kieve The Irish term for a ⇒mash tun. Magee writes, 'the distillery men continue to use the ancient terms which baffle the layman, strange words like grists, worts, worms, washes, tuns, kieves and backs'. (IW) Kieve is also used as a synonym for mash tun in the Irish brewing industry.
'Kieve' has its origins in the Old English cyf, which was later regularly spelled keeve, specifically a tub or vat for holding liquid during brewing or bleaching, though the keeve or kive was also used in the mining industry as a vessel in which copper or tin ore was washed. In c.1000 Ælfric wrote in Homilies, 'Se het afyllan ane cyfe mid weallendum ele' - 'he commanded a keeve to be filled with welling ale', and with a number of spelling variations kieve occurs in England, Ireland and Scotland. Keeve is recorded in Ireland in 1776 with reference to cider-making, and the current Irish distillation-related spelling is first recorded in an English publication in 1875.
The variant kiver also occurs, having the sense of a shallow wooden vessel or tub, not so specifically related to brewing. With the spelling kevere this is first attested in 1407, but the earliest written reference to ⇒alcohol production and kiver occurs in the West Sussex Gazette in 1884: 'Brew vat and stand, oval kiver, two 50-gallon casks'.
kiln During ⇒malting the ⇒green malt is dried in a kiln, and 'gives the typical malt distillery its best known feature: the pagoda-style roof, which will immediately identify an otherwise unremarkable collection of commercial buildings'. (SGtS) The originator of this exotic feature was the Elgin distillery architect Charles Doig, who first installed what became known as the 'Doig Ventilator' at Dailuaine Distillery in 1889. Prior to that time the common Kentish oast house ventilator had been used, which resembled a revolving, fluted cardinal's hat. 'The kilns had tapering roofs to draw the heat from the furnace through the drying floor on which the malt was laid out', Moss explains (CSDB); 'The kilns were capped with horizontal ventilators, often designed to look like the roofs of Chinese pagodas'. Moss says that earlier kilns were 'normally made of stone and shaped like a bowl in the ground, with an arched furnace beneath. The kiln would have been covered with a simple thatch and used for drying the barley and oats grown in the township as well as malt.'
The word 'kiln' comes from the Old English cylene, adopted from the Latin culina kitchen, cooking-stove, burning-place. The first record of kiln occurs in c.725, and with specific reference to drying malt in c.1440 in Promptorium Parvolorum, 'kylne for malt drying'. The first use of kiln as a verb is recorded in 1715, 'It must be employed as soon as kiln'd', and ten years later, in his Family Dictionary, Bradley writes under the Malt heading: 'There is also another Error in drying and kilning of Malt'.
The purpose of kilning the green malt is to kill the germ of the growing grain, once germination to the required degree has been achieved. This is done by the application of heat, and in modern, purpose-built maltings fans spread hot, sometimes peat-flavoured air, and the processes of germination and kilning may take place in the same vessel. McDowall makes the point that 'Many of the new or reconditioned distilleries have no typical kiln house, or, if they have, they use it for other purposes' (WoS), but where the more traditional distillery-based makings survive, green malt is spread on a perforated floor above a peat fire and is turned regularly during kilning. Hot air from the fire passes up through the malt, with ventilation being provided by the open pagoda head.
Once nothing but ⇒peat was burnt in distillery kilns in Scotland, but its principal role now is to provide flavour rather than heat, with more efficient fuels such as coal, coke and oil being employed after an initial period of peat-drying lasting some 24 hours. Anthracite and coke have been used in kilns for drying purposes since the late 18th century. Kiln temperatures are kept below 70°F so that the enzymes which are converting starch to sugar will not be destroyed, and the malt is dried until it has a final moisture content of only three or four percent. The kilning time varies from around 48 hours in a traditional floor maltings, such as that at ⇒Islay's Laphroaig Distillery, to 42 hours at Bowmore, where fans blow re-cycled heat through the green malt, and other fans above the floor draw the air up and thereby accelerate the drying process. Kilning takes as little as 36 hours in a modern plant such as Port Ellen on Islay. Once dried, the malt is ready to be turned into ⇒grist for ⇒mashing.