Free Raw Spirit by Iain Banks Page A
Authors: Iain Banks
and god-knows-what else.
And I do have one, I just don’t use it. It’s a Palm Tungsten T which I was going to use to write this book on as Rog, Brad and I trundled our way through the forest and across the taiga on our way to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian. I had thought of taking my laptop but I’d heard things get nicked a lot on the train so I preferred something I could carry on me at all times.
I’d coveted the full-size but collapsible keyboard that connects to these things since I’d seen fellow skiffy writer Charles Stross using one in an Edinburgh pub a couple of years ago; in fact I nearly bought one of the keyboards just on aesthetic principle, to own as an object, because they are simply so damn neat, even though I didn’t particularly want one of the computers themselves at the time. The keyboards fold down to a size barely any larger than the hand-held itself, and then unfold once and then twice, with bits gliding and snicking as a little sprung-loaded cradle clips up to support the tiny computer. Beautiful. Nowadays, as well as these fold-outs, you can buy keyboards made from flexible plastics which you can roll up, but even if they’re lighter and better, it’s the jewellery-like intricacy of the fold-out that intrigues me.
Anyway, I have one of these things but I haven’t yet started carrying it around; I have a bad habit of buying glitzy bits of new technology in a fit of retail feeding-frenzy excitement and then losing interest in it for subsequent months or even years, by which time it’s usually obsolete.
Later Rog borrows the hand-held/folding keyboard set-up to write stuff while he does the Trans-Siberian all by himself (Brad, too, has had to drop out).
We’re shown round Bruichladdich by David Barr, the Bottlings Operations Manager, a pleasant guy with various tattoos on his arms from his time in the merchant marine. They’re proud of their bottling plant at Bruichladdich. It’s the only one on the island – the other distilleries ship their malts to the mainland to be bottled – and uses local water to bring the whisky to the right strength. Before all that, of course, it’s the mash-tun/washback/still house standard tour with a bit of the history of the place thrown in.
Now, obviously I’m not going to detail in this book all the different tours round all the different distilleries, because that would be boring. You probably do not really need to know, for example, that Bruichladdich currently produces 300,000 bottles per year, or that the temperature of the second of the three waters introduced into the mash tun is 79 to 80 degrees centigrade, or that the distillery dog is called Tiny, all of which – along with much, much more – I duly noted down on my tour.
I’ve given a rough guide to whisky-making above, and it doesn’t vary much between distilleries. Where it does and I think it’s worthy of note, I’ll let you know; otherwise, just make the relevant assumptions. The stuff I’m looking for as I make these journeys is the interesting bits and pieces that always crop up during every tour, especially if you ask questions and keep your eyes open and senses engaged; the grace notes in a familiar theme.
What I find intriguing is stuff like the fact that now they’ve got their new bottling plant, next on the list of improvements at Bruichladdich is a Whisky Academy they intend to open in the summer in an old de-bonded warehouse, to teach people about whisky in depth, or the fact that a family of seven dolphins seem to have adopted the place, showing up at the same time each year in the bay across the road from the distillery, or that it has the tallest stills on the island (taller stills give the vapours inside a harder job getting out to the bit where they’ll be condensed and so tend to produce lighter spirits), or that what they call their computer in the mash room is a blackboard … and yet they have webcams set up at various sites throughout the distillery
And I do have one, I just don’t use it. It’s a Palm Tungsten T which I was going to use to write this book on as Rog, Brad and I trundled our way through the forest and across the taiga on our way to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian. I had thought of taking my laptop but I’d heard things get nicked a lot on the train so I preferred something I could carry on me at all times.
I’d coveted the full-size but collapsible keyboard that connects to these things since I’d seen fellow skiffy writer Charles Stross using one in an Edinburgh pub a couple of years ago; in fact I nearly bought one of the keyboards just on aesthetic principle, to own as an object, because they are simply so damn neat, even though I didn’t particularly want one of the computers themselves at the time. The keyboards fold down to a size barely any larger than the hand-held itself, and then unfold once and then twice, with bits gliding and snicking as a little sprung-loaded cradle clips up to support the tiny computer. Beautiful. Nowadays, as well as these fold-outs, you can buy keyboards made from flexible plastics which you can roll up, but even if they’re lighter and better, it’s the jewellery-like intricacy of the fold-out that intrigues me.
Anyway, I have one of these things but I haven’t yet started carrying it around; I have a bad habit of buying glitzy bits of new technology in a fit of retail feeding-frenzy excitement and then losing interest in it for subsequent months or even years, by which time it’s usually obsolete.
Later Rog borrows the hand-held/folding keyboard set-up to write stuff while he does the Trans-Siberian all by himself (Brad, too, has had to drop out).
We’re shown round Bruichladdich by David Barr, the Bottlings Operations Manager, a pleasant guy with various tattoos on his arms from his time in the merchant marine. They’re proud of their bottling plant at Bruichladdich. It’s the only one on the island – the other distilleries ship their malts to the mainland to be bottled – and uses local water to bring the whisky to the right strength. Before all that, of course, it’s the mash-tun/washback/still house standard tour with a bit of the history of the place thrown in.
Now, obviously I’m not going to detail in this book all the different tours round all the different distilleries, because that would be boring. You probably do not really need to know, for example, that Bruichladdich currently produces 300,000 bottles per year, or that the temperature of the second of the three waters introduced into the mash tun is 79 to 80 degrees centigrade, or that the distillery dog is called Tiny, all of which – along with much, much more – I duly noted down on my tour.
I’ve given a rough guide to whisky-making above, and it doesn’t vary much between distilleries. Where it does and I think it’s worthy of note, I’ll let you know; otherwise, just make the relevant assumptions. The stuff I’m looking for as I make these journeys is the interesting bits and pieces that always crop up during every tour, especially if you ask questions and keep your eyes open and senses engaged; the grace notes in a familiar theme.
What I find intriguing is stuff like the fact that now they’ve got their new bottling plant, next on the list of improvements at Bruichladdich is a Whisky Academy they intend to open in the summer in an old de-bonded warehouse, to teach people about whisky in depth, or the fact that a family of seven dolphins seem to have adopted the place, showing up at the same time each year in the bay across the road from the distillery, or that it has the tallest stills on the island (taller stills give the vapours inside a harder job getting out to the bit where they’ll be condensed and so tend to produce lighter spirits), or that what they call their computer in the mash room is a blackboard … and yet they have webcams set up at various sites throughout the distillery