Water
Well let’s start with the water. Most scotch distilleries claim that their water is the key to their uniqueness of spirit. So it is sensible for an Essex distillery to want to use its own water. We believe that we should celebrate our water because it is great. OK, we are not using it straight out of the tap. We don’t live in Peckham! We have installed our own water treatment system. In fact two systems. First a softening treatment and the second is a 4 stage Reverse Osmosis system with de-ionisation. Forget the technical stuff, the result is super pure, medical level purity of water.
TDS (Total Dissolvable Solids) is the measure of water purity. TDS is a measure of how much chemicals, minerals and metals are in the water. It is important to the health of the body. The greater the measure, the less water the human cells can absorb, and it becomes damaging to our health.
Water companies must supply water at no more than a rating of 350. It is not deemed safe to drink over that figure. TDS is reported to a maximum value of 500 which would be totally not pure and undrinkable.
Tap water might be 300 TDS. Your carbon water filters might reduce it to 200. Spring Water, as you can imagine, is high. We tested a bottle of well-known spring water and it was 250 TDS. Yes this is what lots of distilleries use in their products.
We researched water purity and spoke to medical people and dentists who need absolute purity. We decided that if Pigs Bay could produce water less than 50 TDS then this would mean ultimate purity of our water and this would carry through to the purity of our spirit’s taste. Well not only have we achieved this, but we have only gone and done what we thought was impossible – we can actually produce ZERO TDS ESSEX WATER !
We will be bringing it along to tasting sessions to let you experience it for yourself, obviously only as a palate cleanser between spirits.