Flowing Spirits at Glasgow’s Clydeside Distillery

If you know anything about the River Clyde, you know it’s a massive river used to transport goods for ages, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. And you don’t. Glasgow’s water supply is Loch Katrine in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park to the north. A massive engineering project by Morrison & Mason (yep, you guessed it) made this possible after Glasgow’s cholera outbreak in the 1840s. Glasgow’s some of the best drinking water in Europe, and Clydeside Distillery only boils the water to remove a bit of chlorine before using it in their whisky production.

After soaking in the distillery’s great location I entered to find a highly polished distillery experience with a café and a surprisingly excellent whisky shop. Clydeside has been running for less than a year at the time of writing, so they don’t have a single malt for sale yet. However, the Morrison family’s deep whisky connections have seeded the shop with remarkable drams from around Scotland. You can even buy Clydeside Distillery’s newmake.

I joined the standard tour while I waited for David to arrive and listened to a summary of Clydeside Distillery’s founding before being given free-rein to wander amongst an informative museum-like exhibit on Glasgow’s distilling past. This was extremely well done and paced, and I would have liked to spend an hour there just reading all the informational boards and artifact descriptions.

The tour continued in a small square room where the various processes of making whisky were explained on a series of giant flowcharts. As my guide walked through each step David arrived to squirrel me away from the 30 French sommelier students.

David led me into the tidy and cozy brewhouse where I got a look at an array of equipment manufactured and installed by prestigious Forsythes of Rothes. The brewing starts with tons of Concerto barley from Simpsons Malt. Porteus mills, now long out of production, are getting harder and harder to find (not to mention repair) so I wasn’t surprised to see an Alan Ruddock AR 2000 mill planted beneath the malt bin. It’s a small mill, but also sturdy and powerful. One thing hasn’t changed with milling, however, and that’s the use of the antiquated grist box. Add in some milled barley, shake it around, then take apart the box’s different levels and eyeball the ratios of grist, husk, and flour. That’s how you know you’ll get a good mash. Suffice to say it’s a bit of an artform.

Each mash in that beautiful copper-topped mash tun yields 7,500 liters of worts with a gravity around 1.060 that get pumped over to the steel washbacks. Fermentation lasts for 72 hours, and according to David it’s a rollicking period that threatens to send foam over the top. The topic of steel vs. wooden washbacks seems to be academic at best. Steel washbacks are far easier to clean and at Clydeside Distillery they’ve found increased yield on the back end when they follow a rigorous cleaning schedule. When fermentation is complete they have a supremely dry wash at around 8% ABV.

The stillhouse at Clydeside Distillery is one of the more beautiful offices I can image. The large space is bounded by floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides with two gorgeous Forsythes stills standing guard over the River Clyde. It’s here that David charges the wash still with 7,500 liters. After three to four hours they’ve collected their low wines, which come in at a hefty 30-31% ABV. The low wines and feints from a previous spirit distillation are mixed into a 5,000L charge that’s pumped into the spirit still.

The heart cut at Clydeside Distillery is a lofty 74-71% range, and at the end of a spirit distillation they’ve captured around 850L of 73.5% ABV spirit ready to be barreled and warehoused. When all the math shakes out that means Clydeside is getting 420L of spirit per ton of malt, which is breathtakingly high.

As you can see in the picture above, the spirit still has a boil ball to increase reflux within the distillation. This process leads to a lighter-bodied whisky inline with the style Clydeside aims to create: Lowlands style, light in character, and fruity. Perhaps outside of special batches, you won’t find peatiness in Clydeside’s whisky.

Clydeside Distillery filled their first casks just before Christmas 2017, and as there’s no warehousing on site they age elsewhere in Scotland’s Central Belt. Scotch whisky has to age for at least three years in Scottish warehouses, and a cask loses around 2.5% of its volume each year. This is the so-called “Angel’s Share,” and a fact of life you simply have to grin and bear.

After a good hour getting into the nuts and bolts of Clydeside’s distilling process David took me up to the VIP tasting room. This swanky room looks over the River Clyde with a number of fine drams upon the wall. We quickly found our way to the primary tasting room, a space smartly lofted over the café. We grabbed a table and David led me through a trio of blind tastings because, once again, Clydeside doesn’t have their own whisky yet.

I was being put to the test. There have more than a few times in my past, and I say this humbly, when I have called the whisky during a blind tasting. At least one of those was last year when Jeff and I went out with David and Stuart from Strathearn. The secret drams David presented to me now hailed from the lowlands, highlands, and Islay, and I managed to call the Islay as Bowmore, thereby retaining David’s illustrious respect (I was close on Glen Garioch).

Clydeside Distillery is a wonderful addition to Glasgow. It’s a beautiful, welcoming place that approaches the process of making whisky with dedication, humility, and honest intention. I’ve no doubt Clydeside will be an excellent addition to Scotland’s portfolio of Lowland whiskies when it’s ready. In the meantime, come visit, see the distillery in its youth, and taste the newmake. They might just make a new fan out of you.