Brewing that's worth the wait

Distance is clearly no object in the brewing industry.

The impressive brewing kit found at Harviestoun, Scotland, started life as a pilot plant in St Austell in deepest Cornwall — but these days it's producing 10,000 barrels a year in Alva, near Alloa.

Harviestoun is another exhilarating example of the success of cask beer-producers. The brewery began with a five-barrel plant in a barn in Dollar in 1985, but has moved to a custom-built site on an industrial estate. That might conjure up images of ramshackle buildings surrounded by skips, but Alva has attractive, white-washed offices and warehouses, overlooked by the densely-wooded Ochil hills.

The Scottish pub scene is different to England's; there's little official tied trade. In the American and French style, big brewers use loans and discounts to dominate beer supply. While there are now dozens of cask brewers in Scotland, many of them look to England to sell the bulk of their products.

This is true of Harviestoun. MD Chris Miller and his team deliver beer directly, within a 50-mile radius, but most of their cask beer production — split 50:50 between cask and bottle — goes over the border. The brewery is best known for its Bitter & Twisted golden ale and Schiehallion cask lager, both of which have won Champion Beer of Britain awards, with B&T named overall champion beer in 2003. This gave both brand and company great presence throughout the UK.

Head brewer Stuart Cail, who worked for Vaux, Daleside and Butcombe before moving to Scotland, showed me round his spacious brewhouse — which has plenty of room for expansion. A new fermenting vessel is on order to keep up with increasing demand. The brewery was for some years a subsidiary of Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh, but when "Caley" became part of Scottish & Newcastle, and then Heineken, Harviestoun opted to return to independent status, swapping the clog for the claymore.

The most fascinating beer at Harviestoun is Ola Dubh. Gaelic for "Black Oil", this is a stronger version of the brewery's acclaimed porter-style beer Old Engine Oil, which has a rich chocolate, coffee and burnt-fruit character balanced by powerful hop notes. Encouraged by the success of Edinburgh's Innis & Gunn, whose beer is matured in American oak casks from the bourbon industry, Miller and Cail approached the managers of Orkney's Highland Park distillery about using whisky casks to mature Ola Dubh.

They wanted a beer that was distinctly different to that of Innis & Gunn. This led them to choose Highland Park because of its reputation as one of the finest producers of single-malt Scotch whisky, and because it uses not bourbon casks, but ones obtained from the Spanish sherry industry — in this case, Oloroso, a rich, dark sherry that infuses the wood with superb fruity notes.

Breathtaking​

Following the brewery tour, Cail and I made the short plane-hop to Orkney, where we toured Highland Park. The distillery is breathtaking. Founded in 1798, it's based in a series of stone buildings, including a maltings where Optic barley is turned to malt before being dried and gently roasted in a peat and coke-fired kiln. Brewing and distilling are remarkably similar; the malt goes on to be mixed in a mash tun with pure, hot water, producing a sweet extract called wort.

The major difference between the brewing and distilling processes is that no hops are used in whisky production. The wort is transferred to wooden fermenting vessels called "wash-backs", where yeast is added. Fermentation lasts for 100 hours and the liquid — strictly speaking, ale without hops — goes to the still room.

The stills are the high point of the tour — four tall, burnished copper vessels in a cool, tiled room where the beer is heated, condensed and distilled twice, with only the finest spirit — the middle cut — used for whisky. The liquid created, as pale as gin or vodka, is then run into casks that cost between £400 and £600 each, four times the price of bourbon casks. These are stored three-deep across 19 warehouses, and left to ripen whilst picking up flavour and colour from the sherry-impregnated wood.

Highland Park produces 12, 18, 25, 30 and 40-year-old versions known as "expressions". It was a joy and a revelation to sample them all, and to note how age developed the citrus, honey, spice, peat, vanilla and smoke character of the whiskies.

These characteristics are also evident in Ola Dubh's five 8% expressions, where the sherry/fruit, vanilla/oak nature of the wood infuses and blends with the roasted grain, burnt-fruit, chocolate and bitter hops of the beer.

Sampling both beer and whisky took me on a journey into Scotland's Highland and island past, where out of the mists of history came a drink called uisge beatha — or "the water of life" — that now beguiles us as both malt whisky and wood-matured beer. Sláinte!