Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales

by Gavin D. Smith

  As well as adding a second, replica pair of stills, John was also responsible for introducing a third pair, which are as different in style to the originals as it is possible to get. ‘We put them in during 1998 and they were my attempt to make a heavier and more traditional malt whisky. They are traditional-style pot stills, and we make a very heavy spirit in them, using Anchor dried yeast, which gives a weighty, estery spirit.

  ‘We also make heavily peated spirit in them at times. This is all for blending purposes, except for very small amounts which are released occasionally in our Distillery Select series, when we call it Inchfad. It matures well in three years, despite being heavier than most of our spirit.’

  Not content with these additions to the Loch Lomond distilling dynamic, John installed another still in 2008, and this was to prove somewhat controversial, to say the least. ‘It is a continuous still which consists of two copper columns, encased in stainless steel. It was installed to make malt spirit and it can turn out more than the six pot stills together – around two million litres a year. We installed it simply because we needed to double output and there was no room for another six pot stills! This was the solution.’

  Addressing the contentious nature of the new still, the mild-mannered, golf and piano-playing Peterson adopts an air of bemusement, saying that, ‘It was put in around the time when the Scotch Whisky Association revised its definitions relating to Scotch whisky, which declared that malt whisky must be made in pot stills. It was all about the use of “traditional practice” in relation to distilling methods. Most malt whisky is made in what are essentially large factories, so what is “traditional” about that? Around twenty per cent of the malt in our blends comes from the continuous still, and if we want to bottle it as it stands we have to label it “Scotch grain whisky made from one hundred per cent malted barley.”

  ‘It’s made in Scotland, it tastes like malt whisky, it’s matured in Scotland for a minimum of three years in oak casks. It patently is malt whisky. It also saves a great deal of energy and is a very “green” way of distilling. One SWA objection is that it enabled us to make malt whisky much more cheaply than our rivals, and was somehow underhand.

  ‘When we consulted our lawyers an advocate said that we were obviously right, but that the whole issue hinged on the contents of the 1909 Royal Commission findings. He told us we wouldn’t win, so we didn’t pursue it. The SWA said that how the whisky tasted was irrelevant. Presumably then you can make terrible whisky, provided it is “traditional”. The SWA are Luddites.’

  Unsurprisingly, Loch Lomond Distillery Company Ltd is not a member of the Scotch Whisky Association!

  PART TWO

  Into the Wood

  CHAPTER 8

  Douglas Yeats – Cooper, Perth

  PERTH IS A SETTLEMENT WITH ancient origins and royal heritage, centrally located between the Lowlands and the Highlands of Scotland. ‘The Fair City’ of Perth was therefore perfectly placed during the 19th century to capitalise on the burgeoning popularity of blended Scotch whisky, particularly as the spread of the Victorian rail network furnished it with very good transport links. Perth stood between the many distilleries of the Highlands and the markets of the Lowlands, England and beyond, and it soon became a notable locus for blending and bottling.

  Perth was really put on the whisky map by three principal, rival companies, namely Arthur Bell & Sons, John Dewar & Sons and Matthew Gloag & Son of ‘The Famous Grouse’ fame. Of the three only Gloag, now incorporated into The Edrington Group, retains a presence in the city, having moved to purpose-built offices at West Kinfauns on the outskirts of Perth in 1996. Now part of Bermuda-based Bacardi Limited, John Dewar & Sons remains active in the county of Perthshire through its Aberfeldy Distillery and associated ‘Dewar’s World of Whisky’ visitor centre.

  The story of Dewar’s is a fascinating one, with John Dewar, born near Aberfeldy, walking the 30 miles to Perth in 1828, aged 23, to work in a relative’s wine merchants, before going on to open his own wine and spirits business in 1846, beginning to blend whiskies during the 1860s.

  In the hands of John Dewar’s two sons, John and Tommy Dewar, the firm thrived, with Dewar’s ultimately becoming the bestselling blended Scotch whisky in the USA, a status it retains to this day. Tommy Dewar is renowned as one of the most colourful characters in the history of Scotch whisky, noted for his ‘Dewarisms’ such as, ‘A teetotaller is one who suffers from thirst instead of enjoying it.’ In 1892 he set off on a two-year sales tour of the world. By the time he returned he had spent the vast sum of £14,000 (almost £1.25m in today’s money) but had established relations with 33 agents in 26 countries, and opened a branch of the firm in New York.

  Flamboyant and with a great knack for self-publicity, which did sales of the company whiskies no harm at all, Tommy Dewar was effortlessly at home in the highest of society and was known for the phrase, ‘If you do not advertise, you fossilize.’ With this in mind, he was responsible for the first-ever motion picture advert for a drink, filmed by Edison in 1898. The film of dancing, kilted and quite possibly intoxicated Scotsmen was projected onto a building in New York’s Herald Square and literally managed to stop the traffic!

  From 1925 until its acquisition by Bacardi in 1998, John Dewar & Sons Ltd was part of the DCL and its successors, United Distillers and Diageo.

  So much for the corporate story, but what about Dewar’s on a more personal level? Husband and wife couple Douglas and Jeanette Yeats were both born in Perth at a time when several members of many families still worked for either Dewar’s or Bell’s. Douglas’ sister, Helen, was employed in Dewar’s bottling hall which was part of the company’s Glasgow Road/Glover Street complex, where Dewar’s landmark East Bond Warehouse had stood beside the railway tracks since 1912. Douglas says that, ‘Jeanette, like many local girls, also went to work in the bottling hall after leaving school. Eventually, she was transferred into the bottling hall offices and became an export clerkess.’

  Douglas was the son of a post office worker who had previously served in the Black Watch, the local regiment, which had its headquarters in Perth’s Balhousie Castle, now the regimental museum. The Black Watch was a ‘family’ regiment, just as Dewar’s and Bell’s were ‘family’ blenders, with both achieving loyal support from several generations of local families.

  ‘Growing up, there was a real sense that Perth was a whisky town,’ says Douglas. ‘Perth was at the hub of the wheel, if you like; a great geographical centre. The bulk of whisky came in by road from the Highland distilleries during my time. Dewar’s was very family-orientated – you would get whole families employed by them. You would find mother and father worked there and perhaps a son and a sister, and you would get brothers together in the cooperage.

  ‘When I left school I got a job as an apprentice cooper, based in Glover Street. The place was dirty and old, with wooden floors. I started at sixteen in 1958 and did labouring to harden me up, as it were, for what was to come. Today, they are all what I call “mechanical coopers”, because so many of the processes are automated. When I started, your hammer and your “driver’ were your main tools. It was heavy manual labour.

  ‘It was a five-year apprenticeship, during which you were attached to a “journeyman”, and you were his apprentice. Essentially, what you were doing was repairing barrels. Casks came in empty, they were checked for defects and you cannibalised others for staves to repair them where necessary. Rebuilding casks only came later when they started importing Bourbon casks from the USA. By law they had to come into the country broken down into “shooks” [component parts].’

  Douglas remembers that, ‘On my first day as an apprentice, my journeyman said to me that the initial thing you did when a cask came in was to put it up on end – there was always a chance there would be a wee dram still in it for me. One day we found four gallons of sherry in a butt that had come in from Cadiz in Spain. First-fill sherry casks like that were highly prized by the company.’

  He explains
that, ‘Coopering was a very well-paid job. You were on piece work, for one thing. You were much better paid than the guys who worked in the distilleries. You could just about double your standard forty-hour week. But it was hard toil in the cooperage – you were well paid but you certainly worked for your money! There were incentives – you would get paid a bonus if you worked fast and handled more casks.’

  Even today, when an apprentice becomes a fully-fledged cooper there is an informal ceremony during which he is usually rolled around the cooperage in a barrel, having first been covered in a variety of unpleasant substances. In the past, such ceremonies could result in newly-qualified coopers sporting black eyes and even gashes to their faces, but Douglas says that in the case of Dewar’s, ‘We would cover him in chalk and sawdust and roll him round the cooperage in a barrel, but it was never anything too hazardous. Though in some places there could be rough initiations.’

  The period from 1959 onwards saw the development of a new bottling hall and blending centre for John Dewar & Sons Ltd at Inveralmond, to the west of the city of Perth, with a gradual transfer of equipment and employees being completed during 1962.

  When it opened, Inveralmond was the most modern and productive facility of its kind in Scotland, and while seven bottling lines at Glasgow Road produced up to 1.2 million cases per year, at Inveralmond there were ultimately 22 bottling lines, capable of turning out almost four times as much whisky.

  ‘The cooperage transferred to Inveralmond around 1962,’ recalls Douglas, ‘though they kept the big East Bond warehouse for storage after Inveralmond opened, and I had to go down from time to time to check for “leakers” and for slack hoops which needed tightening. That was the time when ex-Bourbon casks were first coming in. You had to re-assemble them and put new ends in. You had to make them a new, bigger size. We were taking them up to fifty-four gallons – hogsheads. They came in as a bundle of staves at American barrel size [around 44 gallons]. You raised them up; you brought them back to life again.

  ‘Previously, they had used mainly ex-sherry casks and some port pipes. The sherry casks we got came in as first-fills, not having previously contained Scotch whisky. They went off to Highland Park or wherever – they went to the malt distilleries to be filled.’

  Douglas explains that, ‘At Inveralmond I became a “journeyman” – I did two years ‘on the bench’ as they called it. I was sent over to work in the bond side of the operation when I was twenty-three because I didn’t drink, and there had been problems with some of the guys working in the bond drinking far too much! It was just too tempting. Finally, I ended up as foreman cooper. As a “bond cooper” my job was to check casks to make sure there were no leaks, no damage at all. There was a blending floor in the bond. Casks came in from various distilleries by lorry and by train. They had their own train, with wagons being shunted in off the main line into a siding on the site.

  ‘They brought in casks of Highland Park, Glenfarclas and lots of grain whisky, which came from all over Scotland. The first time I saw Highland Park it was a rich mahogany colour. They always wanted first-fill sherry casks for use in the Dewar’s blend. The front office sent through orders for empty barrels for Highland Park, Linkwood and so on, to be used in five to ten years’ time.’

  The bond at Inveralmond contained between 2,000 and 3,000 casks of whisky that had been blended and then re-casked. ‘The individual casks of whisky were disgorged into vats in the warehouse, it was aerated to thoroughly mix it and reduced in strength to seventy degrees proof,’ says Douglas. ‘It was then either re-casked or pumped directly to the bottling hall vats, depending on circumstances. Deluxe blended whiskies, like Ancestor, which was a blend of older whiskies, would be left in cask to mature for a while longer.

  ‘Once the casks had been disgorged their ends were painted to show that they had been used once, and they were sent out as refill casks, unless they needed repair, in which case they went into the cooperage before being painted. Various companies used different colours – and Dewar’s painted their cask ends a reddish-maroon colour. I had to examine the casks and see whether they were up to maturing whisky for another four to five years.’

  ‘Sometimes you would do a specific Islay blend. All the Islays would be brought together and blended ready to be used in blended whiskies. You would only use something like two or three per cent of the Islay mix in a blend.’

  No longer a non-drinker these days, Douglas has a fondness for whisky with a hint of Islay character to it, and his personal preference is for Dewar’s old Perth rival – Bell’s. ‘The current version of Bell’s has quite a strong Islay element to it, compared to lots of blends now, and that’s what I drink,’ he explains. ‘I like the distinctive flavour of it.’

  Compared to the basic conditions that had prevailed in the old Glover Street cooperage, Inveralmond represented a great improvement. ‘In the bond you had a dedicated sweeper, and you also had a stone floor,’ says Douglas. ‘But it was all still manual, however. These days, coopers have mechanical hoop-drivers to save lots of the hard work and other such things.’

  The modern equivalent to cooperages like that at Inveralmond is Diageo’s state-of-the-art site at Cambus in Central Scotland, where all of the company’s coopering activities have been concentrated since its opening in 2011. There 250,000 casks are processed each year, and the sort of robot-style technology more usually seen in car-making plants removes much of the heavy manual labour from the day to day lives of the coopers. Cambus employs 40 coopers out of the 200 currently working in the UK. As recently as the late 1980s the number was closer to 2,500.

  Back in the days when Douglas was growing up, wooden barrels were still used to store and transport a wide variety of goods, including beer, and Perth was home to many coopers. He notes that, ‘Coopers transferred from Bell’s to Dewar’s and vice versa, and also to and from Wright’s Brewery [which closed in 1961], which used oak casks in the days before metal kegs replaced them.’

  Recalling the Inveralmond operation, Douglas says that, ‘At one time there were fifteen hundred people employed on the site. There were more than fifty just in the cooperage, including labourers. In the bond casks were stacked on top of each other and you had a mechanical lift to move them up and down. You had two rows of casks – one on top of the other. You had puncheons of one hundred and eight to one hundred and ten gallons, which were easier to handle and store. They were used for Islay blends, for Dewar’s Ancestor and for the surplus from various blends. In those days Dewar’s was in competition with the Johnnie Walker and White Horse blends, despite also being part of the DCL.’

  While Douglas spent his time working with casks, most Inveralmond employees worked with bottles. ‘The bottling hall was semi-automated at Inveralmond,’ he notes. ‘There were men at the end of the lines stacking cartons full of bottles onto pallets. The lines were mainly staffed by women, but with male engineers attached to the lines. Women would sit behind a screen, checking for defects and contaminants. They took turns doing that, because you could only really concentrate properly on it for an hour or so at a time. A squint label was not acceptable.

  ‘The bottles came down the line already filled, capped and labelled, and the women manually put the bottles once checked into cartons. A woman was in charge of each line, making sure there were plenty of caps and labels and so forth for the machines.’

  While today’s Scotch whisky industry employs a significant and increasing number of women in production roles, until not too long ago if you visited a distillery and saw a female employee, the chances were that she would be typing letters or making tea. The bottling halls of the central belt were another matter entirely, however, with female staff traditionally dominating bottling operations, and often enjoying a fearsome reputation.

  Strong men who could hold their own in most situations quaked at the prospect of entering the women’s domain, and Douglas remembers that, ‘When I was at Glover Street there was a washhouse, where used bottles were put into machines
and washed with jets of water. Doing it like that was a big leap in hygiene and automation from when the bottles had previously been washed by hand. If you had to go into the washhouse the girls teased the life out of you. They were definitely not very ladylike! There were some wee characters!’

  Despite being a relatively modern facility, Inveralmond was not immune to the vagaries of the Scotch whisky industry, and as Douglas recalls, ‘Casks were stored at the back of the cooperage side of the bond, and we had seventy-five thousand on site at one time. Around 1974 we were getting the sense that they had been over-producing whisky. Casks were coming in full and being disgorged and then just stored rather than going back into the system.’

  ‘Finally, the cooperage at Inveralmond closed in 1988, though the bonded warehouses remained in use and latterly the bottling hall was doing White Horse and various other DCL blends instead of just Dewar’s. They were just bringing in the whisky by tanker, so no casks were being used then. When that happened it became obvious that the bottling hall could be closed – the writing was on the wall, if you like.’

  As foreseen by members of the workforce like Douglas, the Inveralmond complex closed entirely in 1994, despite producing 4.4 million cases of whisky the previous year. ‘The loss of Inveralmond was a huge blow to Perth,’ says Douglas. ‘I worked for Dewar’s for thirty years, and well over a thousand people went when it closed and whole families lost their jobs. Coopering is a specialised trade and some of the Dewar’s coopers transferred to Markinch, to the DCL Haig bottling plant there.’