Unlike some of his contemporaries who mourn the ‘good old days’, Jim feels that most changes within the Scotch whisky industry have been for the best. ‘Whisky is much better made than in the old days,’ he says, unequivocally. ‘For me, quality equals consistency – modern monitoring and control make that possible. The guys on night shift in the stillhouse might have had “one too many” in the past! Also, we are much more aware of the importance of good wood now. Overall, we have a more consistent product today.’
He notes that, ‘As Master Distiller I’ve seen lots of parts of the world and I like to think I’ve done my bit to help sales and awareness of The Glenlivet. It’s been reinvigorated in the States and there has been big growth in China, as well as some European markets. It’s been very pleasing to see how the brand has grown with the investment put behind it by Pernod Ricard.
‘During the nineties the importance of brand ambassadors was recognised. There is now a huge interest in Scotch whisky around the world, and long may it continue. The trend of drinking it has finally got away from an insistence on not putting anything in your whisky, and companies now encourage people to drink it the way they want to. I used The Glenlivet brand as an example, if you like, of all that was best about Scotch whisky. I saw my role as being an ambassador for the drink and also for Scotland.’
CHAPTER 4
Gordon Dey – Dallas Dhu
JUST AS THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD describes an unused theatre as ‘dark,’ so an unused distillery is said to be ‘silent.’ And for the whisky lover, the saddest sight of all is a ‘silent’ distillery. No bustle of human activity, no aromas of mashing or of maturing spirit. It is a place of true silence.
Given that Scotch whisky must age for a legal minimum of three years before it may be referred to as such, and in practice is often kept for much longer before being blended or bottled as single malt, it takes a particularly effective crystal ball to accurately match current production to future sales, perhaps a dozen years down the line.
Thus, the Scotch whisky industry has always been prone to periods of ‘boom’ and ‘bust.’ Years of buoyant trading lead to the construction of new distilleries and the expansion and modernisation of existing ones, but then sales begin to taper away for various economic and social reasons, yet because of the ‘time lag’ between production and consumption, surplus stocks of maturing whisky build up, their value falls, and the ultimate result of such over-production is distillery closures.
There have been two such major ‘boom and bust’ eras, the first during the latter years of the 19th century, when so many of the distilleries we see scattered across the Scottish landscape today were built during ‘boom,’ and the years around the turn of the century, when the house of cards caused by a glut of whisky came tumbling down during ‘bust.’
The second such period came in the early 1980s, following dramatic programmes of expansion during the sixties and seventies in particular. The press dubbed the surplus the ‘whisky loch’, giving a Scottish twist to the familiar ‘wine lake’ and ‘butter mountain’ that created such opprobrium for the European Economic Community (EEC), as it was then styled.
Industry leader DCL responded to the situation by closing no fewer than 21 malt distilleries during 1983 and 1985, and the company’s workforce was cut by 470. Whereas there had been 123 operational distilleries in Scotland in 1979, that figure had fallen to 94 a decade later.
Statistics are ultimately just statistics, but for each individual distillery that closes, there is a story of human loss to tell as well. One man who was intimately involved with one of the DCL distilleries that closed in 1983 was Gordon Dey, then working at Dallas Dhu Distillery, near Forres, on Speyside.
Dallas Dhu had been born out of the late-Victorian whisky boom that saw no fewer than 21 new distilleries constructed on Speyside during the last decade of the 19th century alone. Blended Scotch whisky was becoming a drink for the world by this time, and blenders found the comparatively subtle, urbane single malts of Strathspey ideally suited for their purposes. Dallas Dhu was designed by that doyen of ‘whisky architects’ Charles Doig of Elgin, being constructed during 1898/99. Production commenced in April 1899, and the following year the distillery was sold by its founder, local landowner and distilling entrepreneur Alexander Edward, to the Glasgow blending firm of Wright & Greig Ltd, principally to provide supplies of malt spirit for their Roderick Dhu blend.
The young Gordon Dey entered the Scotch whisky industry some six decades after Dallas Dhu came on stream, initially joining DCL in 1966, aged 16. ‘I was born at Rothiemay, north of Huntly, in rural Aberdeenshire and there was no heritage of distilling in the family,’ he recalls. ‘My father and two brothers were in farming, and the brothers run the farm now. I left school at fifteen and I didn’t want to be a farmer, I wanted to make my own way, if you like.’
Gordon’s ‘local’ distillery was Knockdhu, which, like Dallas Dhu was a product of the 1890s Speyside whisky bonanza, and was actually the first distillery to be built – during 1893/94 – by the DCL. ‘I started working in the malt barns at Knockdhu Distillery in 1966,’ says Gordon, ‘but I was there for less than a year, as owners DCL were closing down individual distillery floor maltings at the time and building new, centralised and mechanised malting plants, like that at Burghead, near Elgin.’
Having left Knockdhu after a relatively brief introduction to the Scotch whisky industry, Gordon undertook agricultural and forestry work, before getting married. ‘Then one day I saw an advert for a tunroom man at Dalwhinnie Distillery,’ he says. ‘I was a young guy of twenty, and I’d never been south of Aviemore. When I got there it was raining and misty and the place seemed really bleak, and I thought ‘Do I really want to have this job?’ but I went through with my interview anyway. And, of course, they offered me the job. Well, I decided to take it, but I made sure I arrived with my wife in the dark!’
Dalwhinnie is yet another 1890s distillery, and enjoys a dramatic and beautiful setting, close to the A9 Perth to Inverness trunk road, though at over 1,000 feet above sea level, and some 13 miles from the nearest town, it can be a daunting place in winter. ‘We moved there in November 1970,’ notes Gordon, ‘and it was a grand place to work, though very antiquated at the time. I remember we would collect the milk from the “milk train” and deliver it to all the distillery houses. We spent two years there and I enjoyed the work, but my wife didn’t like Dalwhinnie, it was really just too remote.
‘In order to get a move within DCL I had to take a job as a labourer initially, but it was at Dallas Dhu Distillery, near Forres, which was much more to my wife’s liking. It’s in a lovely situation and was much closer to friends and family. We went there in November 1972. The distillery was a lot smaller and more compact than Dalwhinnie, and while the boiler at Dalwhinnie was still coal-fired, that at Dallas Dhu was running on heavy fuel oil.
‘We lived in one of the distillery houses and brought up our two daughters there. They were very young at the time. It was a great community, and everyone helped each other. In the distillery there were eight shift workers, a mill man and three guys in the warehouses.’
Gordon’s initial job was as relief mashman, standing in for a mashman who was on holiday at the time, but when he returned to his post, he found himself acting as labourer for a while, before being appointed to the position of millman, responsible for ensuring that the malt was ground into grist, with just the right proportions of flour and husk to ensure optimum fermentation. He recalls that, ‘I then became a mashman again, spent time as a stillman and finally started to train as a brewer.’
The ‘brewer’ in a distillery acted as what would now be termed a production manager, being responsible for day to day running of the distillery on a practical level, and answerable to the distillery manager. One crucial role undertaken by the brewer was ‘dramming’.
‘Dramming stopped when I was at Dallas Dhu,’ remembers Gordon. ‘We always got a mature dram. The brewer and the warehousemen knew th
e best casks to take. We were getting excellent whisky. But guys were driving home from work when they shouldn’t really have been driving, so it was as well it stopped I suppose.
‘Mature spirit lingered longer on you. New spirit gave you a buzz then left quicker. Heavy manual labour at the time meant that you sweated it off anyway. “Dirty drams”, awarded for undertaking sometimes unpleasant tasks outside the usual routine, meant that you never had any trouble getting guys to do anything!’
Dallas Dhu had always operated just one pair of stills, and had a perennial problem with its water supply, which dried up entirely during the infamous drought of 1976. Despite the fact that owners DCL did invest in the site, increasing capacity by installing an additional pair of washbacks in 1964, along with a new mashtun and boiler, subsequently replacing the stills and then converting them to steam-heating, but Dallas Dhu’s coat was always hanging on a shooglie peg, to use the Scots vernacular.
As Gordon says, despite the upgrading work that had been done, ‘Dallas Dhu was still old-fashioned and small. Aultmore and Linkwood and lots of other DCL distilleries were being rebuilt and extended during the early seventies, but Dallas Dhu was making only between forty and fifty hogsheads of spirit per week. You would be filling that in a day at some of the bigger distilleries, and Teaninich, where I went after Dallas Dhu, would be filling up to ten times as much spirit.’
The distillery had endured a period of silence between 1930 and 1936, as DCL – who had acquired the site in 1928 – tried to curb over-production in the Scotch whisky industry by buying up and closing a significant number of distilleries. Sadly, silence was again to descend on the small distilling community in 1983.
‘We knew by the early eighties that there was too much whisky being made,’ says Gordon. ‘There wasn’t so much mature spirit going out and the warehouses were really filling up. We became aware that something must happen. You always found out a lot about what was happening from the lorry drivers who visited the distillery. They were usually pretty well informed because they went to so many places and heard so much.
‘We were told in early 1983 that Dallas Dhu was to close, that it wasn’t cost effective. A small distillery like that was not so viable. We knew we would be one of the ones to go. Overall, the closures had quite a big effect on Speyside.
‘We did a four-day week there for a while, and to be fair, they tried to keep the distillery open for as long as it could. The closures were all about cost. If a distillery produced a light blending whisky then the blender could work without that particular malt as quite a number of distilleries produced a light spirit.
‘So it wasn’t surprising that those distilleries went. But it was sad to see the industry losing distilleries, jobs and whole distilling communities. It was a particularly sad day when we filled the last cask on sixteenth of March 1983. My name is one of those written on the wall in the filling store as one of the people present, preserved for visitors to see now.’
The distillery was duly mothballed, with Gordon describing the process of shutting down a distillery, yet ensuring it would be in the best possible condition to be re-commissioned should circumstances change. ‘We internally cleaned the malt bins, malt conveyors and the grist bin. The insides of the sparge tank and warm water tank were cleaned, washed out and given a coating of lime. This was done to kill bacteria that might still be lingering in any porous area. Hot lime was made into a solution and brushed onto the internal walls of the tanks.
‘The inside of the mashtun was cleaned and the plates lifted, and a coating of sperm oil was painted onto the sides and floor. This was to save the cast iron from rusting, but realistically it would have needed to be done periodically over the last thirty years to do any good. The washbacks were filled with water and all pipework cleaned. The stills were cleaned internally as was the boiler. The boiler smoke tubes were cleaned and oiled and the faceplates painted with red oxide paint. The intermediate spirit receiver was filled with water, as were the wooden washbacks to prevent the wood from shrinking, leading to leakage. Engineers were also brought in to decommission some of the machinery.
‘Three employees were kept on to wind-up the warehouses, and all the others were made redundant, apart from me. We all hoped that it would open again, but we knew in our hearts that it would not happen.’
Unlike so many of its fellow distilleries which closed during the eighties and were subsequently demolished or converted for other uses, Dallas Dhu did at least survive intact, and now has a valuable interpretive role for visitors. It was leased by DCL to the organisation that is now Historic Scotland to be preserved and opened to the public, and the fact that it was compact, complete and relatively original, made it an ideal selection for the role. The old distillery re-opened as a visitor attraction in 1988. ‘I would love Historic Scotland to come along and ask me to get it going again,’ says Gordon with a wistful smile. ‘That would be fantastic!’
Just as Gordon’s initial foray into the distilling business at Knockdhu had been followed by time out of the industry, so it seemed that a similar fate would befall him when Dallas Dhu closed. ‘I was due to go to work in the milk-bottling factory in Forres,’ he says, ‘when I was told there were three DCL brewers jobs going, at Talisker on Skye, Brora in Sutherland and Teaninich, at Alness, north of Inverness. We went to Teaninich.’
By contrast with the late-Victorian distilleries of Knockdhu, Dalwhinnie and Dallas Dhu, where Gordon had previously worked, Teaninich had a much longer history, dating back to 1817. However, the original distillery had been augmented in 1970 by a new distillation unit, comprising six stills and known as the ‘A’ side. This was in line with DCL’s policy of expanding existing distilleries during the sixties and early seventies.
‘When I went there the new plant had been producing spirit for a number of years, and the old “side” was still working too,’ notes Gordon. ‘It was all very different to Dallas Dhu. For one thing, the house (that went with the brewer’s position) was in Alness, so we were living in a town after living in the country. As this was my first brewer’s job, it was a big learning curve for me. Everybody helped everyone else at Dallas Dhu and at Teaninich I found there was something of a “that’s not my job” attitude. Indeed, one Saturday, after the last shift of the week had finished, just to help out I went into the stillhouse and cleaned out a still. Come Monday morning, the shop steward was in the manager’s office complaining about me. Needless to say I never cleaned another still!’
The ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ nature of whisky-making saw the old or ‘B’ side of Teaninich close down in 1984, and the following year the ‘A’ side was also mothballed, once again leaving Gordon seeking a new distillery in which to work. ‘I was offered a job at Aultmore, near Keith, and we jumped at the chance of getting back to our local area,’ he says. ‘I went from brewer to production manager in 1994, and after a while the distillery was “twinned” with Inchgower, at Buckie.’
However, the remorseless consolidation that was taking place within the Scotch whisky industry saw Guinness plc, now the owner of the old DCL, merge with Grand Metropolitan plc in 1997 to create Diageo plc, and a legal requirement of this merger was that the new company divest itself of some brands to satisfy monopoly legislation. Accordingly, Bermuda-based Bacardi Ltd acquired the Scotch whisky business of John Dewar & Sons and the Bombay Sapphire gin brand for £1.15 billion in 1998 and Aultmore, Aberfeldy, Royal Brackla and Craigellachie distilleries were transferred to Bacardi ownership.
Aultmore was yet another product of the 1890s distilling boom on Speyside, but the distillery as it appears today betrays few signs of its heritage, due mainly to a 1970s expansion and reconstruction programme, which saw capacity doubled by the installation of a second pair of stills.
Gordon says that, ‘After the split which took Aultmore into Dewar’s, the distillery had to have its own production manager, and that was me. I did that job until I’d served my forty years and then I retired. I’ve seen lots of changes in the S
cotch whisky industry in that time. Most notably, I think in terms of automation of plant, particularly in mashing and distilling. We had gone from everything being manual to a press of a button doing everything. There is a fully automated lauter mashtun at Aultmore, and controls for the stills were upgraded in 2008. However, the operator still has to make decisions himself. At the spirit safe he would read a hydrometer and thermometer to determine the strength of the spirit, and decide when to “cut” the flow of spirit. As for opening and closing the valves to empty and fill the stills, the operator still controls that, even though the actual valves are automatic.’
However, Gordon adds that, ‘You could take a guy off the street who was able to work a computer, show him what to do, and he could mash. But it wouldn’t mean he understood the process. The mashtuns at Aultmore and Dewar’s “sister” distillery of Craigellachie can be controlled by the manufacturer in Germany via a modem, though this would only happen if the manufacturer had to upgrade the software or if some new plant was installed.’
Treatment of ‘by-products’ and distillery waste has long been an important element of the whisky-making business, with measures being put in place as far back as the late 19th century to prevent pollution of the River Spey with its lucrative salmon fishing trade. Early experimentation of evaporating the pot ale – the residue after the initial distillation in the wash still – to produce a concentrated ‘syrup’ took place as early as 1906 in a plant in the Speyside distilling community of Rothes, producing a spray-dried, powdered form of evaporated pot ale which was sold as fertiliser.
Aultmore played a notable part in further development work on by-products, when a processing plant was installed at the distillery in 1952, where a substance more suitable for incorporation into animal feed was developed. This led to the creation of a full-scale plant at the now silent Imperial Distillery at Carron. The various processes were refined over the years, and Aultmore came to have a ‘dark grains’ plant, which mixed pot ale and draff – the cereal residue left behind after mashing – to create dark grains, a highly nutritious cattle feed.
Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales Page 5
