a metal alloy rather than copper, intended to allow a sulphur-rich spirit.1 Brian Kinsman also planned to fit a stainless steel condenser on a spirit still for more trials.1
Water comes from Penwhapple Reservoir, and its malt comes from various suppliers.2 It has 24 washbacks, the tanks where the wash ferments, made of stainless steel.2 Fermentation, which turns sugary water from the mash into a beer called wash, lasts 60 hours.2 In 2010 some 95 per cent of its spirit was peated to less than 2ppm, with up to five per cent lightly (5-8ppm) or heavily (over 15ppm) peated.1,8 Its peated run has taken two weeks a year: one week lightly peated and one week heavily peated.1,8 It makes four styles of new spirit: estery, nutty, fruity and heavily peated.2,9 It can make 12 million litres of alcohol a year.2
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