A copper still, just large enough to be carried on a man’s back, and a small assortment of mash-tubs, and some pitchers and pannikins, fully furnish such a rustic undertaking.
The first step is to convert your barley into malt; but this is to-day a needless delay and trouble, now that malt can be made entirely without let or hindrance. This was done by steeping the sacks of barley in running water for some forty-eight hours, and then storing the grain underground for a period, until it germinated. The malt thus made was then dried over a rude kiln fired with peats, whose smoke gave the characteristic smoky taste possessed by all this bothy-made stuff.
It was not necessary for the malt to be made on the site of the still, and it was, and is, generally carried to the spot, ready-made for the mash-tubs. The removal of the duty upon malt by Mr. Gladstone, in 1880, was one of that grossly overrated and really amateur statesman’s many errors. His career was full of false steps and incompetent bunglings, and the removal of the Malt Tax was but a small example among many Imperial tragedies on a grand scale of disaster. It put new and vigorous life into whisky-smuggling, as any expert could have foretold; for it was precisely the long operation of converting the barley into malt that formed the illegal distiller’s chief difficulty. The time taken, and the process of crushing or bruising the grains, offered some obstacles not easily overcome. The crushing, in particular, was a dangerous process when the possession of unlicensed malt was an offence; for that operation resulted in a very strong and unmistakable odour being given forth, so that no one who happened to be in the neighbourhood when the process was going on could be ignorant of it, while he retained his sense of smell.
Brought ready-made from the clachan to the bothy, the malt was emptied into the mash-tubs to ferment; the tubs placed in charge of a boy or girl, who stirs up the mess with a willow-wand or birch-twig; while the men themselves are out and about at work on their usual avocations.
Having sufficiently fermented, the next process was to place the malt in the still, over a brisk heat. From the still a crooked spout descends into a tub. This spout has to be constantly cooled by running water, to produce condensation of the vaporised alcohol. Thus we have a second, and even more important, necessity for a neighbouring stream, which often, in conjunction with the indispensable fire, serves the excisemen to locate these stills. If a bothy is so artfully concealed by rocks and turves that it escapes notice, even by the most vigilant eye, amid the rugged hill-sides, the smoke arising from the peat-fire will almost certainly betray it.
The crude spirit thus distilled into the tub is then emptied again into the still, which has been in the meanwhile cleared of the exhausted malt and cleansed, and subjected to a second distilling, over a milder fire, and with a small piece of soap dropped into the liquor to clarify it.
The question of maturing the whisky never enters into the minds of these rustic distillers, who drink it, generally, as soon as made. Very little is now made for sale; but when sold the profit is very large, a capital of twenty-three shillings bringing a return of nine or ten pounds.
But the typical secret whisky-distiller has no commercial instincts. It cannot fairly be said that he has a soul above them, for he is just a shiftless fellow, whose soul is not very apparent in manner or conversation, and whose only ambition is to procure a sufficiency of “whusky” for self and friends; and a “sufficiency” in his case means a great deal. He has not enough money to buy taxed whisky; and if he had, he would prefer to make his own, for he loves the peat-reek in it, and he thinks “jist naething at a’” of the “puir stuff” that comes from the great distilleries.
He is generally ostensibly by trade a hanger-on to the agricultural or sheep-farming industries, but between his spells of five days at the bothy (for it takes five days to the making of whisky) he is usually to be seen loafing about, aimlessly. Experienced folk can generally tell where such an one has been, and what he has been doing, after his periodical absences, for his eyelids are red with the peat-smoke and his clothes reek with it.
