The art of the Warehouseman

Monday morning came, and with a stomach full of porridge, I walked down to Callum's office to report for work. I was issued with a navy blue outfit and steel cap boots. A few introductions, then it was off to the filling room, where rows of freshly-stencilled, empty casks were waiting to be filled.

The filling room and warehouses are managed by a cheerful man called Tommy. Working alongside him are Euan, Brian and Brian's son Andrew. They all have a strong North-east Scottish accent and initially, I could understand about a quarter of what they were saying. . They have been patient with me though, and I'm picking up more and more:
"ken" means "know" (Do ye ken?)
"pesh" is "piss" (It's peshin' oot 'o this crack)
"loon" is "boy" or "son" (Gordon's loon was visiting last weekend)
"quine" is "girl"(Go and ask the quines in the office)
"piece" is a morning or afternoon tea snack (Have you got a piece to go with your cup of tea?)
"scutch" is  a wedge of wood that is jammed under a barrel to stop it rolling.

In the filling room is a 46,000 litre tank, that is constantly being filled with new spirit from the stills.
New spirit is clear like water, around 63% alcohol and tastes whisky-ish, but harsh and a bit fruity.

The job of the warehouseman is to:

• Select empty casks that are stored around the distillery and take them to the filling shed.
• Paint out any previous numbers from the end of cask.
• Stencil new details onto the end of the cask.
• Fill the cask with new spirit from the tank and record how much liquid went in.
• Hammer a new poplar bung into the filling-hole of the cask
• Sometimes the casks will leak from a crack in the wood, a woodworm-hole or from a bung that hasn't sealed properly. The warehouseman will hammer the steel hoops of the cask towards the fatter centre part of the cask, compressing the staves (planks of oak that make up  cask) to try and close any gaps. For a worm-hole, he would expand the hole with a nail then hammer in a small piece of dowel. If the leak is coming from around the disc of wood that seals the end of a cask, dried reeds called flagging will be jammed in  to try and seal it. No glue is used in the construction of the cask, it is all held together by the friction of the hoops. Sometimes the hoops rust or fall off and need to be replaced, so the warehouseman becomes a cooper and fits a new hoop with hand tools. If it's the bung that's leaking the bung hole will be reamed out and a larger bung fitted. If all this fails, the spirit will have to be decanted into another cask. It should be noted that you must never ask a warehouseman where the cask is leaking from. He will pause, look you in the eye and reply "probably from the inside".
• The filled cask is then taken by forklift to one of the 34 warehouses Glenfarclas has on site.
• The casks are stored on their sides, two or three high, depending on the size.

Casks vary in size from 200 litre ex-bourbon barrels, to 250 litre ex-sherry hogs-heads, referred to as  "hoggies", to 500 litre ex-sherry butts and 600 litre ex-port pipes, which is essentially a longer sherry butt. Glenfarclas is known for its sherried whiskies, so the bulk of the casks are ex-sherry casks from Spain and Portugal. A used 500 litre sherry butt is worth about £700, so the cask is a greater cost than the liquid that gets put into it. This also means that running repairs, as described above, sometimes need to be made to casks to get maximum use out of them. A cask is usually used 4 times, before being retired. The cask is a major contributor to the flavour and colour of a whisky as it matures. With each subsequent use, the influence of the cask becomes less.

I spend a lot of my day rolling these casks around in warehouses. The larger casks can weigh over half a ton when full. I have enjoyed learning various techniques minimise the effort required. Full casks always have to be stored, even for short periods, "bung up", ie with the bung facing upwards, as this is where the cask is mostly likely to leak from. This sounds easy enough, but when you are storing a dozen or so casks in a row on two wooden rails, some forethought is required. There is a whole clockface system where by you roll one cask into a stowe with the bung up as you start rolling, then the next cask will have the bung at "twenty past", the next at "twenty too", then "bung up" again.
It's not easy to explain, and I often get it wrong myself, but let me say that when a cask rolls along its wooden rails and thumps into place next to another cask, with the bung pointing straight up, that is job satisfaction right there!

I have the pleasure of spending much of my day in the warehouses where the casks are stored. There warehouses are  dimly-lit and filled with full whisky casks, stacked on their sides, two or three high in multiple rows. Most of the warehouses have an earth floor with a concrete path running down the middle. The warehousemen lay wooden rails about a foot apart on the earth perpendicular to the path. Casks are lined up on the rails, bung-up, until they stretch from the side wall of the warehouse to the path. The casks are carefully levelled by eye, and another set of rails is added on top of the first casks. A specially-designed lift is used to bring the next layer of casks, one-by-one, from the ground to the top of the casks below. If smaller casks are being stowed, a third set of rails and casks will be added on top. A scutch is used to stop a row casks from moving.

The most striking thing about the warehouses is the sweet, woody smell, which always reminds me of my late grandfather's antique mahogany booze cabinet. The wood from the casks mingles with the slowly evaporating whisky, the damp in the air and the earth floors. The smell differs from one warehouse to the next, with at least one smelling like jersey caramels and another like freshly baked bran muffins. Some of the warehouses have leaking roofs, which are in the process of being replaced. These smell damper, and less pleasant, but no less fascinating. The warehousemen have an off-colour name for the black mould that grows on  interior walls of the older warehouses and is synonymous with the maturing of spirits.

Having worked at Glenfarclas for just over three weeks now, I have learned a lot and been made to feel welcome by some great people. One thing is was quickly aware of is that for all the tartan and water-of-life romance of the whisky industry, the distillery is a working production facility, no different from the Walkers shortbread factory a few miles up the road. With this comes economic realities, health and safety requirements, plant and equipment hassles and the constant coming and going of trucks to deliver raw materials and remove product and by-product. None of these are a problem or much of a surprise, but a reminder of how inaccurate our perceptions from afar often are.

I will be spending another couple of weeks rolling barrels, as there is always a barrel that needs rolling somewhere, then moving into the mashing area, which I'm told will mean shift work.

I'll let you know how I get on, and hopefully write a bit about some other aspects of life in the snowy Scottish Highlands.

Hammering the bung into a freshly-filled cask. The 46,000 litre spirit tank is in the background. Incidentally, this particular cask was last filled in 1953. It had just come back from bottling a single-cask batch of whisky that had been maturing for over 60 years. Yours for a mere £2700 per bottle.

One of the older warehouses. I wish you could smell it.

I work in here [cough].

Taking a small sample from a cask of maturing whisky using the "bull's cock". This is put in a small bottle and the powers-that-be will decide if that cask has reached its full potential.

Tommy and Euan hammering a new steel hoop onto a cask.

One of the newer Glenfarclas warehouses. I took this photo sitting on a three-high stack of casks, so each of the casks you see in this photo has another two casks underneath it. Glenfarclas has 34 warehouses. That's a lot of whisky.

Casks being loaded onto a truck. These two are from 2006 and are most likely going off to be added to a blend.

 

 

 

There is something undeniably satisfying about emptying seven 250 litre casks of 25-year-old Glenfarclas into a vat so it can be sent off for bottling.