A Week on the Estate: Storm Christoph, Shy Birds & Angelica’s Purification

Damian Furlong also returned to his (almost) invisible home-from-home, the camouflaged woodland hide. His neighbours are mostly getting used to him now, but the nuthatch remains wary and won’t sit still for the camera. Leah Furlong took the picture of the week with a fine study of a goldcrest.

At the Massingberd-Mundy Distillery, Tristan Jørgensen shared some of the inner workings of his 120L still, Angelica (named in honour of Angelica Kauffman who painted Charles Burrell’s first wife, Ann Blackall in the late 18^th-century). The still has a six-plate column which serves to purify waste spirit and improve its ABV. Varying significantly between distilleries, the column consists of a series of plates or trays, each of which creates its own wee distillation process. Each of these small sub-distillations purifies the vapour and strips out its flavours, resulting in a neutral spirit with a higher ABV than pot-stilled spirit. A video clip of this process can be found at the Massingberd-Mundy Facebook page.

Finally, we’re delighted to bring you the third instalment of ‘Our Days’, courtesy of Sarah Billings. Sarah grew up in the Old Rectory in the 1970s while her father, the Reverend Canon Peter Fluck, tended his rural parish. The family’s neighbour at South Ormsby Hall, Adrian Massingberd-Mundy, kept his lake stocked with trout and taught Sarah’s brothers to fly-fish. Trout wasn’t the only fresh food on the menu as the Old Rectory had a cow called Charlotte, as well as goats, chickens and rabbits with a barn to house them.