They do some things a bit different than other distilleries with vacuum distillation and reinforced casks.

To run the whole process from start to end takes roughly 8 hours, and the whole distillery can in fact be run/managed by one person alone. After that we have evident mint, peated lemon curd moving on into peated white chocolate vanilla, and in fact there is also some regular milk chocolate lurking around somewhere in the mix. Below the obvious vanilla sweetness in the top layer we also have white chocolate and something moving slightly towards mint leaves (in the distant) and just a tad of lemon jucie. Agitator, Arboga. When all was safe and the distillation could manage itself (run by Oskar from the computer-room), Christian and I sampled some different styles of newmake…. We also have the innertube of a bicycle tire. “You’ll get 95 or 96 products which just literally go down the drain… Now the coolest thing is that all of the sudden you can test and trial everything, and pick the winners out of them, which would make zero economic sense otherwise. It appears to be young and unfinished (which it is, of course, since it is only 13 months old). Next up, I got to try a 2 month old sample from a bourbon cask, very tasty! You can read about here – in Swedish, though. In other words, there’s no stopping in between. This 13 months old spirit smells rather like 8yo. In the aftertaste there is almond paste and my chest feels warm. “We’ll run 100 tests and  out of those 100 tests of different combinations of stuff, you might get four or five products you actually want to make and sell,” he continues.

Given our joint cask collaboration project and the fact that I've visited the distillery a number of times now, I've been very lucky indeed to taste quite a lot of maturing spirit from Agitator before, including following the progress of "my" casks. Washstill no.1 is connected to…, still no.3 (spirit-still no.1), and washstill no.2 is connected to…. A bit thin. So let's see what kind of styles of whisky Oskar and Christian have in mind for the core range! When the afternoon had arrived and the workday was (sadly) over, Christian drove me back to Örebro, while Oskar stayed behind to clean up my mess. There are major potential advantages to rapid-aging of course.
The spirit could literally enter the barrel, slosh around, and be dumped, and it qualifies. Judging from it’s nose I thought that this would be a ”punch-in-the-face” kind of a dram. Agitator is equipped with four vacuum potstills. I’m not a reborn believer of the rapid-aging revolution, but I’m not writing it off as utter rubbish, either. The Rökmalt draft has been composed from spirit distilled in the Low Reflux-stills only, has been matured for 13 months, and has been bottled at 46%. Both in order to get a proper sense of their unique production process given the fact that this is the only known maltwhisky distillery in the world using vacuum distillation, and also to actually ”work” and help out during my visit (yay!). Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The immediate taste is however quite ”fast”, lasting somewhere between 45 seconds to 1 minute. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.