It seems everyone following our project wants to understand our distillery in numbers. No doubt at some point we’ll end up with a deck of distillery Top Trumps cards being put together, but in the meantime, here’s what we have.
As a caveat to all of this, these numbers come courtesy of our very own Whisky Cat (AKA Dengshan). We shipped her a few crates of sushi grade salmon and she put her pet human maths geek to work on this for us. Like all pet humans, he obeyed.
Mud in Numbers
We have a land parcel of 17,238 square meters.
We had to rip off 14,000 cubic meters just make the land “workable” (levelled out to pretty much the baseline we need.
The total excavation (land levelling and for foundations for the first three buildings) will be 46,000 cubic meters.
If you’re more about weight than volume, then consider this. Wet clay (which is what we have been excavating) weight about 1800 kilograms per cubic meter. So we’re talking about 82.8 million kilograms of mud. 82,800 metric tons. Over 4000 truck loads. So chalk that one up for our distillery in numbers!
Water In Numbers
21.6 million litres of water for concrete, mortar and render.
1.8 million litres of water for our underground reservoir needed for fire safety (in case of a fire, we need to flood our still house, or cask maturation warehouse, with 516 litres per second for 30 minutes – and have enough water left over to fight a fire at a reduced rate of water discharge, for 3 hours!)
At full production capacity we need 1.35 million litres of water a day for malting, mashing and fermenting.
At full production capacity we need 60,000 litres of water a day for cleaning stills, mash tuns, fermentors and other things (the other things being of course Hayden’s socks and pants…..although they need more bleach than they need water!).
We currently estimate the water usage for Jay’s coffee to be about 47 litres a day. He should have massively reduced his intake by the time our distillery is built from the currently levels of circa 120 litres a day. Coffee is one of the more important stats about out distillery in numbers.
An abundance of pristine water is a critical need for crafting any whisky and this underpins one of the many reasons why we chose our location. A year round supply from the nine mountain springs that converge in Da Chi village.
Yes, we know, we should have called our project Nine Springs Distillery – but we decided to be a little bit more creative and user rivers, because, well, everyone else in the industry have no issues stretching the truth so if you can’t beat them, join them right?
Steel In Numbers
Steel reinforced concrete is the norm in most constructions. Where our distillery in numbers gets really crazy is the vast amount of steel we need. For three reasons. Firstly, because the weight we are putting on the floors is huge. 5000 kilos per square meter. Compare that to a normal industrial building which would typically be 500 – 1000 kilos per square meter. Or an office block, which would be right down at 250 kilos per square meter.
Add to that the fact that one of our buildings is carrying that load of 5000 kilos a square meter, on top of a massive water reservoir that we need for fire safety requirements (that 1,8 million litres already mentioned).
Finally it’s because we have a massive open plan area in the still house.
852 square meters in total for the central open plan area where our 10 stills will be located. It has an internal ceiling height of 13 meters from floor to ceiling. So there’s a huge amount of structural steel needed to hold the roof up.
Even the roof itself has a load bearing capacity of 1000 kilos per square meter, so we can have all those funky environmentally friendly, renewable energy goodies such as air source heat pumps. It’s not just the SWA pushing for zero carbon footprints, and let’s be fair here, we’re doing it because we care, and not just we’re genetically programmed to shave pennies off every cost possible (unlike our skirt wearing friends in Scotland).
So, no big surprises. We’re using 3780 tons of steel. Most of it is rebar of different thicknesses. But about 20% of weight will be steel girders to keep something over our heads to keep the sky from falling in on us.
So that’s it from us for our distillery in numbers.
Would You Like To Read More?
If you enjoyed reading about how we currently don’t see any alternatives to dramfunded, 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.
You could help us by simply buying your very own Brick for Life – a brick with a steel name plate wrapped around it, which will be cemented into The Plenum (our feature wall) in July 2023. Every brick owner is entitled to a free dram for life every time they visit us in Longyan, Fujian.
Or, you could learn more about being involved and help us grow to our target of 1000 stakeholders. You can read more about how we are Dramfunded if you CLICK HERE. Remember, we currently have no alternatives to dramfunded!
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