The final steps before shipping the finished whisky to be sold are blending and bottling. In order to maintain control of quality throughout the entire process and to avoid unnecessary transport, our ambition is that the bulk of our production should be bottled at the distillery.

The process commences with us selecting the casks that make up the product to be bottled. Often, the contents of several different kinds of cask are combined for a recipe. The casks are emptied and blended in huge stainless steel tanks. The spirit is then filtered and analysed in different ways, for instance to ascertain the alcohol content. Even if we mature our whisky at a lower strength than other distilleries, it still often needs to be diluted further to lower the alcohol content even more.

The finished whisky is then pumped to the bottling machine. We have a semi-automated setup, which means that some functions are entirely automated, while other functions are handled by the person monitoring the machine. The bottles are filled, the cap is screwed on, the bottles are labelled front and back, and a plastic seal is applied over the bottleneck and cap to show that the bottle is unopened. Finally, the bottles are packed in boxes for wholesale and stacked on a pallet, to be transported to storage and sales points.