RYE
The Orphan Crown Royal is one of the best-known and
Railcar DAVIN DE KERGOMMEAUX
most highly regarded whiskies in the world. In fact, no other Canadian whisky matches its sales. Fifty warehouses on a 360-acre site near the shores of Lake Winnipeg hold a million and a half barrels of the spirit that will become Crown Royal. It’s a little more complicated than that though. The whisky that we so enjoy is actually a blend of individual whiskies from many barrels, and not all of these whiskies are the same. Workers at the Crown Royal distillery in Gimli, Manitoba, make five kinds of whisky spirit. They put each of these five spirits into a variety of different barrels to mature into the diverse range of whiskies that comprise the blend. Ageing them for different periods further contributes to each whisky develop- ing its own special character. In the end, fifty distinct whiskies make up Crown Royal. When each is ready, the blenders bring them together for the final blend- ing.
Even this explanation over-simplifies things, as
those five different spirits come from two distinct spirit streams… Although both are distilled to very high proof, these two distillates, and the whiskies they eventually become, couldn’t be more different from each other.
CROWN ROYAL DISTILLERY IN GIMLI, MANITOBA
The second spirit stream is called flavouring whisky and consists of three distinctive spirits. One is made using all rye grain and the other two from a mixture of rye, corn, and malted barley. Each is distilled to lower proof to preserve the flavours of the grain and yeast. When it comes time for bottling, all the different mature base whiskies from the various barrels that range in age are mingled together in mas- sive blending tanks according to carefully guarded recipes. The three flavouring whiskies, also of vari- ous ages and matured in various types of barrels, are mingled together in other tanks. Because the Gimli distillery is running out of space and has no room for bottling whisky on site, when each sub-blend is ready it is loaded into separate railway tanker cars – one set for flavouring whisky, another for the base – and freighted to a bottling plant in Amherst- burg, Ontario. There, the whiskies are finally brought together and bottled.
Crown Royal owns its own railcars to make sure nothing but their own whisky goes into them, but a
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Photos By DAVIN DE KERGOMMEAUX
Photo Courtesy of JEREMY DUECK
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