John McDougall - Wort, Worms & Washbacks

A grand full-bodied read. Cheers!

Ian Smith, The Scots Magazine

full of humour and interest.

The Highland News Group

an excellent purchase whether you have any interest in whisky or not

The Ileach

These behind-the-scenes tales of not-so-everyday life in the whisky industry will have you reading and re-reading and reaching for a drop of the article.

Dundee Evening Telegraph & Post

a very human, and at times very funny account of life within the world of whisky-making a very different whisky book, and one which should keep you engrossed from start to finish. I am told that it is already required reading within the whisky industry and that a number of old-timers with tales to tell are kicking themselves for not getting in there first. I doubt if they could have done a better job.

Tarbert Campbell, Perthshire Comment

Looking back, I suppose the staff at Aultmore must have wondered what sort of a playboy they had got for their new trainee manager when I drove up to the remote, old-fashioned Speyside distillery one dreich December day in 1963 in my Mark I 2.4 litre Jaguar. Their doubts, I was later to realise, must have been compounded by the fact that the distillery manager chose nothing more ostentatious than a push-bike as his personal mode of transport.

The Jag was a legacy of working in my fathers grain company in Edinburgh. He had been paying me the comparatively generous sum of 750 a year, and I had lived at home, making only modest contributions to my keep. Given those circumstances, the car was a reasonable indulgence. When I joined Scottish Malt Distillers the malt whisky-making division of the great Distillers Company Ltd in 1963, aged 22, my annual salary fell to 500, out of which I had to find 6 per week to pay for my digs at Aultmore. Also, being a young man and a rugby player, there was beer to buy. The Jaguar had a greater thirst than I, and ultimately was to become an unreasonable extravagance, even in those days of comparatively cheap petrol. Its replacement was a Volkswagen Beetle! If my father had paid generously, he expected hard work in return, and I was certainly no playboy. I was physically very fit, and more than capable of getting my hands dirty, which was just as well, considering some of the jobs that lay ahead of me at Aultmore.

My father and I got on well on a personal basis, but we found it difficult to work together because he was so entrenched in his ways and wasnt prepared to move the business forward in what I thought was the right way in a changing climate. He was approached a couple of times to sell the company to firms that were getting bigger, but he carried on. Personally, I thought it would have been better if he had sold out and got an equity stake in a larger company; it would certainly have suited me better! As he got older and I got on in the whisky business, he accepted that I had made the right career move.

After parting company with my father, I approached John Waugh, director of the DCL cereals division, who suggested that the best career opportunities in the company for a young man at that time probably lay in the production side, where my knowledge of cereals would still be of real use, as many distilleries continued to do their own malting. The scientific laboratories that distillers have at their disposal nowadays just didnt exist then it was all about practical evaluation. What I learnt about barley with my father was exceptionally valuable. As far back as 1948 I used to go around farms with him when he was buying and selling barley. I had the idea that the whole world revolved around the stuff! One of the differences between my distillery training and that of someone in a similar position today is that while they know the theory, they havent had the practice that I had, because with centralised maltings there is now no need for it.

I was taken on by DCL as one of 12 management trainees, and the training programme at that time was very forward-looking. It was a period when the company was trying to move away from the idea of the distillery manager as a cloth-capped, boiler-suited foreman figure into a more professional management figure, so they recruited people from various backgrounds, such as accountancy, agriculture, and engineering, and each one was allocated to a distillery within the group. I was sent to Aultmore, which was situated off the Buckie road, some three miles outside the town of Keith, quite high up and isolated.

This was a time of what seemed like a never-ending boom as far as Scotch whisky sales were concerned, and everyone in the industry was looking towards a tremendously buoyant future. DCL was rebuilding lots of its distilleries, and developing existing plants. For example, at Glenlossie they built on a new section and called that Mannochmore while at Glendullan they eventually had Glendullan Number One and Glendullan Number Two. These were all distilleries in their own right, and so the trainees they were taking on were the managers of the future for these units as well as the existing ones.

Speyside then, as now, was the heartland of whisky-making, though in the sixties there were still many family companies which have since been absorbed by the multi-nationals. In Rothes, on the Spey, a town which is nearly all distilleries, Glen Grant was privately owned, as was Longmorn, and Benriach, although not working at the time, was also still in private hands. There were certainly a lot more Scottish-owned and run distilleries than there are today. Eventually DCL was to be absorbed by Guinness during the eighties and in 1998 a merger with chief rivals Grand Metropolitan led to the creation of Diageo, the biggest spirits company in the world.

Elgin is the capital of Speyside, and remains very much a whisky town the place is steeped in distilling lore. I remember a television programme on a Sunday night being broadcast from Elgin during my time at Aultmore. The Revd Henderson was the minister, and he took some criticism from the straight-laced people in the church when he actually put up a prayer for The Dram. What he meant, of course, was that he was praying for all his parishioners who worked in the distilleries surrounding Elgin. It wasnt just about making whisky, not simply an industry, it was a way of life.

Our practical training with DCL was very comprehensive, especially at Aultmore, which was the most old-fashioned distillery belonging to the company. It was so old-fashioned that you learnt everything about how to make whisky in the most basic way imaginable. There was also theoretical training to complete, and we were sent tomes and tomes of information, written by DCLs experts on barley, malting, energy conservation, effluent disposal, coopering, warehousing, and even the right coal to use for the boilers. Every three or four months we were taken away for a couple of days and given lectures by these specialists, who were all university graduates, the boffins of the DCL group. That training course was, in effect, the forerunner of the brewing and distilling degree course now run at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.