I've really enjoyed this series so far, thanks Erik. I think you've judged the balance between explaining all the important steps/points, yet not getting too bogged down in over-technical/scientific details, very well. I look forward to the rest of the series. ---- I don't know whether it's something you might want to explore, but: as you just explained there are some basic things like pot still size and shape which influence the character of the spirit. Those basic "building blocks", as it were, are important for us to learn/understand. But I've also read that quite a few distilleries mix their "building blocks" up. So they might have stills that should produce a heavy distillate, but then take/add various steps to also "lighten" its character. Or they may have stills that should produce a light distillate, but then take/add steps to enrich its character. Things like encouraging reflux, or lyne arm angle, running stills fast/slow, cut points, and so forth--no doubt there's many more and you'll understand it far better/clearer than I do. So I guess I'm saying there are basic patterns/building blocks but in practice many distilleries often follow practices that might seem counter to, or the reverse of, some of those basic patterns--sort of counter-intuitively, as it were. The purpose of this series, I think, is explaining those basic patterns so one wouldn't want to mix things up too much/confusingly, but I also wonder whether there might be interesting/useful videos that you might like to produce that explore some of those seeming contradictions? Here's a whisky that should be heavy because of this and that, yet it's not and here's why, or vice versa, etc., and one can taste those features in the distillate such as in this example whisky. Hopefully my garbled words make some kind of sense. Obviously this is your channel so it's entirely up to you what you might like to do, but I thought the above might be interesting, kind of the next step after learning the basic forms/blocks?
So the art of the whisky production is really selecting all the variables you mentioned to create a unique spirit even though the process is essentially the same, I wonder if anyone really has a database of how all these are different for most of the distilleries to arrive at how they are done or is that the trade secrets that are heavily guarded? Good job Erik.
On the macro level Scotch whisky production is all the same. On the micro level there are countless variances in Scotch whisky production which account for the differences in whiskies.
