Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales

by Gavin D. Smith

  The distillery survived and thrived, and in 1840 George Smith leased the Cairngorm Distillery at Delnabo, near Tomintoul and his son, William, took charge of the distillery at Upper Drumin. However, demand for Smith’s whisky still outstripped supply, and in 1858 a new, significantly larger distillery named Glenlivet was established on the present Minmore site, with Upper Drumin and Cairngorm closing the following year.

  Since 1840 the Edinburgh whisky agency of Andrew Usher & Co had represented Glenlivet in southern Scotland and in England, and in 1864 the firm also undertook to export the whisky. Glenlivet was soon being sold in international markets with notable success.

  Today, internationalism continues to be the name of the game, and The Glenlivet is in the hands of the world’s second-largest distiller of Scotch whisky, Pernod Ricard, which operates another dozen Speyside distilleries, under its Chivas Brothers subsidiary, which was acquired from Seagram Distillers Ltd in 2001.

  One individual who came to be intimately associated with The Glenlivet Distillery and its single malt during his 44-year career in the Scotch whisky industry was Jim Cryle. Jim was born at Tarland, some 30 miles west of Aberdeen and attended the local primary school and Banchory Academy. ‘I then joined the North of Scotland College of Agriculture as a “lab tech”,’ he says. ‘There were no connections with the whisky industry; the family had crofts and farms in the Buchan area of the north-east going back, and on my mother’s side, the family were shoemakers.

  ‘While I was working with the college they were doing research on barley for Long John Distilleries, which gave me an interest in the subject, and I had grown up with a farming background, in an area where lots of barley was grown, so I had an interest in grain anyway. I then got a job as assistant manager for the maltings at Tamdhu Distillery. They wanted someone with laboratory experience. I was twenty-one-years-old and they took me on as a management trainee in 1966, with a year being spent in Robertson and Baxter’s laboratory in Glasgow, involved in whisky analysis, before I moved to Tamdhu.’

  At that time, Tamdhu, located close to the River Spey, was owned by the Highland Distilleries Co Ltd, associated with the Glasgow-based brokers and bottlers Robertson & Baxter Ltd, and it operated Saladin Boxes in the maltings. These were rectangular-section concrete troughs with perforated floors in which barley was steeped and turned by mechanical rakes prior to malting.

  Jim recalls that, ‘I set up a production control lab and was there for three years, from 1967 until 1970, when I moved to the company’s Bunnahabhain Distillery on Islay as Assistant Manager. We loved Islay, and the early seventies was a boom time on the island. All the distilleries were in full production, and it was a very casual, laidback way of life after what I’d been used to. One day Jim noted that, ‘bags of malt dressings had been lying in the maltings at Bunnahabhain for months, and so I asked the workers to clear them up. Several hours later I found the workers in question helping out in the filling store. “You didn’t say you wanted it done today,” one of them said! That was Islay.’

  In 1972 Jim was transferred back to the mainland to Glenglassaugh Distillery at Portsoy on the shores of the Moray Firth. ‘I was there for two years and during my time at Glenglassaugh we did experimental work, trying to make the spirit closer in character to Glenrothes. It just wasn’t right stylistically for the Cutty Sark blend, which was principally what we needed it for.

  ‘We tried taking water from Glenrothes to Glenglassaugh and mashing and distilling with it, and we sent fermented wash to Glenrothes for distillation. These variations all gave us different spirit. We altered the “cut points” when we distilled at Glenglassaugh and finally decided to replace the stills with ones which were identical to those at Glenrothes. That gave us something closer.’ Glenglassaugh was ultimately mothballed in 1986, but found a new lease of life under the ownership of the Scaent Group in 2008. ‘I’m very pleased to see it up and running again,’ he says.

  From Glenglassaugh Jim returned to Tamdhu as General Manager, at what was a time of ongoing growth in the Scotch whisky industry. ‘In 1974 to 1975 I oversaw the expansion of the distillery. We built a new tunroom and mash house and extended the stillhouse from four to six stills.

  ‘I was there until 1983, when I became involved in marketing Highland Park and Tamdhu single malts. This was the time of the first real growth in single malts and I soon became aware of just what potential there was. They were pushing Tamdhu, but mainly Highland Park, introducing it to The Famous Grouse blend customers. Tamdhu is a lovely, sweet Speyside whisky, but it was just another Speyside, if you like, whereas Highland Park had a unique style and story to it.’

  Jim spent eight years in that particular role, but as he says now, ‘To be honest, my heart wasn’t really in driving a desk and number-crunching. I let it be known in the Scotch whisky industry that I wanted back into production and I was offered the manager’s job at The Glenlivet by Chivas Brothers. I started there in January 1991, and that was the crème de la crème for me. It was a very prestigious appointment.’

  As Jim puts it, ‘The Glenlivet has a wonderful story and an easy one to tell. It’s a story not invented by the marketing people, either! It’s an accepted fact that the area was a hotbed of illicit distilling going back two hundred years. It was a very inaccessible place, which meant that people like George Smith could take their time to make the very best spirit. They were extremely unlikely to be caught by the gaugers [excise officers] as the glen gave them lots of cover and they would see them coming for miles. As far as Scotch whisky is concerned, time is the master of perfection. Their stuff wasn’t rough or fiery, they took the time to take the best “cut” of spirit. It would be drunk mostly without much maturity.

  ‘George Smith set the standard for a style of whisky that was much copied. He was a good businessman, a visionary, and he knew how to make great whisky. Eventually, twenty-five or so distilleries attached “Glenlivet” to their names.’ Rather like Talisker on Skye, Glenlivet Distillery enjoys such a magnificent setting that only remarkably well-designed and sympathetic buildings can do justice to it, and the architects who added to, altered and replaced Smith’s 1858 original distillery were employed for their abilities to create the functional rather than the aesthetically pleasing.

  ‘Through the sixties and seventies there was a need to expand, which meant, sadly, that the three pagodas were knocked down. Then the dark grains plant was built to process by-products, so it’s not the prettiest distillery. But they have addressed that with the new extension. They’ve made a really nice job of that.’

  The extension in question, dressed in local stone, was constructed during 2008/9, when £10 million was spent increasing potential capacity to 10.5 million litres per year. Chivas Brothers’ avowed intention was to knock Glenfiddich off the international ‘number one’ single malt spot and such a strategy required larger amounts of maturing spirit being available on an ongoing basis. A highly efficient new mashtun was installed in the new production area, along with eight washbacks and six new stills.

  ‘The stills today are the same shape and size as in George Smith’s day, which says a lot for him,’ declares Jim. ‘They’ve tried to address the fact that additions to the distillery have not been done very authentically over the years. As you drive up to the distillery now, it looks much better. They also decided to put in new wooden washbacks, rather than ones made from stainless steel.

  ‘I was pleased with that, as it maintains tradition, but it also makes a practical difference. You can never totally sterilise the wood. Beneficial bacteria survive the cleaning process. Also, in a stainless steel washback you don’t have the same insulation properties and the influence of temperature. Hotter fermentation reduces detrimental bacterial activity. It’s not such an acidic fermentation, which leads to a better spirit.’ By the time Jim was appointed to The Glenlivet manager’s job in 1991, the tradition of each distillery having its own manager living on site was dying out, particularly among large companies such as Chiva
s Brothers, which owned a number of distilleries in relatively close proximity. ‘We also had a central warehousing function and maintenance team because there were so many Chivas distilleries situated in the area,’ says Jim. ‘We had a semi-automatic facility at Keith, and all spirit was tankered there for filling. There were better communications and you didn’t need to be on-site twenty-four hours a day anymore. I bought a house in Aberlour, a dozen miles from the distillery, but in winter you needed to carry snow chains in your car!

  ‘In 1983/84 we got a huge snowfall as late as May. It was always a couple of degrees colder in Glenlivet than it was in Aberlour. You were roughly 1,000 feet up. This affected maturation in the warehouses. Cold and damp conditions in stone-built, dunnage warehouses are far and away the best. You get slow maturation, which means you lose fiery elements, not water, as you do with warm and dry conditions.’

  Traditional close-knit distilling community values had long been part of The Glenlivet dynamic, thanks to the distillery’s isolated location, but over time this sense of community has diminished. ‘There were thirty-odd houses, all occupied by distillery employees but gradually the distillery sold them off because younger people all had cars and they didn’t want tied houses’, says Jim ‘Until the sixties, average people couldn’t afford cars. Wages went up as demand for whisky increased, and in particular there was lots of overtime being paid. Workers had a good standard of living then and could pay for cars, and they chose to live away.

  ‘There were about eight vacant houses built in the thirties or forties when I was there. They had built some new bungalows and they were still being used by distillery staff. The older houses have now been sold and modernised.

  ‘I think you’ve inevitably lost the sense of distillery community. The people who have moved into the houses are not familiar with the way of life and with distilling. There’s not the same reliance on neighbours in times of trouble, and people don’t need to make their own entertainment. In the fifties, the distillery had about forty staff, but in my time there were only ten production guys working in the distillery, though they took a great pride in ‘their’ whisky and had a real interest in what it was doing around the world.’

  There has long been a close connection between farming and distilling, with whisky-making originally being a way for farmers to add value and longevity to barley crops, while the high-protein draff produced during the mashing process made ideal cattle feed. In turn, the manure produced by those cattle fertilised the fields on which the next crop of barley would grow.

  ‘We had the tenancy of the farm at the distillery until the mid-nineties,’ notes Jim, ‘with one thousand sheep and a hundred head of cattle, and lots of grazing rights. The land was tenanted from the Crown Estates.

  ‘Cardhu Distillery had a farm, too, and lots of distillers had started as farmers. They were farmers first and distillers second in the old days. The Glenlivet was a farm with a distillery added on originally. Apart from anything else, having the land gave you protection of water rights – the lifeblood of the distillery. You could protect it from contamination, for one thing.’

  In 1997 Jim took on the role of Master Distiller, and moved into Elgin, where he still lives today. Despite his fondness for hands-on distilling, Jim found that, ‘Twenty-five percent of my job at Glenlivet was PR. We got lots of overseas trade customers, and as “Master Distiller” I developed and ran training courses and spent around twenty weeks per year travelling overseas. When Pernod Ricard bought the distillery in 2001 from Seagram they brought more overseas customers to the distillery.’

  Embracing his PR role with enthusiasm and a keen eye on the heritage that underpinned The Glenlivet Distillery and the single malt it produced, Jim organised a headline-grabbing event in 1996, when he was one of three people who took a number of ponies, loaded with small casks of Glenlivet on a trek from the distillery. ‘We took them over the hills to Tomintoul,’ he explains, ‘recreating the route George Smith would have taken to get his whisky to market. It was July, but there was ice on top of our tent in the morning! We really appreciated what the old smugglers had gone through. We ended up in the car park of Balmoral Castle, and there we were, a bunch of unshaven guys with a kettle in the place where bewildered tourists arrived by coach to see Queen Victoria’s Highland home!’

  From that venture, the idea of creating a ‘Smugglers’ Trail’ was born, and out of that evolved short walks through the hills around The Glenlivet Distillery for visitors to take, and, more recently, a series of trails in association with Crown Estates was established.

  ‘Alan Greig, who was in charge of the company’s PR, also had the idea of getting a little still and setting it up so that people just came across it while on their trail,’ says Jim. ‘So I found two model stills in storage at our Strathisla Distillery, and they had very thick tops and boil balls, but no bottoms. I took one and got a coppersmith to weld a base into it and add a copper coil inside half a barrel, making a condensing ‘worm.’ It made very good whisky – you could distil it nice and slow. It makes a real Glenlivet style, sweet and rich as new-make spirit. We had a fifty-litre ex-Bourbon cask and a fifty-litre ex-sherry cask filled, and they are coming up three years old soon, so it will be interesting to see how it matures.’

  The still itself is below the minimum legal capacity usually allowed, so, as Jim explains, ‘We had to get special permission from Customs and Excise to use it. The ‘sma’ still’ as we call it can only be used in the distillery environs; we weren’t allowed to take it up on the hill and operate it as we had hoped. We can’t sell the whisky, either. But it’s real fun and it has captured people’s imaginations. We only do the second distillation in it, using wash which has been produced in the distillery and been run through the wash stills. We only run it half-a-dozen times a year, which was one proviso from Customs and Excise.’

  When it comes to the more formal output of The Glenlivet, Jim describes the single malt as, ‘Relatively sweet-tasting, fruity and floral. There is a deceptive depth of character. It’s very smooth and easy to drink at first, and then you get secondary flavours developing after that.’

  When Jim first became involved with The Glenlivet the only expressions were a 12-year-old and a 21-year-old. ‘This was because the owner at the time, Seagram, was not investing behind the brand as I thought it should. The Glenlivet was the number one single malt in the USA, but the view of young Edgar Bronfman, the company CEO, was just to let it cruise along, mainly in US markets. He really wanted to be a movie mogul anyway! It was only when Pernod Ricard took over in 2001 that things really started to happen.

  ‘Twenty-one-year-old The Glenlivet Archive was introduced in my time, but it wasn’t until Pernod took over that it was developed in a global sense, and the annual release of a vintage bottling in the Cellar Collection has produced some wonderful whiskies.

  ‘Of the regular line up, the eighteen-year-old is a superb whisky to sip and savour. It’s my personal favourite on a Friday or Saturday evening by the fireside. You get a much slower development of flavour than you do with the 21-year-old, which is all up-front. We did a French oak release, too, but decided not to use wine casks – and stay true to George Smith’s ideas – so we have just experimented with different non-wine casks, including Limousin oak. We’ve used very little sherry wood since the fifties, partly because too much sherry influence would mask the delicate flavours of the whisky in a way ex-Bourbon, American oak doesn’t.’

  Inevitably, during a career in the Scotch whisky industry spanning more than four decades, Jim has seen many changes, starting with the very beginning of the whisky-making process. ‘Barley was not malted at individual distilleries any more from the early to mid-sixties,’ he notes. ‘You get a better, more consistent product from centralised maltings. However, closing distillery maltings had an impact on distilling communities because in each case you lost eight to ten jobs as a result.

  ‘From the late sixties up to the very early eighties you saw lots of distil
lery expansion. In many cases, there was a doubling of capacity, and there was the introduction of more and more automated systems. Automation of the mashing process was the first to be done. You got automatic temperature control and a timed “run off”. It was a big thing at the time. Then you got the remote control of pumps, valves and motors. All centralised on one control panel. More recently came the automatic control of stills, and their “cut points”. It’s only in the last ten years or so that you’ve had equipment to monitor the strength of spirit flow from the stills.’

  He also points out that, ‘Energy conservation has become very important. Energy became the second-largest production cost after the purchase of barley. Seventy percent of costs was barley and fifteen to twenty percent was energy. Now you have things like heat recovery and the re-use of hot water from the condensers. For a time some distillers went in for operations like growing tomatoes, which they did at Glengarioch in Aberdeenshire and others farmed fish, including eels. John Grant at Glenfarclas even tried crayfish. Unfortunately, nobody told him they were cannibals and he ended up with one bloody big crayfish! It was a bit of a case of the tail wagging the dog, so mostly these stopped.’

  Another significant change within distilleries has been the removal of excise officers. ‘When I started working in distilleries you had one resident excise officer and two assistants, or “watchers”. You had to get the excise officer to unlock the spirit safe if there was a blockage, for example. That sort of thing made life harder for distillery managers. It was the same with warehouses. There always had to be the exciseman and the manager together when one had to be opened up. They both had keys which were needed to unlock the place. The advent of “self-policing” in the eighties, when resident excise officers disappeared, made life much easier.’