The Silver Trail Fire Raises Questions Of Equipment And Training Quality By Richard Thomas While at Scotland’s Spirit of Speyside whisky festival earlier this month, I had the opportunity to visit Strathisla, billed as Scotland’s oldest distillery. It certainly looked the part, roughly the same size as some of America’s bigger craft distilleries and with an appearance comparable to a ...

The Kingsbarns Distillery and Visitor Centre, located in the East Neuk of Fife celebrated another momentous milestone as the copper pot whisky stills arrived on Thursday morning, October 2. Both copper pot stills travelled from Rothes, Speyside and have been hand-made by Forsyths of Rothes. The Wash Still, weighing three and a half tonnes and holding 7,500 litres and the ...

By Richard Thomas When it comes to making the copper stills so vital to the world whiskey trade, two names stand out in the minds of whiskey fans. One is Forsyths, the Scottish copperworks that is literally a global institution. The other is more of an American classic, since its products often remain in the United States, and that is ...

By Richard Thomas The American craft whiskey boom and the widening interest in home distilling has created a demand for stills and other distillation items on a scale that simply did not exist 15 years ago, leaving established copperworks shops such as the famed Vendome of Louisville, Kentucky with waiting lists stretching out more than a year. A crop of ...

By Richard Thomas One of the problems confronting early entrants into the American micro-distilling boom was finding someone to build a copper still to suit their needs. In just one example, the Barrel House Distillery in Lexington, Kentucky told me that when they opened in 2008, they had to go to the Hoga Company in Portugal to find what they ...