Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales

by Gavin D. Smith

  ‘If anything broke down on the croft you would have to go to Inverness for welding in the old days. Then some guys came up from Lancashire and started doing welding locally. People are so well off by comparison and the community spirit is better. When you get work it creates independence. When I was in school you’d have patches on your trousers, and people in their seventies don’t look old now, the way they used to. The standard of living is much better. I’d hate to go back to the old days!’

  CHAPTER 2

  Boyo Norquoy – Distillery Worker, Highland Park

  IF HEBRIDEAN ISLES SUCH AS SKYE feature placenames of Gaelic derivation then the Orkney and Shetland islands to the north of the Scottish mainland are peppered with locations betraying Scandinavian origins – ‘holm’ for a haven or safe anchorage, ‘wick’ or ‘goe’ for inlet. Such words reflect the Nordic heritage of the islands, which belonged to Norway until the mid-15th century, with as many Norwegian flags as Scottish ones being flown from houses in the principal ports of Kirkwall and Stromness during international football tournaments!

  Orkney boasts a wealth of prehistoric treasures, including the Ring of Brodgar, The Standing Stones of Stenness and Maeshowe, while the islands’ more recent history is graphically represented by the surviving hulks of ships sunk to form barriers across Scapa Flow in order to protect allied shipping located there during two world wars. So strategically important was Orkney in the Second World War that 60,000 troops were posted into a community of 20,000 residents.

  Orkney actually comprises some 70 islands in total, 20 of which are inhabited, and much of the land is very fertile, meaning that agriculture remains an important element in the local economy, along with fishing. The late Orcadian poet and novelist George Mackay Brown – who lived in a house built on the site of the old Stromness Distillery, which closed in 1928 – described Orcadians as essentially ‘ ... fishermen with ploughs.’

  Orkney is also well known for its whisky, with two operational distilleries located within three miles of each other. Scapa Distillery dates from 1885, is owned by Chivas Brothers Ltd and takes its name from the maritime feature beside which it stands, but there is nothing Norse about the name of the more famous of the two whisky-making plants. Highland Park could be situated anywhere in the northern half of Scotland. However, the distillery is one of the oldest in the country, dating from 1798, and is located – appropriately on high ground – just to the south of the island capital of Kirkwall, which over the years has spread out to meet the distillery.

  Highland Park was constructed on a site where local church officer Magnus Eunson had previously operated an illicit still, hiding kegs of his whisky beneath the church pulpit, according to local legend! Having been owned from 1895 to 1937 by James Grant, Highland Park was then acquired by Highland Distilleries, and is now in the hands of The Edrington Group, which also has The Macallan single malt and The Famous Grouse and Cutty Sark blends in its portfolio.

  Like Talisker from Skye, Highland Park single malt has a unique, though entirely different, ‘island’ character. Part of Highland Park’s distinctive profile is based on the exclusive use of ex-sherry casks for single malt bottlings, while the fact that it remains one of only a handful of distilleries in Scotland which continues to make a percentage of its own malt on traditional floor maltings, is also influential.

  The peat used in the Highland Park kilns is notably aromatic, and very different from that employed on the ‘whisky island’ of Islay. While Islay boasted trees several thousand years ago, and their remains were ultimately incorporated into the island’s peat, Orcadian peat is derived from heather, dried grass and plants, as there were no trees on Orkney 3,000 years ago, just as there are very few now, due to the frequent, strong winds that are a feature of the area. Peat is crucial to the prevailing profile of Highland Park, and the distillery owns 2,000 acres of peat land on Hobbister Moor, annually cutting some 200 tonnes to fire the distillery furnace and impart its unique flavour.

  Just as maltman and mashman Norman is inextricably linked with his native island of Skye and with Talisker Distillery, so Boyo Norquoy is part and parcel of Orkney and of Highland Park. Principally employed as a stillman until his retirement, his role followed that of mashman in the sequence of malt whisky production.

  Distillation – This follows the process of fermentation in whisky making. During distillation the alcohol is separated from the wash by heating it in stills. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water and is driven off as vapour, leaving behind the water. It is subsequently condensed back into liquid form. Malt Scotch whisky distillation comprises two consecutive distillations in copper pot stills, the first, which takes place in the wash still, produces ‘low wines,’ which are then re-distilled in the spirit still to produce a stronger spirit, ready to be filled into casks for maturation.

  Born and bred in Kirkwall, ‘Boyo’ declares that, ‘My actual name is Christie, but I’ve been called Boyo all my life. My sister, who is two years older than me, couldn’t pronounce Christie, and she called me Boyo and it stuck. Even the teachers at school called me Boyo.’

  The Norse influence that permeates most island place names has also shaped many common Orcadian surnames, such as Isbister, Flett and Norquoy. ‘There’ve been many generations of Norquoys born in the islands, right enough,’ confirms Boyo. Just as in Skye, and so many other Scottish island and remote coastal communities, the sea has traditionally offered a means of escape to new horizons and new opportunities, and Orkney has a long heritage of involvement with the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose ships regularly stopped over in the islands to take on supplies and recruit labour.

  Remarkably, by the late 18th century, three-quarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company workforce in Canada were Orcadians. In 1799, of the 530 men working in the Hudson’s Bay Company post in North America, no fewer than 416 were from Orkney. ‘My father’s brother went to Canada around 70 or 80 years ago,’ says Boyo Norqouy, ‘and I’ve lots of cousins over in Canada still. Orkney was all about farming and fishing then.’

  After school, aged 14, Boyo entered the butchering business and then worked for 17 years in a bacon curer’s, followed by a period with the butcher Jonty Flett, until his business closed. ‘After that I got a job at Highland Park in 1974,’ he says, ‘though there were no family distilling connections before I started to work at the distillery. It began with six weeks in the cooperage and warehouses – repairing casks and moving casks full of spirit in and out of the warehouses as required.’ The usual progression for workers was from the warehouse squad into the malting operation and then into mashing, but Boyo missed out those ‘intermediate’ stages. ‘One day the brewer asked if I would like a full-time job in the stillhouse,’ he notes, ‘and I said yes.’

  Highland Park is equipped with two pairs of stills, and the distillery can produce up to 2.5 million litres of spirit per year. ‘Nowadays the stillhouse is computerised,’ observes Boyo. ‘The operator just pushes a button to make it work. When I was at the stills you had to control them manually, though they had been converted from coal-firing to oil during the 1960s, as in most distilleries. You would get the wash piped through from the tun room [where fermentation had taken place] and you filled the wash stills with that. You boiled it, got it settled and running nice and cool for gentle spirit. When you were boiling wash you had to make sure you didn’t get it boiling over the top. It must be boiling steadily, with vapour going over and condensing. If you drove the still too hard the wash would go over the lyne arm into the condenser.

  ‘The low wines were pumped into the low wines and feints tank, and then you got the low wines stills running. We never ran the stills above ten litres per minute – which was quite a slow speed compared to some other distillers – but it made the spirit much less fiery. If it was fiery when it was new then it would probably still be fiery when it was old! You would run the foreshots for as long as you thought you needed to – and you turned the spirit flow on and off by hand. You had a pride in
your job. You worked with temperature and strength – using a hydrometer and thermometer. The strength determined your length of run. You cut when the temperature and strength coincided, according to a chart in the stillhouse.

  ‘You would use controls to regulate the temperature, and you would lower it if there was hot weather, because that would make a difference. The best spirit was made in cold weather; the colder the better. Highland Park has condensers located outside the still house, and the water in them was obviously colder in winter. Then you got a less fiery new make spirit – you could smell the difference.’

  When it came to working practices, he notes that, ‘You did six am till two pm, two pm till ten pm and night shift in the stillhouse, and then one week in four you were off shift work helping out in the malting and warehouses. That was a lot harder work than the stillhouse!’

  However, there was always the traditional reward of a ‘dram’ by way of compensation. ‘One of the big changes in my time in the industry was the end of dramming. You got a dram at lunchtime and at teatime, and the brewer at Highland Park always gave us a good mature dram. I didn’t always go for the mature dram because it tended to give me heartburn, but when I drank the clearic or “spike” as it was known, that never gave me heartburn.

  ‘When the distillery was closed during the annual “silent season” for maintenance and so on and there was no new-make to drink, we would go into the filling store, open up the pump that was used to fill casks and empty the spirit out of the sump! The Customs guys thought that if you were drammed you wouldn’t take any whisky for yourselves. But this wasn’t true, of course!’

  Like most distillery workers, Boyo has some colourful tales to tell of the various and ingenious ruses used to ‘liberate’ whisky. ‘One guy was heading home one day from working in the warehouse and the brewer was driving by,’ he recalls. ‘So he stopped and offered him a lift. The guy said it was okay, he wife was coming to pick him up. Actually, he had two big lemonade bottles of whisky out of the warehouse strapped to his waist and he couldn’t sit down!’

  Highland Park boasts 23 on-site warehouses, holding some 46,500 casks at any one time. Not surprisingly, these apparently impregnable structures have sometimes been a target for thirsty distillery worker determined to extract an extra dram or two from their employers.

  ‘There used to be some guys who would get up onto the roof of one of the warehouses,’ remembers Boyo. ‘They would edge open a skylight by pulling back the soft lead around it, put down a pipe and ease out the soft bung from a cask with the end of the pipe. They’d sook the whisky up the pipe and into a tin on the rooftop, then ease the bung back in, put the glass on the skylight back into place, push the soft lead back around it. Nobody ever knew they’d been up there!

  ‘In the cooperages you had “dippers” or “dogs” and you’d pull so much out of a cask, and have a dog in your pocket and a bottle or a half-bottle to fill. You wore a “brattie” – a warehouse cooper’s apron that was like a sack – and you made it hang to hide the shape of the bottle.’

  At that time, every distillery was allocated at least one resident excise officer, who was charged with accounting for every drop of spirit produced, as it was liable to excise duty, and governments have always been keen to extract as much money as possible from the Scotch whisky industry.

  ‘You were pretty sure the Customs and Excise guys knew what was going on,’ says Boyo, ‘and the customs man would no doubt have his own drop. But there was no sense of it ever being sold by anyone – it was just for your own consumption.

  ‘We went inside the boilers during the closed season, chipping off hard, burnt oil with a chipping hammer, and you got a “stourie” dram, or a “dirty dram” as it was sometimes known, for doing that, in addition to your usual drams. Sometimes you would get dirt from one of the contractors doing something at the distillery and rub it on your face, and you’d go to the brewer and get a dirty dram by saying it was very hard work – even though you hadn’t been doing it!’

  Even in the stillhouse it was possible to augment accepted dramming practices, with Boyo noting that, ‘We had a wee “pull” of white spirit now and again. You could get it out of the spirit safe. You got a wee tube and you fed it in through a corner of the safe and into the sample jar – you would just sook it out. We would fill small bottles to take away sometimes. And the other guys working on night shift came down and had a dram of it with you.’

  Most distillery workers have a favourite ‘legal’ expression of the whisky that they help to produce, but Boyo says that, ‘I always drank new-make or vodka, then when I’d been retired from the distillery for three years I took a job as a lollipop man at the school crossing. I knew everybody, of course, and one day a woman gave me a bottle of Three Barrels brandy as a thank-you for cheering people up each day. I had a dram and didn’t get any heartburn. So now I have three or four drams of brandy every night. I find Tesco’s own brand in a plastic bottle is good.’

  Asked to nominate the principal changes he has seen during his career in the Scotch whisky industry, Boyo singles out the cessation of dramming, and the introduction of computers into the workplace.

  ‘I retired at fifty-eight,’ he notes, ‘when computers and multi-skilling were coming in. Now the guys do malting, mashing and distillation. I’ve been retired ten years and I breed fancy pigeons, which I’ve been doing for more than sixty years.’

  Another significant difference that Boyo observes on the whisky scene is the rise to prominence of single malts during the past two or three decades. Today, around 75% of all Highland Park produced is reserved for single-malt bottling rather than for blending, and the extensive range of single malts on offer embraces 12- to 50-year-olds, along with many limited edition and travel retail-exclusive expressions.

  ‘When I started work at Highland Park the only single malt was a tenyear-old,’ says Boyo. ‘A great deal of it went into the Famous Grouse blend. Then people became aware of single malts and there are a colossal lot of whiskies around now.’

  Like Norman Morrison on Skye, Boyo has seen many changes on Orkney during his lifetime, but he is less positive about some of them than his Hebridean counterpart.

  ‘There’s been a growth in the amount of housing on Orkney and lots of incomers,’ declares Boyo. ‘But the population isn’t up any. There are 550 people living on the island of Sanday, and only a hundred are Orcadians. You lose tradition and you lose culture. People who move to new places always want to change things. But I always say there are two things they can’t change in Kirkwall – the pipe band and ‘The Ba’.’

  ‘The Ba’ is officially titled ‘The Kirkwall Ba’ Game’ and follows an ancient tradition of such sporting events, which are staged in location from the Northern Isles to the Scottish Borders and beyond. ‘The Ba’ is one of the highlights of the Kirkwall social calendar, taking place on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, and the mass football match features the rival ‘Uppie’s and ‘Doonies’, with up to 200 people battling for their respective teams.

  Without Boyo and his contemporaries, Highland Park Distillery is undoubtedly a less entertaining place to work, as he and selected colleagues had a fondness for practical jokes, ‘ ... to liven up the place a bit.’

  ‘One of the people I worked with was Ian Tulloch,’ he recalls. ‘Now, there’s an intercom in the stillhouse for guides to use during tours, and Ian could imitate a fire alarm very accurately. One day when I was on duty in the stillhouse he came in and did it through the intercom. People appeared from everywhere. It cleared all the buildings! The manager wasn’t impressed and said it wasn’t his sense of humour. I was shop steward of the union, and despite him shouting I refused to tell him who had done it.

  ‘There’s a display of casks in one of the warehouses where guides take visitors to explain to them about the use of ex-sherry casks and so on, and one day a guide was doing this when Ian leaps up from under the last barrel in the row and runs off!’

  Another particula
rly memorable ploy involving Ian Tulloch and Boyo took place one Christmas several years ago. ‘The visitor centre was open in the evening,’ says Boyo, ‘and Ian dressed as an old woman with a tweed coat and skirt and headscarf, while I dressed in old clothes and a cap. We went in and went round the shop complaining loudly about the prices and generally causing a bit of a stir, and we could see in the mirrors all the staff watching and whispering to each other. They had no idea who we were, until finally one of them realised and they threw us out!’

  CHAPTER 3

  Jim Cryle – The Glenlivet

  ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS NAMES in the world of Scotch whisky is Glenlivet. Not only is The Glenlivet the second-bestselling single malt whisky in the world and the leader in the USA, but the brand and its distillery are at the very heart of Scotch whisky’s remarkable heritage.

  Glenlivet is a remote and wildly beautiful area of north-east Scotland, within the Speyside region of malt whisky production, where around half of all Scotland’s malt distilleries are to be found today. Glenlivet was famous for the quality and abundance of its illicit whisky long before George Smith made history by being the first person in the area to take out a licence in the wake of the influential 1823 Excise Act, which made distilling an altogether more attractive commercial proposition in the Highlands. Indeed, Smith’s family had been making whisky on their farm at Upper Drumin in Glenlivet since 1774, so they were not exactly novices at the game.

  What George Smith did have to contend with, however, was the hostility of his neighbours, who did not share Smith’s enthusiasm for legal distilling. A local landowner, the Laird of Aberlour presented Smith with a pair of hair-trigger pistols with which to protect himself and his distillery, and as Smith later recalled, ‘I got together two or three stout fellows for servants, armed them with pistols and let it be known everywhere that I would fight for my place to the last shot.’