A Wee Dram

Highlands Single Malt

This was a Halloween prompt: With no word limit, tell a story that includes at least three of these elements: Witchcraft, face paint, candy corn, ducks, a candle, a mirror, chanting, dread. 

This is a simple imaginary tale of a single malt distillery, all of it based on fact and tradition. For self-challenge, I've stuck to the 500 words. Cheers...

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At the side of a wee rill running down through a glen near the base of Ben Nevis sits a small malt distillery. Small is the defining thing here. And simple. The water comes down the rill a short distance from a crack in the rocks on the brae behind the scattering of stone buildings that house a single malting floor, a small kiln, a hand-cranked grist mill, a mash tun and two copper pot stills. By far the largest building is the ageing shed.

The barley for malting comes from a small acreage lower down the glen. Its small annual production is the distillery's limiting factor. This small grain field has been passed down through the generations along with the distillery. The family has always cut its own peat from their bog — everything about the place is hands-on, small, simple. The single malt they produce is sublime.

This simplicity dates to the fifteenth century when whisky began being heavily taxed. Many distillers moved to hidden nooks in obscure glens and continued without taxation. In 1823, Parliament enacted laws to make commercial distillation much more profitable, and at the same time imposed heavy punishments on landowners with unlicensed distilleries on their lands. The family licensed their distillery and continued in the same simple, small way. They simply watched as Johnny Walker strode into the market and Smith wheedled his way through Government minions to claim the name Glenlivet.

The ageing shed is the only large thing on the property since it needs to house the fifteen or twenty barrels of whisky produced each year and age it for the minimum three years required by law. Generations ago, when the family decided to stop selling their production to the blending houses, they also decided to age their whisky a minimum of a dozen years. This has crept up and now sits at a minimum of twenty years — some of the barrels are over thirty. So fifteen to twenty barrels per year for twenty to thirty years requires not a small building and its contents amount to not a small value. In high street shops, the simple twenty year commands £125 the bottle, often more. The unblended dated bottles ask much higher. Very much higher. They became status years ago when described by a reviewer as sublime complexity from extreme simplicity.

To safeguard their small fortune of ageing malt, the family continues the old tradition of allowing a large flock of white geese to roam through the fenced enclosure surrounding the shed. Their honking at strangers is better than any modern electronic alarm and much more difficult to override or defeat. They also run Muscovy ducks, intrigued by their instantaneous response. For additional backup, a few years ago, the family brought in a dozen peacocks, the dreaded guards of many French wineries.

The MacAbre clan raise a wee dram to simplicity each time they hear the discordant chanting of their menagerie foiling the approach of another unsuspecting intruder.