Max has the air of a man who knows stuff. A man who gets things done. If you need to know something about anything at Jackton Distilling, you find Max. He knows how to fix it, where to find it, or how it works.
No operation can be an operation without someone like Max.
And Max isn’t even his real name.
His real name is Kris.
“There were three Chris’s here 20 years ago, and it was too confusing, and my last name is McAneny, so I just became Max. It works. I like it.”
He makes a good point.
My first name is Chris, and nobody, ever, anywhere calls me Chris. I’m Greta. Yeah, a big bald guy with a name like a nine-year-old German girl is wrong on plenty of levels, but that’s how it is.
The moral of that story is, don’t name your kid Chris because he/she will probably be called something else so just call them that instead.
So Max took me out of Kilbride (don’t know the origin of the name, but probably nothing to do with a dead newly betrothed) and we went to some of the barley fields that will become whisky.
The grain grows on their fields, then into the great harvester, then into the mill, then the mash tun, then the still, then the bottle, then the glass ten years down the line, and the rest goes into the cows.
Everyone wins. Be glad you’re not a cow. While they get a warm place to sleep in the winter and a nice snack, you get the whisky, which is the best part of the deal.
But back to Max. He’s the kind of guy you know you can trust and the kind of guy who will always know what needs to be done.
You can’t have a farm or a distillery or a movie studio without someone with his competence.
People who make whisky are good people, and they’re doing the rest of us a big favor.
Thanks, Max. Or Kris.
And thanks, cows, for not keeping the good part of the barley.
But wait.
I had to come back to this almost a week later.
As I was photographing the distillery, I asked Matt, the distiller, how they’d figured out how to put all this together.
Everything is perfect. Everything is laid out logically, with just enough room for each piece of equipment, every hose and pipe and electrical conduit laid out perfectly, logically, neatly.
He said Max.
Wait… What?
Max who does almost everything laid this all out?
So I had to track him down again and ask… WTF dude.
It’s true. He researched the best equipment and worked with the vendors for the layout. For the perfect still, he picked a German Kothe still. The company is family owned and builds incredibly high quality stills.
He also installed The Hungarian Mystery Still.
That’s not the real name. That’s my name. But it got that because there are some trade secret goings on inside the big, beautiful and complex Haygo still that the builders won’t share with anyone.
“We’re pretty sure we’ve figured it out, but we’d have to tear it all apart to really know. Whatever magic it’s doing is worth it though. It can distill to a perfect 96% ABV and creates an excellent spirit for vodka or gin.”
They can even produce their own beer and I’ve tried it. It’s fantastic.
So in one family-owned distillery, they can do everything from beer to whisky to vodka to gin and do it all extraordinarily well.
And all in one place. The first time. Sure, there were a lot of hickups and unforseen problems but they all worked together and turned into an efficient and beautiful machine.
And Max is so damned humble about it that if I hadn’t pestered everyone else, I might never have known.
Honestly, if I was smart enough to set up a distillery like this, I’d be telling total strangers, random cats and every lizard I met what I’d accomplished.
The Jackton Whisky Miracle has a lot of parts, and Max is certainly one of them.
