Original subtitles

From amaretto to sambuca, we drink an astonishing 40 million litres

of liqueurs every year.

Whether you prefer them neat, or on the rocks...

Or in a classy cocktail..

..we shell out over £1.5 billion a year on them.

Whether citrusy, nutty or fruity, liqueurs are simply sweetened

and flavoured alcoholic drinks.

To find out how they're made, we've come to Ireland.

To the country's largest liqueurs factory!

How is it doing that?

I'm Gregg Wallace...

That's too fast! I can't even see what it's doing.

..and I'll be finding out how they put the flavour...

Phwoar! That's a heady mix, innit?

..into this creamy concoction.

You're almost making a dessert.

All right.

I'm Cherry Healey and I'll be digesting the science

behind these popular drinks.

Some of them have got pizza sandwiches!

And historian Ruth Goodman...

I feel a burn of pepper!

..discovers how liqueurs were once thought to be the cure

for all ills.

No matter what was wrong with you - stubbed toe, dandruff -

"Have a glass of this!"

Over the next 24 hours,

this factory will produce an astonishing

540,000 bottles of liqueur!

Welcome to Inside the Factory.

This is the Baileys factory in Dublin, Ireland.

150 people work here, knocking out their liqueurs.

They make 15 different flavours,

from salted caramel

to strawberries and cream.

But tonight, we're following production

of their original Irish Cream

in 700ml bottles.

A blend of alcohol and cream,

sweetened with chocolate and vanilla,

it all begins with the base spirit,

Irish whiskey.

To get hold of some, I'm heading 55 miles up the road

to one of Ireland's biggest distilleries,

the Great Northern Distillery.

It churns out more than 19 million litres each year.

I'm heading to the intake area, where production starts

with a delivery of grain.

Guiding the lorry in is distillery manager Brian Watts.

Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Gregg. Good morning.

Why have you got a jar of stuff in your hands?

I've got a jar of maize, because we're making a grain whiskey.

How much maize is on that truck?

There's 30 tonnes on that truck.

Otherwise known as corn, the maize is dried to stop it going off.

It gives a sweet, light, buttery type of spirit,

that goes well in a cream liqueur.

You're not actually Irish, are you? No, I'm from Perthshire in Scotland.

How did a Scotsman end up making Irish whiskey, please?

Well, the Scots and Irish have a long history going back

of making spirits.

So, 30 tonnes on there

and how often does one of those trucks full of maize come in?

I'll be bringing in about nine a week to keep us going.

Well, we can't hang about, then, we'd better unload it.

Let's go, then. Let's get going.

I'm not sure why I'm hurrying,

because turning this lot into whiskey will take a while.

Right! Ready?

As I set the maize free,

the clock starts on our longest ever production timeline.

Look at that!

There she blows!

There's enough maize on this lorry to produce 30,000 litres of whiskey.

What's the basic principle of turning this into whiskey?

This is just starch inside a packet.

We've got to break it open and then we have to break that

starch down into sugars.

The yeast will then eat the sugar to produce alcohol.

But first of all, we've got to get the starch out?

We've got to expose the starch.

And that is no walk in the park.

Our maize faces an extreme assault course,

before it can become whiskey.

First, it drops through the grate in the floor.

Then it rattles through a series of sieves,

which remove any husks and stones.

The clean, golden kernels shuffle on...

# Can't touch this! #

..to the hammer mill, where they face their biggest challenge yet.

This is where we break down the corns of maize and make it into

a very fine cornflour.

Tell me how this works.

Well, let's have a little look.

# Stop! Hammer time! #

The maize is fed down through these pipes

and it lands right in the path of these flails.

These will spin round and smash the maize corns as they come round.

Wow!

And it's going at such a speed that it's forcing the crushed up

maize against the side

and out the other side comes our maize flour, or our cornflour.

Yes. The finer you mill it, the easier it is

to burst open the starch granules.

Right, well, we'd better get this started then, hadn't we?

Let's get it going, then.

# Hammer time!#

Every hour, 3.7 tonnes of maize drops into the path of 200 flails.

They spin against it at 1,500 revs per minute,

smashing it into cornflour.

Now known as grist, it rushes along pipes and drops down

into the still's masher for its next workout.

Here, it's mixed with water to create a thick liquid

called mash.

This is what's come out of the still's masher.

Can I taste it? You can indeed.

God, that is really acidic!

Mate, if they're drinking that, they're not going to be very happy.

What's going to happen to it?

What we're going to do with that

is we're putting it into the steep tank.

In this 6,500 litre tank, the mash faces another ordeal,

as it's heated to 75 degrees Celsius.

As the temperature increases, the starch granules swell up

like tiny balloons.

Then they're blasted with jets of superheated steam,

which explode them, finally releasing that valuable starch.

So, all of these processes, all this heat, all these tanks,

that's just to get the starch.

You haven't even turned the starch into sugar yet.

We are nowhere near a wee dram.

Nowhere near a wee dram.

It's taken three hours to release the starch from the maize,

but now another transformation is required.

Our cooked mash is cooled to 64 degrees and pumped into another

steel tank, where an ingredient containing natural enzymes is added

to break that starch down into sugars.

The enzymes come from milled barley.

Barley? I thought it was all maize.

No, up to 10% of the recipe comes for malted barley.

Why don't you add the barley right at the start?

It would kill the enzymes, by adding it in too early in the process.

You have to cool everything down and then add the malted barley.

It makes you wonder why people from years ago bothered, don't it?

Oh, I think the end results are worth the bother!

Yeah, you would!

The enzymes make quick work of the starch,

turning it into sugars in just 90 minutes.

The resulting liquid is now known as sweet wort

and is pumped into one of the distillery's

126,000-litre fermentation vessels,

before it embarks on the next stage of this complex production process.

As I'm discovering, making whiskey is a complicated business

and ordering it's no easier, as Cherry's discovering.

Single malt.

Blended. Aged 12 years.

Triple distilled. Cask strength.

Irish. Scotch.

When it comes to whisky, it can be really hard

to know what to order.

What is the difference between a single malt, a blended

and a bourbon?

To find out...

Hi, Jaega, lovely to see you.

..I've invited drinks expert Jaega Wise to pull up a stool

with me at the bar.

Behold! A dazzling array of whiskies!

How on Earth do you tell the difference between them?

Well, it can be quite complicated, even the type of grain that's

used, whereabouts it's made, the type of cask.

All these differences will determine a difference in flavour

and ultimately a different whisky.

Well, let's get this lesson started.

First up, what makes a single malt a single malt?

OK, well, the "single" part of a single malt means it comes from

a single distillery and the "malt" means it has to be made with 100%

malted barley, which looks like that.

Is there leeway with that?

No, not at all,

and there are actually strict laws that govern this.

Next, bourbon.

Bourbon is a type of American whiskey, traditionally associated

with the state of Kentucky.

What is the main characteristic of a bourbon?

What makes a bourbon a bourbon is it has to be made with

at least 51% maize, or corn.

How specific! 51%? 51%.

Just like the Irish whiskey that's going into our liqueur,

bourbon's taste is influenced by the subtle, buttery flavours of maize.

And you're probably thinking, "What's the other 49%?"

Well, it can be a whole myriad of other grains.

It can be barley, it can be wheat, or it could just be more corn.

Whisky makers are very strict, very specific.

People take their whisky very, very seriously.

But the grain is just the start.

Oh, wow! Look at this!

How the alcohol is distilled is also crucial.

This looks like a kind of cartoon character from a children's animation.

This is called a pot still, which is made of copper,

and copper helps to strip the impurities from the whisky.

The higher the surface area of copper to whisky,

the more impurities are removed.

So, if the still is taller, then there's a higher surface area,

which means you have a more lighter, more delicate whisky.

So, the type of still can have as big an impact on taste

as the type of grain.

But whisky makers have even more ways to play around with flavour.

So, we've tried a single malt, we've tried a bourbon,

so this here is a blended whisky. OK.

Let's give it a go.

I'm going to say the word "earthy". Yeah, it's quite earthy.

OK, what does the word "blended" mean in this context?

A blended whisky can mean a mix of whiskies

from multiple different distilleries.

You would tend to blend whisky to get a flavour profile you particularly wanted.

In the way that a painter might use different colours

to get a very specific colour? Yeah, exactly.

Despite their complex differences, there is one simple thing

all whiskies have in common.

They must be aged in oak casks.

These casks are often second-hand and have had a previous life

maturing other drinks like sherry, port and even wine.

One of the things I've noticed is there seems to be a real emphasis

on where the whisky is made.

Scotland, Ireland, Japan, America.

Does that actually make a difference to the taste?

It makes a huge difference and that's largely because they all

have different whisky-making traditions

and they all have different geography as well.

So, things like the type of water will have a massive difference

on the flavour of the finished product.

So, if you're a whisky aficionado, you are going to notice a difference

between a Japanese and a Scottish whisky?

Yeah, absolutely. I might not! Give it time! OK!

Back at the distillery, it's less a question of which whisky,

than, "WHERE'S the whiskey?"

Three hours and 45 minutes after our maize arrived,

it's still a long way from being an alcoholic spirit.

Our 125,000 litres of non-alcoholic wort are about to be introduced

to the ingredient that will perform that transformation.

Yeast!

Can I help? You can certainly help. If you want to jump up on the platform. Certainly.

OK, so I know we've got our sugary liquid, right?

What does the yeast do to our sugary wort?

Yeast's a living mechanism and this will work on the sugars

and will convert that sugar into alcohol.

We dissolve 200kg of yeast in 2,000 litres of water,

creating a gloopy mix.

Are all the sacks the same yeast?

No, there are four different strains

that go into our fermentation.

One will be a fast starter,

one will finish the whole process

and two in the middle will give me the flavour compounds that I'm looking for.

Four separate yeasts to do the whole job?

Yes. Two Cherry Healeys, a Gregg Wallace and a Ruth Goodman.

That's perfect.

1,000 litres of this powerful yeast mix

joins 125,000 litres of sweet wort

inside one of our fermentation tanks.

The yeast feeds on the sugars,

slowly converting them into alcohol and...

..three days later, we have a boozy liquid called wash.

But there's a problem. The wash isn't boozy enough.

At just 10% alcohol by volume,

it's not even as strong as wine

and falls well short of the requirements for whiskey.

That problem is solved in distillation.

Wow!

Now, they look beautiful.

Welcome to my still hall.

What's happening in here?

What we're doing here is taking our 10% alcohol

from the fermentation process

and we will purify that up to 94.6% alcohol.

Take away all the water, all impurities,

and give us the spirit that will eventually become Irish whiskey.

This process relies on the different boiling points of alcohol and water.

Our wash is pumped into a distillation column and heated

to 85 degrees Celsius.

This is enough to boil the alcohol and turn it into a vapour,

but isn't hot enough to boil the water.

The steamy booze we're after rises to the top of the still,

where it's pumped out and cooled back to a liquid,

while the unwanted water is sucked out through a pipe at the bottom.

Basically, adding heat and the alcohol is being caught

as evaporation in the top?

That's essentially what distilling is.

The wash cycles through three distillation columns,

which successively increase the alcohol content

and remove impurities.

What happens if you only distilled it once?

I would be bit rough.

It would be harsher spirit.

So, why not do it six or seven times?

You would end up with no flavour, just alcohol.

We want flavour.

So, in three distils, you'll go from 10% alcohol to 94% alcohol.

The volume of liquid must have reduced down...?

Dramatically, yes.

We're feeding it 15,000 litres an hour

and we'll have around about 1,500 litres of alcohol an hour

coming off the still.

And before it's allowed to travel on to the next stage of production,

it has to be sampled.

Sounds like a job for me!

Well, this is where the spirit comes off the still.

This is the 94.6% alcohol.

Whoa!

Sorry, I got too close.

Whoa! That's like getting a whiff of a really strong

paint stripper. It is.

Too strong to drink.

We dilute the spirit down to 40% alcohol with water,

to preserve my precious taste buds.

But that's not whiskey colour, is it?

No, this is whiskey spirit.

Oh! That's better.

It's getting almost toasty now.

Can I? You can.

It's got a sweet start, but it ends in heat.

It's not unlike a grappa. Very, very similar.

And you can hopefully get the buttery notes coming through there.

That's a characteristic of the maize.

OK, and has that now passed your test?

That has passed my test, yes.

This clear whiskey spirit might not look or taste much like whiskey yet,

but Brian assures me that it's nothing

some time and carefully chosen woodwork won't sort out

a little later.

Whisper it -

but when we think of whisky, it's usually Scotland

that comes to mind, but that wasn't always the case.

Ruth's exploring the spirited history of this spirit.

Irish whiskey.

It may not be as well-known as its Scottish counterpart,

but 100 years ago it commanded more than 60% of the global market.

Today, that figure is just 5%.

So, what went wrong?

To find out about its rise and fall, I've come to one

of the Emerald Isle's oldest distilleries, Kilbeggan...

John! Lovely to meet you. How are you?

..where I'm meeting Irish whiskey historian John Cashman.

John, how on Earth did Irish whiskey becomes such big business in the first place?

Ireland was very much agrarian, so there was a lot of small town

farmers and cottage industry.

People would plant their barley, plant their wheat and, at the end

of the season, if they had leftover, they were able to turn

that into spirit, or alcohol.

And all of a sudden, the small cottage industries realised,

"Well, actually, now we know how to mass-produce something,"

and the mass production of our whiskey began.

It's thought this is how the spirit was produced until

well into the 18th century.

How does that become something that's beyond the shores of Ireland?

How does it become an export industry?

What really happens is the Industrial Revolution.

In this period, you see some of the massive distilleries

being established in the late 1700s.

Ireland being an integral part of the British Empire,

then they could sell whiskey out of Dublin.

In Dublin, hit the ships and travel all over the world,

even as far away as India.

Irish whiskey was a huge global export, and by 1780,

there were over 1,000 distilleries across Ireland

producing it in traditional copper pot stills.

This is very much a batch making system, isn't it?

You're putting a load in and it works its way

through and then it's finished and you've got to clean it all out

and start again. Exactly.

The problem with batch distillation was that it was

slow and inefficient.

But that changed in 1830 with the invention of a new type of still.

The predecessor of modern column stills,

it was the brainchild of a man called Aeneas Coffey.

So this is the 1830 apparatus for brewing and distilling,

Coffey's specification, and this is a diagram of his stills.

You have a continuous amount of mash coming in at the top,

you've steam rising from the bottom,

you're going to have alcohol and you could do this 24 hours a day,

365 days a year. OK.

It's estimated that one of these could produce three to four times

the same amount of whiskey as you could

out of these traditional pot stills.

Confident that his new invention would boost the production

of Irish whiskey, Coffey wasted no time in touting it

to the country's distilleries.

But to his horror, many deemed it untraditional and rejected it.

Coffey realised he wasn't really going to make much money

in Ireland, so he went over to Scotland with his invention.

Unlike the Irish, the Scots saw the benefits of this new still

and quickly adopted it.

They realised that if they made the liquid from these stills

and then blended it with their traditional single malt whisky,

all of a sudden they'd have a liquid that was closer in style

and flavour, perhaps, to Irish whiskey.

And the Irish industry all of a sudden

had this massive competition.

The new blended whisky allowed the Scots to reduce costs

and undercut the Irish market.

This, coupled with the impact of the First World War, meant Irish

distilleries were forced to close.

There were just 14 in operation by 1916.

And things went from bad to worse as Irish-British relations soured.

In 1919, we have our War of Independence.

We lost our single biggest market for Irish whiskey,

which wasn't just Britain, but it was also the British Empire

and the British Commonwealth.

Another nail in the coffin came in 1920, when the United States

of America introduced prohibition, making the sale of alcohol illegal.

Irish whiskey must have been at rock-bottom?

So to put it into context, by the end of World War II,

there were six distilleries left open in Ireland. Oh!

And by the 1970s, two.

Just two?

Just two distilleries in the entire country.

That is decimation of an industry. Completely.

In just 90 years, the once mighty Irish whiskey industry

had fallen to holding just 3% of the global market.

Although it was down, it wasn't out.

Distillers finally adopted the column still and produced

a lighter, blended drink,

introducing a new generation to Irish whiskey.

Helped by some clever marketing in the '80s and '90s,

a slow recovery began.

Today there are 24... Wow!

..operational whiskey distilleries in this country.

We've a long way to go.

Right now we're back up to about 5% of the world's whiskey consumption.

That's quite a renaissance, and very fast.

Yes, very, very quickly.

And it's all set to continue as the global appetite

for Irish whiskey increases.

Back at our distillery, the whiskey spirit we have produced

is diluted with water down to 68.5% alcohol,

and piped over from distillation to casking.

Now, these are attractive.

What wood is this?

This is American oak.

Why do you have to keep the whiskey spirit in a wood barrel?

The wood will give colour and it'll contribute about 55%

of the final flavour. No way! Yeah.

Over half the flavour comes from the wood?

Well, it's a bit subjective, but yeah.

But it's not just the wood itself adding that flavour.

The barrels have previously been used to age American bourbon,

which helps add caramel and vanilla flavours and create

a golden coloured whiskey.

How do you get the spirit in here? With a big funnel?

Very nearly. No!

No, really?

That's a fuel pump, right?

It's a pump, it can be used for fuel.

We use it...

Mate, mate, listen, anybody watching this will identify this

as what they fill their car up with. Have you got a meter?

The meter's here on the wall.

OK, if I do this six times, do I get a free teddy

or set of gardening gloves?

You could try.

Right. Right.

Yeah, ready? Go for it.

It takes just 15 minutes to fill each 200 litre barrel.

But it'll be a long time before the whiskey is ready to go

into our cream liqueur.

How long will our whiskey stay in here?

Minimum of three years.

I'm kind of really proud of that, I think this is beautiful.

I might take one home and leave it in my shed for three years.

Rather than a shed, our whiskey spirit will sit in a warehouse

slowly maturing for the next 1,095 days.

Only then will it be grown-up enough to be called Irish whiskey.

Thankfully, Brian planned ahead and has a barrel

he prepared earlier for me to taste.

Yeah! Come on, then.

The wood's added the colour to the spirit.

It's made it golden.

Yeah, that's its natural colour after three years.

Cheers.

That's deep and richer, that's more open.

That's definitely sweet, very mellow.

You know what you're talking about, you, don't you? Thank you, yeah.

Listen, I've got a cream liqueur to make.

Thank you, sir, thank you very much. OK.

Not too much of that.

After three years, three days and five hours of production,

Brian's matured batch of whiskey is ready to become liqueur.

So I've followed 24,000 litres of it...

..south, to the liqueur factory.

At intake, the tanker's hooked up and the whiskey's pumped out.

But it's not the only ingredient Darren Keegan is seeing in today.

Darren. Hi, Greg.

That's our whiskey, right? That's our whiskey.

What is that?

That's cream. Fabulous.

Of course, it's a whiskey cream liqueur, right?

Absolutely, Yeah. How much cream on that truck?

28,000 litres of cream on the tanker.

That will make 100,000 litres of the liqueur.

Which in turn will make 140,000 standard bottles.

Roughly what percentage of the drink is cream?

25%. No wonder I like it.

With two of these deliveries a day, it's no surprise that 3% of all milk

farmed in Ireland goes into producing the cream

for this factory.

But before it's cleared to head inside, there's one vital check

we need to carry out.

STAR TREK THEME TUNE PLAYS

GREGG LAUGHS

It's like Star Trek.

You know, I have seen many lorries emptied before,

I've never been on the top of one. Go on.

OK, let's go.

What are you sampling for?

So, we're sampling the temperature of the cream

to make sure that it's 4 to 9 degrees.

Cos any more than that and it's starting to go off, right?

It's starting to go off, yes.

So, as you can see there, Gregg, we're at 6.2 degrees.

Perfect. Are we now ready to unload this lorry?

We're ready to unload this lorry now.

Come on!

Our 28,000 litres of cream is pumped from the lorry

into one of three 50,000 litre holding tanks.

Look at that!

The next ingredient is one I've never heard of.

Darren, what's all these big sacks of casein?

This is casein powder, which is a milk protein.

It comes from milk? It comes from milk.

But during the cream and milk separation process,

we lose the casein.

You lose it when you take the cream off?

Absolutely, yeah.

And you have to put it back in again?

We have to put it back in because it adds to its shelf life.

There's going to be hard of cows watching, laughing right now.

Surely! OK.

All we need to do now is get that casein into our cream.

We're going to lift it up using this device.

Would you like to do the honours, Gregg?

Lucky for Darren, I'm a dab hand with a hoist.

Whoa! Did I go the wrong way?

OK, maybe not.

Oh, I've got it upside down!

Sorry, mate. Not a great start, was it?

No, no.

Up she goes!

Each one-tonne bag provides enough casein for 57,000 bottles

of liqueur.

Whoa! Very good.

That's a big old weight.

I couldn't have done it better myself.

So what we now need to do is open the bag.

Gregg, if you want to pull that.

Wow. As I'm loosening the knot, you can just feel...

The weight. ..the pressure of it coming down.

Wow! That's it.

Is that actually now coming out?

You can feel it moving there. You can see it travelling.

I can feel it kicking.

From here, the casein is mixed with cream,

creating what they call the "cream blend".

It's the key ingredient that will transform our whiskey

from neat spirit to smooth liqueur,

something that's often drunk before or after a meal

as either a digestif or an aperitif.

But do these aperitifs help, well, increase our appetites?

Cherry's exploring the effects of alcohol on the hunger.

Often, when out for a nice meal,

we're offered an aperitif to get us in the mood for food.

Thank you.

It's meant to stimulate our appetite.

But whichever one of these liqueurs we choose,

do they really get us ready to eat?

To check out the science behind these drinks...

Hi, Sam. Lovely to meet you. Hi.

..I've invited biopsychologist Dr Sam Caton to join me.

Thank you.

Why do we drink aperitifs before a meal?

Traditionally, aperitifs are quite light

and often quite bitter as well.

The bitter taste stimulates saliva and they're said to prepare

the taste buds and the stomach for up-and-coming food.

What is it that's in the aperitifs that give us that extra appetite?

Well, actually, it's probably just the alcohol.

In the laboratory, we've simply offered beer or wine

and we've still seen this stimulation of appetite.

Is there a way that we can test your theory out?

Yes. And it involves a rugby team, some beer and lots of pizza.

I'm ready.

Hello. Welcome.

Team A over here.

Team B, you're all over here.

We split the lads into two teams.

All right, Sam, what's the plan?

Team A will be given two pints each of normal lager.

Team B will be give him two pints each of alcohol-free lager.

Our rugby boys think they're here to test the effects of alcohol

on their decision-making skills by completing

some mental exercises.

Now it's time to serve the beer.

Here we go.

Alcoholic for Team A,

and non-alcoholic for Team B.

OK, guys, you've all got your beers now

and you're more than welcome to start drinking.

Both groups think they're drinking alcoholic beer.

OK, so they've finish their beer. What happens next?

We're going to give them pizza and, in theory,

Team A, that are having the alcohol, should eat way more.

Each team is allowed to eat as much as they want.

But what they don't know is that this is the real experiment.

Some of them have got pizza sandwiches!

They layered them!

I think Team A are eating a little bit more.

But they have had the alcohol.

After 30 minutes, we take everything that's uneaten...

..and weigh the scraps to work out exactly how much each team

has wolfed down.

Finally, it's time to come clean.

I'm afraid to say, we actually lied to you.

We actually wanted to see the effect of the alcohol

not on your cognitive function, but on how much you ate.

So, Team A, you were the ones that consumed alcohol.

And you consumed 8% more pizza compared to Team B.

Group B, you had alcohol-free lager.

Taking into account the alcohol consumed,

that's roughly 320 calories more per person.

Why does alcohol make you eat more?

One line of thinking is that alcohol promotes food intake

via stimulating hormones that make us feel hungrier

or dampening down those that make us feel full.

It could be that it makes the food tastier.

It could be a loss of inhibitions and therefore,

the diet simply goes out the window.

I definitely know that feeling.

If you want to avoid overeating, then it may be a good idea

to avoid the alcohol as well.

So there's nothing magical in an aperitif.

It's just the alcohol.

Yeah, that's right. It's just the alcohol.

So it turns out that the person who came up with the idea

of aperitifs really was onto something.

AND we have the science to back it up.

They really do put you in the mood for food.

In Dublin, our cream blend is sorted.

But I'm going in search of our whiskey,

which has been pumped to the production area

and is waiting in a 15,000 litre mix tank.

Meeting me at the top of it is Eamon Oxley.

Hi, Gregg. Eamon.

Right, what are we doing here?

OK, firstly, we're going to make a flavour mix.

So we're going to blend our Irish whiskey

with extracts from cocoa and vanilla,

and we're going to blend in some caramel.

Natural flavourings are pumped in, beginning the transformation

of our whiskey to a rich, flavoursome liqueur.

Phwoar! That's a heady mix, isn't it?

You're almost making a dessert.

Yeah.

Cream, vanilla, cocoa, caramel...

Why do you add the caramel?

Does that give it the sweetness?

It gives a little bit of flavour, but it also balances the colour.

Cocoa and vanilla are both natural products.

So they vary in colour from season to season.

By subtly altering the amount of added caramel,

they keep the colour of the finished drink consistent.

How many bottles will that result in?

You can make up to half a million bottles.

And how often do you make a batch like that?

Every day or so.

Our whiskey flavour mix is pumped out of the tank

and into this high-security room,

where sugar and water are fed in,

along with another surprising ingredient.

What's in there?

OK. So, we take our flavour mix that we've just made

and we blend it together with neutral spirit.

You've already got a spirit. You've got whiskey.

Yes. But we add a little bit more, which has got a neutral taste.

We don't want to overpower the flavour with whiskey

so we put in the neutral spirit,

which brings up that alcohol content without affecting

the flavour balance.

The neutral spirit is made in a very similar way

to our Irish whiskey,

but is left at an eye-watering 97% alcohol by volume.

Can we go in there? No, we can't.

There may be an explosive atmosphere in there

due to the high-strength spirit that we use.

Three years, three days and nine hours into production,

our cream and whiskey blends are almost ready to combine

and form our liqueur.

Liqueurs are such a simple concept -

booze, sugar and flavourings -

but who thought of bunging those ingredients together

in the first place?

Ruth is investigating.

Today, many of us associate liqueurs with fancy cocktails.

But their origins are not to be found in busy downtown bars

or swanky restaurants,

but in places like this - places of religious study,

quiet contemplation

and the search for the elixir of life.

I've come to the 14th century ruins of Mount Grace Priory

in Yorkshire...

Jane! How lovely to see you again!

..to find out more from drinks expert Jane Peyton.

So, why are we here, then?

We're here in a former monastery because

the development of liqueurs, around 800 years ago,

was very much driven by monks.

Originally, they were medicinal drinks

with medicinal herbs and spices, fruits,

with an alcoholic base.

The secrets of distilling alcohol are believed to have been

brought to Europe by Spanish scholar Arnaldus de Villanova.

Arnaldus was an alchemist

and he was looking for the elixir of immortality,

which he thought he might find through distillation.

So he started practising it himself.

To boost their health-giving properties

and mask the often foul taste of his concoctions,

he infused them with herbs and spices.

Soon, he was convinced he had found the elixir of life

and he referred to his liqueurs as "aqua vitae" -

water of life.

It really was considered to be a magical potion.

You could drink it for anything and it would help you...

No matter what was wrong with you.

Stubbed toe? THEY LAUGH

Dandruff?

Have a glass of this!

Monks and religious scholars expanded on Villanova's work

and created their own recipes,

including this one from the 14th century,

for Aqua Vitae Perfectissima.

We've got a selection of herbs and spices.

This is sage, and this would have been used

to rid the body of venom and pestilence.

Very important.

We have cloves and cinnamon.

They'd be very good at getting rid of phlegm.

OK.

We have ginger and fennel.

Now, they'd be very good for digestion.

We're infusing our herbs and spices into a base spirit of brandy.

It looks a little bit like pond-life.

It does at the moment, doesn't it?

Why are they putting them in alcohol?

The thing about alcohol is that herbs and spices dissolve

into the alcohol.

So the active ingredient will be there in the alcohol

in a way it wouldn't be if it was water-based.

After heating, we pour our concoction into a jar,

to infuse.

Oh, look at that sludge!

Sludgy! That's where all the goodness is.

Seven days later, it's ready to cure all ills.

That's powerful.

Very spicy hot, isn't it?

I can feel a burn of pepper.

I really feel the burn as well,

but I already feel more vigorous, actually.

Do you? I do.

And this, then, really is the beginning of liqueur?

You could say this is the mother of liqueurs.

The popularisation of aqua vitae around Europe

in the 16th century paved the way for a boom in liqueur making.

Distillers started making them,

apothecaries started making them,

and suddenly they had a commercial value.

The drinks got sweeter

and their recipes even found their way into the most popular books

of the day.

It has a wonderful title, Delights for Ladies,

which includes tips for your home.

So liqueurs were included in that.

So, suddenly, they've gone from being medicine,

which is fairly prosaic,

to something that was a real treat and something to savour.

In the 18th and 19th centuries,

the popularity of liqueurs increased dramatically.

Many makers experimented with their own flavours,

creating some of the well-known brands

we still see today.

But what of the monks who first popularised them?

Even today, two of the best known liqueurs,

Chartreuse and Benedictine... Oh, of course.

..are connected with monks and monasteries.

Going back all those 800 years,

we still have that religious connection in the monks.

Modern liqueurs are a varied bunch of flavours,

yet they all stem from an exploration

of ancient ideas and the search for the ultimate medicine.

Funny today how many people drink them for dessert.

Back at the factory, we've got 3,600 litres

of non-alcoholic smooth cream blend

and 3,900 litres of flavoured alcoholic whiskey mix.

And it's time to introduce these very different liquids

to each other.

The venue for their first date is this 7,500 litre tank.

Let's see how this liquid liaison is going.

Well, it smells like a glass of whiskey

and looks like a caffe latte.

To me, the two liquids appear to be getting on swimmingly.

Is that it now? Are we ready to bottle this?

Not quite.

If we bottle the liquid at this stage,

the product would separate in the bottle

in a number of hours.

I have an example here.

The cream has risen to the top.

And your flavours, your whiskey, has stayed at the bottom.

Despite the initial attraction,

it seems like cream prefers its own company.

Why does it do that?

Well, the cream droplets are less dense

than the surrounding liquid,

so they will actually rise to the top.

So how do you stop that happening?

We put it through a process of homogenisation.

I've heard of that. But I'm not sure what that is.

Come with me and I'll show you how it works.

In need of some quick relationship counselling,

our cream liqueur is pumped down to the homogeniser.

So, explain to me this process of homogenisation.

OK.

This is the homogeniser valve.

So, the liquid is pumped very high pressure through this valve

and through a very, very small gap.

Less than 0.1 millimetre.

And that reduces the cream droplet size from about five microns

to 0.3 of a micron.

So around 300 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Wow!

So squeezing the liquid through such a small hole

stops it splitting? Yes.

Smashing these droplets decreases their size and buoyancy,

meaning they can't rise to the top.

And as they pass through the valve,

they're coated in a crucial ingredient.

The casein powder I added earlier.

This stops them clumping back together.

Smaller casein coated droplets mean our liqueur won't split.

That's it, isn't it?

That's the cream liqueur. That's done.

This is the finished cream liqueur.

That's the stuff that's going in the bottles and going to the shops.

It is.

But before it's allowed anywhere near a bottle,

we need to check the relationship is rock solid.

If that's not right, that doesn't go out?

No, we can't bottle it.

That's a lot of liquid to throw away, mate. It is.

The only way to tell for sure is to stick it under the microscope.

Here, you sit down, Eamon. Don't worry about me.

Firstly, we want to look at our sample from the homogeniser.

OK.

What are you expecting to see?

Hopefully, not very much.

This is 400 times magnification, and you can see the liquid

flowing across the lens.

There's nothing.

The cream droplets have been reduced to a very fine size,

so you actually can't see them under 400 times magnification.

So, what would it look like if it wasn't right?

I have a sample here.

So there will be rather more to see on this picture.

Oh, wow.

That looks like little islands in a fast-flowing stream.

That's very different.

In this sample, the fat particles are keeping to themselves.

The relationship is doomed.

Those clumps would join together

and then they would separate from the liquid? Yes.

Whereas our homogenised batch is happily cohabiting.

Does that mean that our batch has got the all clear?

Yep. It's good to bottle.

My Auntie Hazel can have her drop at Christmas?

She can indeed, yep.

Eamon, thank you for your time. Thank you very much, Gregg.

Test passed, our cream liqueur is destined to stay

together forever.

# Stay close to me... #

Or at least until the best before date.

7,500 litres skip merrily to the bottling line.

60% of the glass in our bottles comes from a recycled source.

So how do you turn an old bottle into a new one?

The journey of our liqueur bottles begins

at one of nearly 2,000 recycling centres dotted around Ireland.

You pop your glass in here...

GLASS SMASHES ..and you think no more about it.

That's probably because you've never seen one of these in action.

Every few days, a huge crane arrives...

Trucks away!

..and empties up to 24 tonnes of glass

into the back of this lorry.

All done!

I reckon I could hitch a lift.

Next stop is the Glassco recycling plant

in Naas, County Kildare.

This place is responsible for recycling a whopping 85%

of all Ireland's glass bottles and jars -

500 tonnes every day.

Operations manager David Farrelly...

Hi, David! Hi, Cherry!

Nice to meet you.

..is going to take my lorry load of old glass

and get it ready to become something new.

So, David, I brought some glass for you.

Excellent. How do we get it out the lorry?

Very simple.

Do you want to work away, Peter?

Woohoo!

David, that was absolutely smashing!

Thanks be to God.

Even though most of it is glass,

there's a fair few other bits and bobs in there.

There are, yeah.

There's a variety of different types of glass in it

and there's some non-glass material, as you can see, as well.

The glass that we're after,

particularly for the bottle we're going to make,

is brown with some green added in.

So there's a lot of work to be done.

Time to load up and get sorting.

The first job is to sift out everything that isn't glass.

We take any magnetic material out.

Say, steel cans, knives, forks.

So we use an electromagnet, and that will capture

all of the steel items in this initial flow.

It's like they've got a mind of their own

and they're just flying off.

What happens to the metal that is whizzing off that?

Where does it go?

That is all melted down and made into brand-new steel items.

So it's fully recycled as well.

But steel isn't the only metal that's found its way

into our haul of glass.

What we're doing here, Cherry, is we're taking the aluminium

out of this glass stream.

But I thought we'd just had a massive magnet over there

take out all the metal?

Yeah, but that was all the steel.

The magnet that we used before won't attract aluminium,

so we use what's called an eddy current magnet.

Unlike steel, aluminium isn't normally magnetic,

but the special magnet sitting underneath this conveyor

induces an opposing magnetic field in the aluminium,

repelling it.

The aluminium jumps across... Whee!

..and goes down a different chute.

You've created a kind of invisible bridge?

We have indeed.

What's left passes through a giant sieve.

Small pieces of glass are sent one way,

while larger bits go off to the picking line

to have those final rogue elements removed by hand.

What kind of things are they looking for?

Things like the plastic, bits of cups, bits of plates,

bits of saucers.

Got one. That is definitely a throw-out.

Absolutely.

After picking, the remaining big bits of glass

are crushed by two 150kg rollers,

reunited with the smaller pieces

and sent through a series of optical sorters.

Ooh, look at this! It's beautiful.

These machines have a clever way of separating out

the different colours.

The glass falls between a light box and a set of cameras.

It's taking tens of thousands of pictures every minute.

The pictures are analysed and because it's mainly brown

and green glass that we're after for our liqueur bottles,

most of the clear stuff is ejected by jets of air.

The speed at which that must be happening is mind-blowing.

Oh, look at this!

This is your glass to make our brown liqueur bottles.

But I spotted a bit of clear and blue.

How is this going to make a brown bottle?

That's allowed. As long as it's predominantly brown, it's OK.

Because what will happen is, this will all be melted down

and then they will add a dye that will turn it into your typically

dark brown liqueur bottle.

Our filtered and sorted glass is loaded into a waiting lorry.

From here, it travels 95 miles north into Northern Ireland

to the Encirc bottle making plant in Fermanagh.

Here, it's combined with sand, soda ash and limestone

and dyed to give it that rich dark brown shade.

Then it's melted at 1,230 degrees Celsius,

cut into 445 gram gobs and blown into moulds.

Just seven seconds later,

our bottles emerge.

And there we have it!

A beautiful, brand-new, brown bottle.

Just to think, only a few days ago. the glass in this bottle

would have been lying at the bottom of someone's recycle bin.

In Dublin, more than 10,000 of these bottles are ready to be filled

with 7,500 litres of our Irish cream liqueur.

Overseeing the process is line manager Kiera Clowry.

Kiera! How are you?

Very good. Great.

I want you to teach me about bottling.

Why are they dark, right?

Because you're making a cream liqueur,

which isn't unattractive,

but you can't see in with a dark bottle.

The reason for that is that UV light can actually damage

the cream liqueur inside. Ah!

So, by using the dark bottle, we protect the cream liqueur

and prolong the shelf-life.

Our factor 50 bottles trundle into a depalletiser,

which bunches each layer firmly together using a hydraulic press,

then slides them - 176 at a time - onto a conveyor belt.

But it all seems a rather slow process.

Hang on, Kiera.

That's not very fast, is it?

Because of the shape of the bottle, they're quite top-heavy

and we don't want them to tip over once they've been depalletised.

They will get faster? Absolutely.

You wouldn't lie to me, would you? Never.

Sure enough, once in single file, they begin to build up speed,

The inside of each one is blasted with a jet of sterile air,

which ensures they're perfectly clean

and they're ready to meet our cream liqueur.

What's happening?

So, this is where we fill the bottles.

That's it? All those processes, all that testing, the all-clear,

that is now going in a bottle?

Our liqueur is pumped along pipes in the ceiling

at a rate of 9,000 litres an hour

and into the top of the filler.

Each bottle is lifted up by a piston in the rotating carousel...

..and forced against the filler heads,

which pump 700ml into every one.

So, at any one time, how many bottles are actually being filled?

The line runs at 250 bottles a minute.

But each bottle is being filled in about three and a half seconds.

But how does it do it?

It can't just pour it in because at that speed,

it would bounce back up again. You're absolutely right.

We have a specially designed nozzle.

It fills in a really special way.

The liquid flows along the top of the bottle, along the inside,

and then fills from the bottom up.

It takes just 14 minutes to pump our 7,500 litre batch of liqueur

into 10,714 bottles.

Then it's on to the capper.

So we've got eight capping heads.

Each of those is capping 30 bottles a minute.

How is it doing that?!

That's too fast - I can't even see what it's doing.

So, the aluminium caps are coming down the chute

and it goes all the way onto the bottle.

Under the capping head.

If you look at the bottle,

it already has the thread in the bottle itself.

So when the cap is placed on top,

the pressure of the capper actually presses the cap into those recesses.

And that's how you get your threads worn. Gotcha.

So the machine is basically moulding the cap to the shape of the bottle.

Absolutely.

Precious cargo sealed inside,

labels are applied to the front, back and neck of each bottle.

How fast is it sticking labels on?

It's still 250 bottles a minute.

The same as it was over there, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, I feel a bit silly now. Not at all. OK!

More than three years, three days

and ten hours after production began...

..our bottles of cream liqueur are packed into cases of 12...

..stacked onto pallets...

..and taken to the distribution area.

In charge is dispatch manager Dennis Minahan.

Hello, Dennis. Hi, Gregg.

Good to meet you. You too.

Right, I love you guys

because you have all the crazy facts and figures. Yeah!

Tell me how much is on there.

How many pallets?

There's 33 pallets go into that container, Gregg.

45 cases per pallet, which is 1,485 cases. Right.

With 12 by 700ml bottles per case,

which is 17,820 bottles.

Right, I knew you'd know it! I absolutely knew...

I'm guessing Christmas sales are the biggest sales.

Am I right?

Well, the plant here is busy all year round.

But the lead-up to Christmas will be the busiest time of the year.

How long have you worked here, Dennis?

I've worked here 40 years, Gregg.

Since you were ten years old?! Short pants, let's say!

12 lorry loads of cream liqueur leave here every day.

With bottles heading all over the world.

Americans are the biggest drinkers,

getting through 13 million litres a year.

Followed by us Brits,

then the Germans.

Well, making a cream liqueur

is a lot more complicated than I first thought.

And two things really surprised me.

One is we don't make whiskey, we just make spirit.

It's the barrel that turns it into whiskey.

And cream and alcohol do not mix.

It takes a great deal of know-how

and a fair amount of science to make them happily blend.

Bit like me and Cherry.