Your true Highlander will not relinquish his “mountain-dew” without a struggle. His forefathers made as much of it as they liked, out of inexpensive materials, and drank it fresh and raw. No one bought whisky; and a whole clachan would be roaring drunk for a week without a coin having changed hands. Naturally, the descendants of these men—“it wass the fine time they had, whateffer”—dislike the notion of buying their whisky from the grocer and drinking stuff made in up-to-date distilleries. They prefer the heady stuff of the old brae-side pot-still, with a rasp on it like sulphuric acid and a consequent feeling as though one had swallowed lighted petroleum: stuff with a headache for the Southerner in every drop, not like the tamed and subdued creature that whisky-merchants assure their customers has not got a headache in a hogshead.
The time-honoured brae-side manner of brewing whisky is not very abstruse. First find your lonely situation, the lonelier and the more difficult of access, obviously the better. If it is at once lonely and difficult of approach, and at the same time commands good views of such approaches as there are, by so much it is the better. But one very cardinal fact must not be forgotten: the site of the proposed still and its sheltering shieling, or bothy, must have a water-supply, either from a mountain-stream naturally passing, or by an artfully constructed rude system of pipes.
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.