The beating heart of any distillery is not the stills, or washbacks, or mashtun or the casking store. It is the distillery boiler, without which the distillery grinds to a halt. Hot water and steam are needed throughout the production process and, if the boiler packs up, so does the distillery.
Most boilers in Scotch distilleries come from Cochran, of Annan in Dumfries-shire, although some come from Byworth, based in Keighley, Yorkshire.
Should a boiler fail, the distillery manager has few choices. If it’s a straightforward repair, get the parts and fix it, or call in the boiler engineers (the boiler firms and suppliers tend to have engineers stationed in all main distilling areas). However, if the repairs—for whatever reason—look like taking a long time, he has a third option: bring in a portable boiler.
I knew they existed but had never seen one in action until a few weeks ago at Ben Nevis distillery at Fort William. It was housed in a vast artic semi-trailer sitting outside the main distillery building. It was roaring away, belching steam through the roof and from a valve near the back axle. Several cables and hosepipes fed into it (suppling, I assumed, water, fuel oil and electricity) while a six-inch diameter tube, scalding hot to the touch, fed steam into the stills and elsewhere.
And to make sure everyone knew its role in life, every few minutes a jet of seething hot water gushed out of the semi-trailer onto the tarmac. It wasn’t a picture-postcard scene, but its value could be easily appreciated. Especially after I had seen another distillery sitting cold and inactive after it, too, suffered a boiler breakdown and couldn’t get the parts quickly enough.
So, who supplies portable boilers? The one at Ben Nevis came from Byworth, who operate a fleet of them, to provide either hot water or steam, and one or two other firms supply them, too.
In a way, getting a mobile boiler to an idled distillery is the easy part. It then has be “plumbed in” to the distillery’s existing hot water and steam pipework and also to the distillery’s main water supply, to a fuel line and heavy duty electrics. That is a really demanding operation.
