A visit to Fary Lochan Distillery

In May a group of friends and I visited the wee danish Distillery Fary Lochan

It's a very small distillery located in a small danish village called Farre. That's in central Jutland, not far from Billund (Legoland). http://www.farylochan.dk

The small house is for storage and the slightly bigger one is the distillery with a small warehouse in the cellar

Here's the wash-still, mashtun and washback with distillery owner Jens-Erik Jørgensen.

The Spirit Still

Here's a bottle from a test run a few years ago. These stills made its first spirit on 31.st December 2009

Here's the first 7 casks. Now here I experienced something I found very unusual. He was supposed to use 50liter casks but due to failed deliveries he had to start fill "normal" 200liter barrels. Once the quartercasks is delivered the plan is to empty some of the barrels into the quartercasks, but also leave some barrels for some longer time maturation. Now, as the batch size is smaller than 200liters (around 60-70liters) the barrels are filled step by step. I think most of these barrels are partly filled. He was eager to fill some up as the official date of filling a cask would be when the last portion goes in. But nosing two of these casks revealed the most intense butterscotch-fudge-toffee nose I ever experienced. Havent' really found the reason for this. The whisky inside was between 0-4½ months old and I guess the casks were filled to 50-75% by now

Here's another interesting thing. Jens-Erik Jørgensen told me, that when he received the casks there would be quite a lot of this stuff inside. This is from one cask just. It looks like manufactured charred chipped wood. It wasn't just something that had fallen of the inside of the cask. His theory was that it was a little gift that could help the spirit mature. (he removed it as you can see). Well I am not sure about that -the wood chips was pretty much very neutral in the smell and my theory is that it has something to do with transport/storage of casks

It was a very pleasant visit, with a nice guided tour by Jens-Erik, and also my chance to taste my first danish newmake, which semi-light compared to other newmakes I tried and I think this whisky will age well, but from the nose it seemed like it did unusually remarkable within a few months. Casks seemed to be good ex-bourbon casks

This is actually an almost repeat of a post I did on a whiskywhiskywhisky here : http://www.whiskywhiskywhisky.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=243&t=3285&p=35128&hilit=fary+lochan#p35128