Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales Read online

  While away from his native isle, earning a living from the sea, Norman met and married a woman from Teesside, in north-east England, and on leaving the Merchant Navy he secured a job with one of the area’s largest employers, the chemical giant Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).

  ‘I was with ICI for five years and then my brother, who worked at Talisker, told me there was a job going at the distillery. We came up on holiday and my wife liked the place, so I took the job and we got a company house, the same house I’m living in till this day. I started at the distillery in 1972.’

  Norman’s initial role was as a maltman, working at a time when every malt distillery in Scotland had its own floor maltings. As part of the DCL’s programme of distillery expansion and malting centralisation on-site malting ceased at Talisker during 1972, and since then malt has been made to Talisker’s specification at Glen Ord Maltings in Inverness-shire. Phenol levels of peating are measured in parts per million (ppm), with many distilleries using malt peated to just one or two ppm, while the most heavily peated Islays will use malt with a phenolic level in excess of 50ppm. Talisker uses a medium-peated malt of 20-22ppm.

  The role of maltman was one of the most physically demanding of all distillery roles, and maltmen sometimes suffered from a condition known as bursitis, commonly nicknamed ‘monkey shoulder’ or ‘monkey grips,’ due to repeatedly turning the germinating barley, or piece, on the malting floor using wooden shiels, or shovels, in order to prevent the tangling or rootlets and to maintain an even temperature.

  Recalling his days as a Talisker maltman, Norman explains that, ‘We had two malt barns, with two floors in each. You would have twenty-odd tons in each couch. In summer, if it was humid and foggy, I detested night shift. The barley would sprout like mad, it would just go haywire in that sort of weather, so you had to turn it a lot to stop the rootlets getting tangled. You were on your own from ten pm to six am and you never had much time to yourself. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. When you went home in the morning, you slept. You certainly didn’t need a sleeping pill!

  ‘It was very eerie in the malt barns when you were in there by yourself at night. On a Saturday night I might be the only one working in the barns, and there were rats all over the place. You would sit down for a cup of tea and a ‘piece’ at maybe two am. One night I was sitting there drinking my tea and eating my piece when suddenly between the two couches of barley a Lurpak butter wrapper appeared – and it was a still night, there was no wind to blow it. It came towards me, and I realised that it was a rat with this butter wrapper in its mouth – it must have got it out of the manager’s bin. If I’d had a drink on me I’d have sobered up quickly, I can tell you! I remember I was working in the malt barns when they landed on the moon ... ‘

  Although work in the maltings was hard, there were many lighter moments to compensate for the labour involved. Norman recalls that, ‘Roddy Alec was one of the great characters in the distillery. He liked his dram. He wore a pair of thick glasses, and every lunchtime he headed up the road from the distillery to the Old Inn for a pint or two on his break.

  ‘There were no cattle grids around the distillery then and so you would often get sheep in the distillery eating the draff. One day, Roddy Alec came back from the pub and into the maltings where the bags of ‘cummins’ [dried malt rootlets] were stored. I was following Roddy Alec and I saw that there was a Blackface sheep between two bags. All you could see was the head. Well, Roddy Alec looked and he took off his glasses, and he put them on again and the sheep’s head was still there. So he took them off again, rubbed them on his sleeve, put them on again, and still he could see the sheep’s head. I was just standing behind him laughing quietly to myself.’

  Draff was an important by-product of distilling for the local crofters, for whom it provided valuable animal feed. ‘Once a week crofters came up with bags to be filled with draff and they were then delivered by a local guy with a lorry,’ says Norman. ‘Sometimes, people at the distillery used to put one of the forty-five-pound weights meant to hold down the wooden lids of the washbacks in the tunroom during fermentation into a draff bag for a joke. The lorry driver really used to struggle with them!

  ‘One of the stillmen in my time, Bill Campbell, filled two bags of draff each week and took them away home in the boot of his car after finishing night shift. I used to put weights in them and watch him struggle to get them into the car. He told me that eventually he had about a dozen of the things, and the distillery started to wonder where they had all gone to!’

  In common with all island distilleries, peat-harvesting was an important task to be accomplished at Talisker, with the objective being to cut, dry and gather in sufficient supplies of peat to last for a working year. ‘In the summer the distillery shut for two months and everybody cut peats for the malting,’ recalls Norman. ‘They took on extra people to help with the cutting, too. You did it for your own crofts as well as for the distillery. There was a big peat shed near the pier for the distillery. You had a coke fire in the kiln in the maltings, and you had to put so many peats on top of that. The smoke came off from it and flavoured the malt. You had to be careful not to put too much peat on or you could put the fire out.’

  Malting – Essentially, the purpose of malting is to ‘modify’ the barley corn by enzymic action, breaking down cell walls and converting the insoluble starch to soluble starch, which will be turned into fermentable sugars during the ‘mashing’ stage of whisky production. In distillery-based floor maltings, barley is steeped in water for two or three days, then spread on a malting floor, where rootlets develop as germination begins. So that the malt retains the sugars essential for fermentation, germination must be halted at this point, and the partially germinated ‘green malt’, as it is known, is transferred to a kiln for around seven days and dried over a fire or by jets of hot air, often with some peat used in the furnace to impart flavour. The amount of peat introduced during kilning has a major influence on the character of the finished whisky.

  Mashing – During the process of mashing, malt is mixed with hot water to form wort. Mashing follows malting and precedes fermentation in the whisky-making process, and the mash of grist and hot water is mixed in a large, circular vessel, known as a mashtun. Mashing extracts soluble sugars from the malted grain.

  Fermentation – Along with mashing, fermentation is part of the ‘brewing’ process of whisky production, and a distillery ‘mashman’ is traditionally responsible for all brewing practices. During fermentation, yeast is added to the wort in a number of wooden or stainless steel washbacks, housed in the ‘tunroom,’ and the yeast acts upon sugars contained in the wort to produce a low-alcohol beer called ‘wash’. This is the first time during whisky-making that alcohol is produced.

  After working in the malt barns for two years, Norman followed the usual route of advancement into the mash house when one of the serving mashmen retired. ‘It was nothing like such hard work as the maltings,’ he notes. ‘The old mashtun had rakes in it, and we got good extraction from it. You put the ‘stirrer’ on as much as you could when you were mashing, and left it on till you had finished. That gave better extraction, better results. The old manager, Hogg, explained that to me.’

  A new ‘lauter’ mashtun was installed in 1997, replacing the existing cast-iron vessel, though unusually it retains a copper dome. Its increased efficiency meant that the mashing cycle was halved from ten to five hours. ‘It’s made from stainless steel now, and all cleaned with sprinklers,’ notes Norman, pointing out that, ‘With the old one you had to go inside with a steam hose to clean it, wearing Wellies and an apron and nothing else. I felt great when I came out – it was just like a Turkish bath! I never felt so clean in all my life ...

  ‘The copper dome of the mashtun was polished with Brasso. You had two full shifts every Wednesday doing that, and on reflection, what a waste of manpower that was! Computers came in six months before I left. Now you press a button and it carries out the mashing cycle. Temperature
s for mashing were very accurate once computers were put in. Spot on. You could never do that quite so precisely for yourself. Today, you get mentally tired doing the job, but not physically tired.’

  Inevitably, the increase in computerisation and the lack of floor maltings, means that the modern Talisker workforce is significantly smaller than it was some years ago. Additionally, whereas at one time spirit was filled into casks and warehoused on site, today the spirit is collected by road tanker and taken away to be casked and matured in central maturation facilities in the central belt of the Scottish mainland, though some is transported back to Talisker for maturation. ‘The stills were coal-fired until 1972,’ says Norman, ‘and you had a mashman, a boilerman and a stillman on shift. There would be eight staff in malt barns during the day, and four on nightshift there. They would also be called on to roll barrels and do other duties from time to time. In the tun room, you had one man just to steam the vats, keeping the washbacks clean, so you are talking 12 men in total per shift.

  ‘Then you had two women in the office, a manager and an under-manager, two excisemen, two drivers for the minibus to collect staff, an electrician, an engineer and coopers, because at that time all the casks were filled and matured on site. All in all, nearly fifty people were employed at the distillery at one time. Today, on a shift you have a mashman and a stillman. There are more tour guides than production staff!’

  Modern distilleries are comparatively clean places to work, but in the days when stills were coal-fired it was an entirely different matter. ‘The distillery is certainly a lot less dirty than it used to be,’ says Norman. ‘There was coal dust all over the place. Every Friday night they hosed down the stillroom walls, and you could see the coal dust running down them. But it was great to hear the roar of the fires in the stillhouse, and if you were wet on a winter’s night, with gales and rain outside, you put your backside to the still and you could easily get dried there.’

  Until the practice cased in the early 1980s, ‘dramming’ was an essential part of a distillery’s routine. This involved the brewer handing out drams of whisky to the staff several times a day, with the size of drams and the frequency of their distribution varying from distillery to distillery. In some cases, new-make spirit was dispensed, and in others, mature whisky.

  ‘We always got stuff from the best cask in the warehouse, not new-make spirit,’ notes Norman. ‘We were drammed at nine am, twelve o’clock and five pm. The nightshift men coming on got a double dram – a cupful to do them the night. You got an extra dram for cleaning the elevator or similar unpleasant jobs. The postman would always manage to arrive at the distillery at twelve-thirty, just in time for a dram. You didn’t need a clock to tell when the post would be delivered!’

  Every distillery had its resident excise officer or officers, who represented ‘the Crown,’ and whose job it was to ensure that no spirit went unaccounted for, in the days before self-policing by distillers was introduced. ‘The excise officers were pretty lenient, provided that nobody was abusing the privilege, if you like. There were no accidents that I remember, despite the dramming. The exciseman would come in at two or three in the morning sometimes, you never knew when he would call. He had a great deal of power and had the second-biggest house at Talisker, after the manager.’

  Despite dramming, many distillery workers found ingenious ways of liberating spirit for their personal use and that of their friends, but Norman recalls an instance when the liberation of whisky took place far from any distillery.

  ‘Before I was at Talisker, when I was in the Merchant Navy we used to load whisky in Grangemouth, in Fife, and put it off in Rotterdam, en route to the States,’ he recalls. ‘One night, myself and a fellow from Shetland were coming back from the pictures in Grangemouth when we decided to go into the hold to get ourselves a couple of bottles of whisky. The night watchman was a Skye man and we told him what we were doing and he didn’t mind. We pulled out some nails and opened up a case and it was full of miniatures of Old Smuggler. Well we didn’t want those, so we had to pack them all pack in and seal up the case.

  ‘We opened up a second case and this time we got the good stuff, Johnnie Walker Black Label. We took out four bottles and replaced them with fire bricks. We did three cases that night, and from then on we did this every trip we made from Grangemouth with whisky. In the States they were convinced it was happening at the bottling plant in Kilmarnock and they were keeping an eye on the workers there!

  ‘Well, many years later when I was working at Talisker there was an excise officer over on relief for three weeks, and he was from Leven in Fife. He came in to chat when I was on the night shift one time and I was telling him about the Merchant Navy, and how I had worked for the Gibson Rankin Line, based in Leith. I told him what we had one with the bottles of Johnnie Walker and he just looked at me in amazement. It turned out he had been based in Leith at the time. ‘I was called to London three times over that,’ he told me, ‘and I’ve had to come all the way to Skye to find out the truth!’

  As a single malt, Talisker is highly prized by owners Diageo, and the 10-year-old expression was one of the six core ‘Classic Malts’ launched in 1988, the same year a visitor centre opened at the Skye distillery. Today, the range has been extended to include Storm, an 18-year-old, a Distiller’s Edition (with an Amoroso Sherry finish) and 57 North, which takes its name from the distillery’s latitude and the strength of the whisky.

  Norman declares that, ‘The whisky I like now is the 18-year-old, it’s a nice dram, but I wish I had a bottle of DCL-distilled Talisker, which used to be bottled by Gordon & MacPhail in Elgin. The smell was different to now. You would just think you were at the mashtun. It smelled of the distillery and was beautiful stuff. When they were distilling in the old days they took their time. In fact, if the manager caught you rushing the stills you got into trouble.’ Today, with no on-site malting and with spirit tankered away to the mainland to be filled into casks for maturation, Talisker, like so many distilleries, has effectively lost the beginning and the end of the narrative of malt whisky production.

  There is an ongoing debate as to whether there is any discernable difference between single malt whisky matured at its place of production and that matured in vast bonding complexes in the central belt. Norman states that, ‘I think it must make a difference if the whisky is matured on the island rather than taken to a central place on the mainland away from the lochs and mountains and so on. Having worked with chemicals at ICI, changes in the chemistry of maturing the whisky in different locations wouldn’t surprise me.’

  He notes that three of the old, stone warehouses at Talisker have been demolished, and makes the point that, ‘When I started work at the distillery only the malt barns were old, with corrugated iron roofs. All the rest was new, having been rebuilt after the fire. It had certainly been very old-fashioned before that.’

  The fire in question took place on 22 November 1960, when a valve on the coal-fired number one spirit still was left open during distillation. Spirit escaped from the still and caught fire, resulting in serious damage. The entire stillhouse burned to the ground, but was subsequently rebuilt and equipped with new stills that were exact copies of the originals. The dimensions and configuration of two wash and three spirit stills were faithfully reproduced, and the replacement stills continued to be coal-fired until 1972. The unusual ratio of two wash stills and three spirit stills had its origins in the fact that until 1928, Talisker was triple-distilled, although triple distillation is more usually associated with Lowland distilleries, such as Auchentoshan.

  ‘When I went to work at the distillery the guys never discussed the fire,’ says Norman. ‘It was due to having open fires and a leaking valve. Nobody would say what really happened, whether it was an error. But I do think that if so much money hadn’t been spent rebuilding the distillery in the early 1960s it would probably have closed during the 1980s, when DCL shut so many distilleries. It is more expensive to make whisky on an island than it is on
the mainland due to so many extra costs.’

  Norman combined his role at Talisker with running a croft, and he notes that, ‘I got a croft from my brother when I came to work at the distillery – I was keeping a few Hereford cattle. I actually had two crofts of twenty-six acres each, and when you were doing shift work it fitted in really well with the crofting. I’ve still got the two crofts today. The Herefords were very docile, good cattle to handle, but after a while I bought six belted Galloways, and I’ve still got their offspring today. ‘When I started at the distillery I got my home free, and I retired when I was just over sixty-three – I got my redundancy money and pension and I was able to buy the house for £25,000. I was lucky to work for DCL and then Diageo. They were good companies to work for. I was at Talisker for twenty-eight years, and I’m seventy-three years old now. I never had a single day off work until the last year I was there, when I had to have a heart operation. I still keep in close contact with everything that’s going on down at the distillery, and my son is a stillman – he’s worked there for sixteen years.’ While many people of Norman’s age bemoan the loss of ‘the good old days,’ and lament changing ways brought by incomers to island communities like Skye, he has no such regrets. ‘English people have been coming up and building houses,’ he says, ‘but not holiday homes, mainly. They have been living here all year round. They have taken more interest in the culture of Skye than the locals do!

  ‘When I look at Carbost now, there only used to be one house on my way up the hill, but now there are a dozen. The roads were done up in the 1950s, and now they’re good roads. People would cycle six miles to work on a winter’s night before the minibus started up. And if you look at old postcards of the place everything looked like a third-world country. It all looked so bleak. None of the houses were painted white, and they were hard times. It’s all improved now.