I Paid to Shovel Barley
A week of Whisky School at Springbank Distillery.
(See also my Appendix post, which explains the whisky production process.)
In Campbeltown, at the southern end of the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland, Springbank Distillery runs a program called Whisky School.
Students spend a week participating in every phase of malt whisky production from one of the last distilleries that does every phase in house, mostly manually.
I heard about Whisky School in 2017 and immediately put my name on what turned out to be a six-year waitlist.
Heads
Getting there
On the last Sunday in June 2023, I woke up at 3am after maybe two hours of sleep, showered, packed, checked out of my hotel in London, and took a surprisingly expensive hour-long taxi ride to Luton, an airport that I hate.
Luton is crowded and chaotic. It is the only place in the UK I’ve ever seen people cutting in line (“jumping the queue,” in the local idiom). Years ago, I was standing in a crowd in Luton when I saw a man slap a woman hard across the face, making a noise so loud it echoed through the terminal as she stalked away.
At “boarding time,” Easyjet let us into a narrow holding pit on the tarmac, enclosed within stanchions, and made us stand there for a very long time. They would occasionally yell that we should all crowd in together closer.
Around half an hour later, I was staring at the plane just a few dozen feet away across the cordons, vividly imagining the plane taking off without us while Easyjet employees walked through the crowd whacking us about the face and wrist with yardsticks.
Eventually they did let us on the flight, and I made my way to Glasgow, where I needed to take a four-hour bus ride down the peninsula.
The countryside out the bus window was deep green; there were giant rock cliffs covered in moss and pine trees, creeks, little stone walls, and once or twice even a tiny white sand beach with sea shells and lava rock and what must have been extremely cold ocean water.
The bus let off in the middle of a quiet street — no terminal — and I got my suitcase and wandered.
The Still Guesthouse, where I’d be staying, didn’t show up in Google Maps and was not listed with an address, but a scheduled email popped up in my Gmail inbox with an image showing where the guest house was — a gift from my past self.
Hearts
The guests and the guesthouse
I let myself into the guesthouse. There was a list with the names of six students and the names of our rooms, like “Local Barley” and “Springbank 18.” I went up to my room (Springbank 18), and was pleased to see a spiral-bound “Springbank Whisky School” textbook, a stack of five t-shirts, a heavy jacket, and a high-visibility orange vest, all branded with “Springbank” and/or “Whisky School.” (Mostly pleased. I didn’t need the bulky jacket, and I would rather have had that space in my suitcase for bottles of whisky.)
The guesthouse had two floors, with three of us on each floor, and each floor had only one toilet and one shower. Sharing a restroom with strangers was the only really negative thing about the accommodations.
Over the course of that night and the next day the other students rolled in:
- A man from Idaho, whose side project was running a gin distillery and pub, and who was considering expanding it to make whiskey.
- A man from Japan, who ran a bar and would be writing an article about this week for a whisky magazine (in Japanese).
- A man from Hong Kong, who ran whisky tasting classes.
- A couple from Jordan, whose side project was a restaurant and bar with an alcohol import business.
I was the only one with no clear commercial motive for the week.
The meals
The first night, before any other guests had showed up, I ate dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant that turned out to have surprisingly good food (despite no visible employees or customers who looked Bangladeshi).
From Monday on, meals were provided by the program, and they served as a mechanism for teaching us about Scottish culture.
On the first day, we were served a Full Scottish Breakfast, which is a fried egg, an edible placemat called a potato scone, black pudding, white sausage, haggis, one or two roast tomatoes, roast mushrooms, bacon, and beans. (Coffee, tea, yogurt, fruit juice, toast, cereal, and fruit were also available.)
I, with others, protested that we normally eat much lighter breakfasts.
We were told we’d be working hard and would be glad to have eaten so much.
This was false.
We did do a couple hours of physical labor every day, but it would have been fine on coffee (and maybe yogurt, to be cautious). I am now convinced there is no circumstance that could ever require a Full Scottish Breakfast.
Lunches and dinners were composed of variations on similar elements.
One standout was Balmoral Chicken, which is chicken stuffed with haggis covered in a whisky cream sauce. (Haggis are a savory sausage; they’re pretty good. They get a bad rap.)
There were occasional implications of horrific culinary practices. During the (very nice) meal of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, we all tried to avoid looking at the hand-filled ramekins of ketchup.
One evening several of us politely told the guesthouse host that we would be eating out, and we stopped by a pub to try a local delicacy all the locals had been talking up: the Haggis Nachos.
They were good. Haggis is just sausage served without the casing; it’s not absurd to put it on nachos. Afterwards, we went out and had seafood at a nice restaurant, and a lot of the conversation consisted of us trying to figure out why a country with so much high quality agriculture and fresh seafood had developed a cuisine focused on frying.
Scottish English
- “Wee,” has completely replaced the word “small.” “Wee” is the traditional adjective to use before “dram.”
- “Aye” has completely replaced the word “yes.”
- “Youse” is the plural of “you,” like “Y’all.” Makes sense. “You” + plural “-s,” plus a silent “e” because of (handwave) the Danelaw and the Norman invasion.
- “Hura” means “very” — and the “r” is rolled (always, in every word), so it sounds more like “Hoodah.”
- “That’s you, then” can mean anything from “I’ve done that thing you wanted” to “Bob’s your uncle,” to “next dram’s yours.”
- “That’s your taxi canceled, then,” is a clear cousin.
- “Needs replaced” means “Needs to be replaced.”
The Scottish vowels are all in unexpected places in the mouth. The “i” sound is more like an “e,” so “whisky” becomes “whesky” and the number “six” becomes “sex.”
The Scottish, do not observe the “wine/whine” merger (nor do I), so there’s an “h” sound at the beginning of “hwesky.”
One day, in the shower, it occurred to me that “Sonny and Cher” in a Scottish accent would sound just like “Sunni and Shia.”
Every night in hypnagogia and hypnopompia, the boundary states between consciousness and dreaming, I heard rippling rivers of nonsense words in Scottish accents.
Campbeltown
Campbeltown is a few streets wrapped around a loch. The current population is about 5500 people.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Campbeltown was the biggest Scotch-producer, with as many as 37 legal distilleries (at which point the population was closer to 2000). And, we assume, many more unlicensed operations. (We were given a paper map of town showing the current streets and where all the licensed distilleries used to be.)
The Campbeltown Loch (along with the nearby Crosshill Loch, at a conveniently higher elevation) were useful sources of water, which distilleries need in massive quantities, and it made it easier to ship Scotch to their biggest customers, the Americans.
World War I, (American) Prohibition, and the Great Depression were serious economic blows, and the Campbeltown distillery business collapsed, with only Springbank and their frenemies at Glen Scotia surviving.
Corporate Structure
The parent company of Springbank is J. & A. Mitchell, named after the founder and his brother. They own a collection of companies, three of which are relevant to Whisky School:
- Cadenheads, an independent bottler (who shared the Springbank distillery’s bottling plant).
- Glengyle, a separate distillery on the lot adjoining the Springbank distillery, which still uses some parts of Springbank, including the malting floor and the bottling plant, but has ambitions of more independence. The whisky they make is called Kilkerran, not Glengyle, due to a trademarking issue.
- Springbank, the main distillery business, which makes three lines of whisky. Springbank is also the name of the primary line, lightly peated and distilled 2.5 times (on which more later); Hazelburn is unpeated and distilled 3 times, for a much lighter style; and Longrow, peated heavily and distilled 2 times for a heavier, more intense flavor.
The Springbank Distillery has been in operation under that name since 1828, but the Glengyle Distillery is named in honor of a lost distillery, as are the Hazelburn and Longrow whiskies made by the Springbank Distillery.
They created Glengyle Distillery right next to Springbank, partially for nostalgic reasons (the lost Glengyle had also been owned by the Mitchell family) and partially because Campbeltown was in danger of losing its title as an official Scotch region due to having too few distilleries.
Whisky School Diaries
The schedule of each weekday:
- Wake up peacefully, with gentle sunlight and birds chirping
- Use shared restroom facilities during negotiated time slot
- 07:00: Breakfast in the guesthouse dining room
- 08:00: Show up at the distillery, work
- 10:00: Tea
- 10:30: Work
- 12:00: Back to the guesthouse for lunch
- 13:00: Back to the distillery, work
- 15:00: Tea
- 15:30: Work
- 17:00: Done for the day
- 18:00: Back to the guesthouse for dinner
For the work segments, we had a schedule:
… which gave us a chance to participate in almost every hands-on phase of the whisky process. But not in order. Making whisky takes years from malting to bottling, so we couldn’t follow a single batch through; instead, we dropped in on whichever batch was at a given phase, and over the week, covered most of the process.
(If you haven’t yet, this might be useful to review my appendix on the full end-to-end process, since it’ll help you fit the day-by-day events together.)
Throughout the process below, I will sometimes use the term “professional” to refer to someone who actually works at the distillery, to be distinguished from myself or one of my fellow students.
Day 1
Our uniform was a branded t-shirt (optional), the high-visibility vest (required), and steel-toed boots (required, and the student has to provide their own).
I have bad feet, unusually wide with high arches and sensitive points at the tripod of points on the foot that touch the ground while the arch holds the rest of the foot hovering high above the ground. I need extra-wide shoes with very stiff soles, high arch supports, heel lifts, and a metatarsal support. I normally only ever wear the single model of shoes (New Balance 928v3) that I’ve, with the aid of podiatrists and similarly afflicted family members, found can be worn comfortably on my stupid painful feet.
New Balance 928v3s do not have steel toes, so I had to go shoe shopping before this trip. I tried on several things and bought the least painful, most promising boots I could, and spent a month wearing them around on walks to accustom my feet to them and, to the extent possible for footwear containing steel, to break them in.
I hated them. They were awful. Getting them off at tea time was the highlight of every day.
On the first day, I put on my steel-toed boots and high-visibility vest and we tromped across the street and around the corner to Springbank Distillery. We got a quick tour from the Distillery Manager, and were then sent to the malting floors.
There are three floors in this building: two malting floors and a barley loft. Half of our floor, which was a malting floor, was covered in a layer of neatly raked grain. The other half had bare floor and a few large piles of barley in the corner. (People walk over the barley freely; the milling and distillation processes will filter out any contamination.)
Our job: shovel the piled grain into wheelbarrows, roll the wheelbarrows across the floor, pour the grain out in a line. Somebody then comes by with a broom and flattens it into the nice flat layer seen on the other side of the floor.
I’m a retired knowledge worker. I’ve never had a job in my life that required me to perform a physical activity more demanding that typing on a keyboard very quickly. (One possible exception: at Google I did set trashcans on fire by accident: once in the US, and once in Switzerland. Story for another time.)
Anyway, two hours of shoveling and wheelbarrowing was a new experience. It was also exactly what I’d signed up for. I got somewhere between sixteen and twenty wheelbarrows filled and emptied — my count is not exact, because we would help each other out, shoveling into each others’ wheelbarrows, taking over with brooms when the grain got thin on the ground, etc. I appreciated the small-scale autonomy of seeing an issue and changing what I was doing to help out my classmates.
We had tea and I felt like we’d earned it. I had my work boots off and was thus happy. And then I put them back on for a tour of Campbeltown, seeing where all the long-gone distilleries had once been, and comically shaking our fists at Glen Scotia, the one distillery in town owned by a different company.
After lunch, we went to the stillhouse (where the giant metal stills live [and not to be confused with “the Still Guesthouse,” where we were staying, which was a guesthouse, not a stillhouse]), where workers in 8-hour shifts keep a continuous watch on whatever liquid is in whichever still at a given time. They watch dials and knobs, jot down notes in logbooks, turn knobs and levers, measure temperature in the spirit safe, and sometimes they taste burbling clear liquor. Sometimes the still worker would go and lower a metrestick (which is what I assume yardsticks are called in British, in metric) into a tank, raise it out, and look at where the line of fluid ended.
The stillhouse was slower and less physically demanding than the malting floor, but also in some ways more similar to parts of my old job — babysitting a process that mostly ran itself, but being ready to take action if something went wrong.
Aftewards, we stopped by the Washback Bar, the pub on the distillery grounds, for a few drams before dinner.
Day 2
Day 2 started with an observation of the steeping, where barley was being soaked so that it could be spread on the floor and start sprouting.
The day’s most exciting physical activity was filling casks. The volume in the vat was such that we were going to fill 63 barrels. The 63 empty barrels were lined up in the yard, and had been stenciled with the year, a code for the cask’s history (e.g. first or second fill, bourbon, rum, sherry, etc.), intended contents (Springbank, Hazelburn, or Longrow), and sequential integers, which had to be kept in order (that is, cask 1192 needed to be filled right before case 1193, and they needed to be stored in order in the yard, and later in the warehouse).
We rolled empty casks out of the yard and into a line in the filling room. There was space for two casks, open bung up, under the filling gun, and the gun would be aimed into one or the other. When one cask was finished, the gun would be slid over to the other, the bung on the full cask would be hammered in, the cask would be pushed out the door, and the empty cask at the front of the line would be rolled into position to replace it. As the full cask rolled out the door, someone would catch it and roll it across the yard to set it a row next to all the other full casks (all with their bungs straight up).
There were people manning the filling gun, people rolling casks into the filling room, people moving casks through the line and loading them under the filling gun, and people rolling them out of the filling room into position in the yard. I and my Whisky School colleagues moved in and out of those different roles as the situation demanded.
The distillery manager sat in a little office inside the filling warehouse, keeping notes on each cask as it moved through. There was a scale, which we used to weigh some of the casks, before and after filling, at the beginning and end of the run.
I got very few photos of this, because I had to duck out and change into my steel-toed work boots at the beginning. (Rolling casks was the one task all week during which my toes seemed most at risk.) By the time I got back, everything was in full swing and I dived in.
Moving empty casks was one process; one could be rolled when it was on its side (which is how we got them from the yard into the filling room) or standing up (which we did to get them into position on the line in the filling room). When the cask is standing up, one sort of spins it in a controlled arc of maybe a quarter turn at a time, repeatedly.
At one point I was moving a cask forward in the warehouse line in little rolling arcs and it got away from me, a little, and crashed into the wall of the office. It didn’t seem to have done any damage. I looked up and met the eyes of the distillery manager, wearing an expression that I hope conveyed my embarrassment. He held my eyes for a moment and whistled a sort of “close call, don’t do it again” whistle. I did not make that mistake again.
Full casks move very differently from empty ones. I would have to rock them to get them going, and then once they were moving, it was a little like kayaking; I would alternately pushing on the left side and then the right, each of which would push it forward but also a little off to one side or the other at a slight diagonal; it went straight if you alternated evenly, and you could steer it by letting up a little on the pushes on one side.
As we were lining the full casks up outside in the pick up area, we were repeatedly reminded to leave the bung up. There was an art to rocking the cask in place to change its orientation by a few degrees, given that a full cask is over 500 pounds (230 kg).
Once the filling was complete, a forklift transported the casks, two at a time, to Warehouse 6, which is a dunnage warehouse.
In a dunnage warehouse, the casks are on the floor, in multiple layers, with a pair of boards between each layer. The boards don’t form a platform; they’re just there so that the casks roll straight when they’re first put in place. Most of the surface area of the casks on layer 2 is lying directly on the casks on layer 1, and so forth. (The other kind of warehouse is a racking warehouse, which has shelves.)
Our first task was to get the casks up to the first floor (which an American would call the second floor).
We rolled the casks into place under a hole in the first floor, and used a machine to lower a chain harness. Somebody would hang the chain harness in the proper way around the casks and yell “go!” and we’d lift it up with the “up” button, then pull the machine forward on its rail with a cord, then lower the casks down with the “down” button till they were sitting on the upper floor with the chains loose enough that they could be thrown off by hand, and the casks could then be rolled down the aisle into a line, always retaining the order stenciled on them.
I and my colleagues rotated between operating the lift and rolling the casks into place on the ground floor and into the line in the aisle.
Finally came the dunnage racking. Here, we wanted three layers of casks, and we wanted all the bungs directly up. (They were going to sit in these stacks for years.) The professionals laid out two long boards flat on the ground perpendicular to the aisle and running up to the wall, with the boards maybe half a cask width apart.
They rolled the first cask up, rotated it so it was facing the correct direction to roll onto the boards, and explained to us how to manage orientation. We wanted to put the cask onto the boards in the correct orientation so that by the time it rolls to the end, it’d be bung up.
They described orientations in terms of a clock face. The first cask would go on at with the bung at “quarter past” (90°), and each subsequent cask needed to be rotated by “20 minutes [120°] further,” so the next one would go onto the boards at “25 till” (210°), and the next one at “5 till” (330°), and then the cycle would start over again at “quarter past.”
I learned to “work” the casks by rocking in place, side to side, pushing away and sliding forward, to change the orientation, and once everyone agreed the bung was rotated the correct number of minutes, I’d push it onto the boards, which would serve as guides so it would roll along correctly to line up next to the prior cask.
Once we finished the first layer, they laid boards on top of the layer at the same distance as the prior boards, and a new lift machine came beeping out; it had a big platform on it, and a control panel with “up” and “down” buttons.
Now I’d roll the cask onto the platform, get lifted up by the machine operator, rotate the cask in place to face the right way, work it in place to the proper number of minutes from bung up, and give it a good hard push out onto the boards (initially precariously) balanced on top of the first layer of casks. Professionals stood on top of the lower layer of casks, caught the incoming cask, and rolled it into place. The first four or five casks, they kept at roughly the middle of the stack for balance reasons, only rolling them to the end once the majority of the second layer was in place.
The third layer was similar to the second, just higher up. Our initial rotations were not always perfect, so the professionals would sometimes work the casks in-place to proper orientation. Their patience with us was exemplary.
At one point, the boards for the next layer were discovered to not be the right length, so some on-the-fly alterations had to be made. The first saw was apparently dull, so the man laughingly threw it over his shoulder in disgust (after verifying there was no one there), and a fresh saw was fetched.
There is a more modern “racking warehouse,” but there’s so much demand they have to use all the warehouse space, old and new.
The day finished up with a warehouse tasting of several older spirits straight from their casks; the Director of Production extracted spirit with a tool called the “valinch” or “barrel thief” and poured it directly into our glasses.
Day 3
Day 3 started with more shoveling and wheelbarrows on the malting floor. This time we were dumping the sprouted grain down a chute to the kiln floor. Once most of the grain was gone, we started sweeping it with push brooms to make piles big enough to shovel, and then eventually started sweeping directly into the chute.
I felt very accomplished looking at the grainless floor, until the professionals went through with brooms and swept out all the caches we’d missed around the poles and in the corners.
We went down into the kiln room, at the bottom of the chute, where the grain was all in a mound under the chute mouth, and shoveled it around the floor to flatten it out. (Actually, there were two mounds, because the end of the chute had been clicked back and forth between two positions.)
We went into some of the spaces around the chutes and other channels and cleaned up leftover dust and flour, bagging it up to carry away to local farmers.
We then watched the firing of the kiln. They were making a batch of Springbank, which starts with six hours of peat smoke followed by thirty hours of hot air, so the guy was going to be stuck there with his shovel for quite a while — though not as long as Longrow, which can take up to six consecutive eight-hour shifts! There are piles of both dry and wet peat; the dry peat is used to get the fire going, but the wet peat generates more smoke, which imparts more flavor.
We then spent some time back on the malting floor, where we used a motorized device called a grubber to move the grain on the floor around, so that the sprouts wouldn’t knit together and mat the grain. This thing was heavy and loud and had a long cord, and I had to drag it backwards; the floor was slippery due to moisture under the loose grain, and I and my fellow students worked together to manage the cord and grubber to keep them out of each other’s way and to keep the cord from knotting around the poles. The professional could do all this quickly, solo.
We stopped by the stillhouse, where some steam-cleaning was going on. Upstairs, the washback room was so full of steam it was just a wall of white when we opened the door.
And on the roof, the wash charger was being loaded.
The workday wrapped up in the warehouse where we’d previously been stacking casks: we did a valinch tasting with an employee of Cadenhead, the independent bottlers that are a sibling brand of Springbank.
We then tromped halfway across town (which is to say, a couple blocks) to the Cadenhead storefront, to check out their store and bar.
Day 4
The highlight of Day 4 was the bottling plant. There are vats, into which casks are emptied.
There are filters that remove particulate between the vat and its destination.
And there are two assembly lines, one automated, one semi-automated, for filling bottles. After a tour, we took stations on the automated line, which is really only automated in the middle.
On the front of the line, someone stacks empty bottles onto a conveyor belt. They roll into a machine that cleans them, fills them, puts in a cork, slides foil around the cork, crimps the foil, and attaches a label. Then they come out on a conveyor belt and hit the human assembly line.
- Human 1 is quality control: who inspects to make sure label, foil, bottle, etc. are in proper condition. Bottles that don’t passed are pulled off the line; labels or foil may be stripped and the bottles re-run, or the contents may be emptied back into the vat.
- Human 2 slaps a square piece of cardboard around the neck of the bottle.
- Human 3 loads six bottles into a case, which has a six-way cardboard divider inside.
- Human 4 takes the full case, folds down the top flaps, and slides it into a machine that tapes the top shut. They’re also responsible for putting the cases in front of Human 3, with the cardboard divider properly set up; this requires them to be pulling boxes off of a pile behind them and standing up the cardboard dividers.
- Human 5 stacks the taped cases on a pallet. When the pallet reaches a certain number of cases, they wrap it in plastic.
I rotated through the roles of Human 2, 3, and 4. (Professionals merge some of these roles — e.g. I think Human 1 and 2 are usually a single person.) The tasks are simple and repetitive but very time sensitive. More than once, I fell behind and had to work much faster to dig out and catch up.
Human 4’s task has many more elements than the others, and I found that in this role I was constantly improvising, bringing varying numbers of cases off the pile, experimenting with different ways of stacking pre-staged boxes, etc., whereas in the role of Human 2 and Human 3 I rapidly got into a grove and found an efficient repeatable process.
It was impossible not to think about I Love Lucy or a bajillion cartoons about assembly lines.
We popped out to watch a cask regauging: a cask that has been sitting long enough needs to have its contents measured and the new measurements recorded.
Next was a tour of J. & A. Mitchell’s other facility, the Glengyle Distillery. Glengyle is not currently independent; for a few months of the year, they shut down Springbank, and the staff work on Glengyle’s production runs. The hope is that it will over time grow into a fully independent facility, but right now, due to sharing malting floor, water source, and staff, they can’t afford to operate both at once.
Before the crash of the early 20th century, the Mitchell family owned both Springbank and the Glengyle distillery of that time. The current owner is a descendant of the Mitchells, and he wanted to have a Glengyle in the family again. However, there was already a whisky on the market named Glengyle, because the rights had been sold, so they had to release it under a different name — the whisky is called Kilkerran, though it does say on the bottles that it comes from Glengyle Distillery.
To protect against further trademark, J. & A. Mitchell bought up the names of all the other lost Campbeltown distilleries (which is where “Hazelburn” and “Longrow” get their names).
Between Springbank, Glengyle, and the Glen Scotia distillery down the road, there are three distilleries in Campbeltown, enough for it to continue to qualify as a Scotch region. Glengyle also gives them a chance to experiment with other expressions of the Campbeltown style (e.g. it’s much more open to automation than Springbank), helping it stay a region in more than just name.
This of course ended with a Q&A and tasting session.
Finally, we went to the blending lab. A bottle can be called a single malt even if it contains samples from multiple casks, of multiple styles, so long as they’re all from the same distillery. We had six large bottles containing the contents of six different styles of casks, and test tubes with samples from those bottles, and beakers and syringes.
There was:
- Springbank aged in a Bourbon barrel.
- Springbank aged in a Sauternes cask.
- Springbank aged in a Port cask.
- Springbank aged in a Rum cask.
- Springbank aged in a refill Sherry butt.
- Springbank aged in a first-fill Sherry butt.
The first-fill Sherry whisky was dark red, much darker than the refill Sherry or any of the other whiskies.
We tried various combinations. I thought I would like the Port cask more than I did; it was dry and plummy and chemical, and I didn’t find the right combination to offset it. I ended up liking a recipe of
- 4 parts Bourbon
- 2 part first-fill Sherry
- 2 part Rum
- 1 part Sauternes
Then I filled up the 700ml beaker in those proportions, and they bottled it up for me.
Day 5
The final day, we sat for a written test. It covered a lot of ground, but we could talk to each other and it was open book. But a lot of details had really sunk in. It’s almost like Whisky School works.
We had lunch with the Distillery Manager, received written diplomas, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways.
Tails: Parting observations
After the end of class, I walked across the street from the guesthouse, where there was a Salvation Army donation bin. I took the insoles, metatarsal supports, and heel lifts out of the workboots and threw the boots into the bin and felt free.
The second I turned back, a seagull was staring at me, with a heel lift in its mouth.
“Come on, man,” I said, and tried to explain the limited nutritional benefits of cardboard. But the gull cared not, and flew away with shoe hardware in its mouth.
I gathered up what was left, packed my bags, and moved on.
A few observations from staff or my fellow students kept rattling around in my brain.
It was interesting that most of the people who worked in the distillery didn’t drink whisky. Beer was the clear favorite. At first I speculated it might be that they were tired of whisky by the time they got home, but for the most part it just seemed to be that whisky is expensive. They might get the occasional bottle as a holiday gift, but beer is just a much more economical habit.
I had also been struck by how cheerful the staff were — despite not drinking whisky. Springbank employs a lot more people than Scotch distilleries of comparable size, and many processes that are automated elsewhere are still manual there. Any time we got to see a group of professionals solving problems together, they showed a comfort with each other, a cheerfulness, a sort of mutual trust and appreciation that made me happy to see. This was particularly clear on day 2 when we were rolling casks in at quarter past, twenty-five till, and five till in the dunnage warehouse. And I wondered how much of that happiness and autonomy came from the lack of automation. Did the repetitive nature of their work allowed them to rely on one another, and improvise?
We joked about what a great deal it was for them that we’d paid to do manual labor for them, but obviously we were doing the work more poorly than a professional would, and it was costly for one of them to keep an eye on us at all times. Yet the staff was friendly and welcoming throughout the process.
When I was shoveling barley or rolling barrels or working on the bottling assembly line, all the fun came from the fact that I knew the goal, but it was entirely up to me what to do moment to moment, and that I was constantly adapting to changing conditions, and helping out my fellow students when they needed it.
My whole career has been about automating, making anything repetitive disappear; we treat it as an unquestioned good that our jobs are different every three to six months because of automation. But if the job is always changing, can someone ever reach that level of appreciation and mutual trust?
Or maybe this is just a knowledge worker romanticizing manual labor.
I had experiences I’ll remember the rest of my life, and met very cool people. But the moment I was happiest was when I knew I’d never have to wear those steel-toed boots again.
