Never one to allow the opportunity for a good story to pass him by, or to get his beloved distillery in the news, Reynier embellished the tale, which soon grew to involve spies and the CIA and visits by weapons inspectors. All so Duncan had some spares to keep Bruichladdich running in the days of No Money.Īs this odd flotilla was being towed round the Mull of Kintyre and up to Islay, Laddie MD Mark Reynier received an email from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in the USA who had been monitoring distillery webcams on the grounds that our processes could have been ‘tweaked’ to produce the dreaded WMD. It started with our friend ‘Demolition Dave’ helping Duncan McGillivray and his gang to demolish the old Inverleven distillery – buying up all the old equipment for scrap and loading it onto barges on the Clyde.
QUERN STONE FULL
WMD – THE STORY OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE HAS BEEN FULL OF CHARACTER AND CHARACTERS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING. But that is another story for another day…. There is a body of opinion which claims that the development of grain-based agriculture itself was driven by the desire to brew beer – which is of course an essential initial step in distillation. This quernstone at Coultorsay probably pre-dates distilling by many hundreds, if not some thousands of years – but who knows? The illicit distillers working on Islay would have had to grind their grain into grist by hand using stones similar to this– because they would not necessarily have had access to larger water mills. There is of course a direct connection with quernstones and distilling. It is apparent that this example is quite light – the stone disk is not thick. Guard Archaeology have people with specialist expertise in finds like this which will help give it context – as will the existence of charcoal deposits in association with the quern. Grain would have been fed into the central hole and the stone spun by hand on top of a lower stone to grind the grain into flour. This appears to be the upper stone of a pair. It is not possible to accurately date any of this material at this stage but quern stones have been in use since the Iron Age. The team are now concentrating on quite an extensive area of what is probably prehistoric occupation and are starting to find evidence of ditches, post holes, possible hearths and deposits of charcoal and bone. The archaeologists working up at our new warehouse site at Coultorsay just south of the distillery have found a quern stone.