No, this isn’t clickbait – Nine Rivers Distillery really is an ONLY FANS site! Not only that, we live stream our ONLY FANS site pretty much every day (well, most days on YouTube when we can get a stable connection, but it’s every day on WeChat channels).
But before you all get excited, and get your credit cards out to subscribe, drag your dirty mind out of the gutter and read on.
One of the climate challenges we have (in addition to the rain) is the heat and humidity – something that typically results in a very rapid maturation of whisky, and a non-trivial amount of loss to the notorious Angel’s Share. Distilleries with similar climates struggle to get anything near an age statement, with some distilleries rumoured to have mature whisky in as little as 18 months, which then needs to be decanted and stored in 4th fill casks to clock up the generally accepted minimum of 3 years, without the whisky tasting like a chewed pencil.
Being aware of this since we first found our site, we needed a solution to this challenge – but one that wasn’t going to burn loads of energy and give us the carbon footprint of a multinational oil company. So, as we typically do here at Nine Rivers Distillery, we put it all in for a group discussion at one of the monthly Whisky Networking China events.
We looked at the typical approaches that are used to build a traditional dunnage or rickhouse, and noted that at least some of the challenges were in the design itself.
Low ceilings (both in the single storey and the multi-storey approach) and bad ventilation will typically keep the ambient temperature high. Something we wanted the exact opposite of.
Even on the more modern, palletised, cask maturation warehouse approach 6 to 8 pallets high, with little room above the highest pallet, faced similar challenges. Besides, palletised cask warehouses look soulless and boring – two things that we don’t consider Nine Rivers Distillery to be.
With one of the brainstorming party being a former nerd that had built data centres in some really exotic locations (think “hot as hell” kinda places) he had some thoughts. He’d reduced the problem of insane electricity bills from using air conditioning through having triple height ceilings and the simple science of “warm air rises”. Throw in some air movement (using ONLY FANS), and you get cooler environments for mere fractions of the energy of air conditioning.
That was the foundation of our idea. High ceilings and air movement. We just had to make it work.
So we locked our Star Wars nerd, our rocket scientist, 2 engineers (one mechanical and one Spannerman), our Mini Me, our fashion guru (it has to look stylish right?) and the grey haired monster in a room with a few cases of whisky, a week’s worth of Texas barbecue and some bananas (for scale) in a room with instructions that no one gets out until they make this work – using ONLY FANS.
Only Fans – The Solution
We’ve Got 5 On It?
Apparently (and bear with me, I just write stuff and generally don’t have the first clue what I’m writing about) no one builds higher than 8 meters high on an internal ceiling height in the world of distilling and with Gary and Mark all fired up after 72 hours of that 1995 classic album, Operation Stackola they decided we had to go 13 meters high.
The ceiling height creates the space for warm air to rise. The next challenge was to create the correct amount of air movement using as little energy as possible.
Large diameter, low power fans are installed in pairs. One half of the pair near to the ceiling and the other half of the pair near to the ground. The “real science” being that one sucks and the other blows (words from the nerds – who are way way way too nerdy to be throwing innuendos into the mix) to create enough air movement to keep the building cool.
There’s about 60 pages of gobbledygook and a stack of intense looking drawings on A0 sized blue paper that I was supposed to digest before writing this, but we had some sun today, the barbecue was crying out for some attention, and I needed something to kindle the flames with. So we’ll have to just keep it simple.
The fans at the top expel the air out of the building, and the fans at the bottom bring in new air. At least I think that’s what the nerds said. It’s all allegedly supported by some 3D modelling, some simulations and a few hundred hours of maths and science and scribbles that non-nerds just can’t understand.
Only Fans T-Shirts
To celebrate this apparent bit of genius, we are launching our own commemorative T-shirt to celebrate the fact that we are an ONLY FANS site and we have some really fantastic nerds on our team. More about that next week.
Would you like to read more?
If you enjoyed reading our article about Only Fans at Nine Rivers Distillery, and you would like to catch up with some of our past articles, then please CLICK HERE and go to our News Section, where most of our other content is published.
Would you like to know more about helping Nine Rivers Distillery?
One of the easiest ways to help our project succeed is to take an interest in anything we have for sale. You can find out what we have if you CLICK HERE and go to our shop. We’ll make a few percentage points (after sales tax) and this goes directly to our project.
Follow us
Last, but as important as all the other points above, you can help us by reading, liking and sharing our content across some of the more popular platforms.
LinkedIn users you can CLICK HERE to follow us. Over 8000 people are following our story on LinkedIn right now. In fact, we have more followers on LinkedIn that GLENFIDDICH!
Facebook users, you can CLICK HERE. 3000 followers so far.
YouTube users, you can CLICK HERE. We’re at past 1000 subscribers and growing.
Twitter users, you can CLICK HERE.
Instagram users, you can CLICK HERE.
Or follow us on WeChat using the QR code below.
