One brand, eleven ways in

We began as the visitor programme attached to the plant, which meant one tour, twice a day, mostly for schools. The tour still runs. Everything else grew out of people asking questions the tour did not have time for — what is actually in it, why does it taste different abroad, what happened to all the soda fountains — and eventually it was easier to build an experience around each question than to keep answering them at the gate.

So the catalogue is uneven on purpose. A ninety-minute tasting flight sits beside a three-hour axe session in a basement, and the only thread connecting them is that somebody here knows the subject well enough to spend an hour on it without notes.

Numbers are kept low almost everywhere. Three people at the tasting bench, five on the bottling floor, one group at a time in the vault. The exception is the fire festival, which takes several hundred and is supposed to.