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01 January 2001
A whisky satori
By Dave Brown

Write about a whisky experience. Sibh asked me. For reasons best known to myself (end of one year, start of a new one coupled with a hallucinatory fever), I interpreted this to mean the account of some malt-fuelled epiphany, an earth-shaking, knee-trembling, spine-tingling moment when something irrevocably changed in my life, a sort of whisky satori. You asked for it.

I suppose my first real adult connection with whisky started when I left school and, needing a summer job, ended up travelling half-way across Glasgow every morning to get to the DCL bottling plant at Stepps. (The notion of 'gap years' filled by trips to Thailand were unknown in those times, at least in Glasgow.)

This venture into the world of full employment wasn't driven by any desire to become involved in the whisky industry. It was a job, pure and simple. Oh, and it paid well, sufficient to keep me in vinyl and McEwan's 80/-, so don't go thinking this first epiphany will lead to my first sip of some fantastically arcane malt which summoned up a Blakeian vision of seraphim dancing an eightsome reel on my tongue. That came later. This was altogether grimier . . . and smellier.

You see, when the doors of the bottling hall were flung open at 7.30am you were immediately hit by a tsunami of reeking alcohol, which had the effect of making you instantaneously drunk on fumes alone. I figured if you could stomach that, then it was inevitable that you'd end up liking the stuff. Right enough, you had to. The day's work went something like this. Stand at the end of a line, lift off the cases and build them onto a pallet. 20 mins on one line, 20 mins on the neighbouring one and then 20 mins off on your 'spell', which was spent in the toilet (staff rooms being as common as gap years). There aren't many whisky writers who admit to having an epiphany in a men's toilet, but there ye go.

I started off as a skinny youth clutching a copy of Crime and Punishment but within a couple of weeks Dostoevsky had been left at home and my long initiation into whisky had started. Drinking during the break wasn't optional, it was obligatory. Every cistern hid a bottle. They were stashed in u-bends, below sinks, in towel dispensers and not to have a dram or three on your spell was considered a dereliction of duty. Needless to say, the afternoon shifts were somewhat hazy, but I had started a new love affair. There have been plenty other moments of satori along the way, but somehow this bizarre initiation stayed with me. It was the wild men I remembered, the people as much as the product.

The end result came last year when The Glenlivet's Jim Cryle, my writing and drinking buddy Chris Orr and I decided to recreate an ancient whisky smuggling route that ran from Glenlivet to Balmoral Castle. Why? Maybe the seed was sown by the men nicking the bottles from the line in Stepps, maybe it was hearing tales of the wild old dramming days, maybe it was just a desire to stop rewriting the same old history that everyone copies off each other and to -see what the reality (or an approximation of it) was like. So, kilted up and leading two Highland ponies, panniers full of Glenlivet 18-year-old, we trekked 40 miles, causing considerable consternation to serious walkers. It may have been tough at times (and bloody cold at night) but it was absurdly good crack and gave an unexpectedly vivid insight into what the whisky world was like in those days: operated by bands of rebels (or criminals depending on your point of view) selling the product of a criminalised rural population to the middle classes who made up the establishment that were trying to jail them! The same is going on in Colombia today.

We stopped for regular 'energy stops' as Jim called them (toilet cisterns being replaced by panniers), and never has whisky tasted so good. This was liquid which seemed to spring from the very landscape we were tramping through: there was heather, peat, a mind-hurting clarity to the experience, a feeling of energy and primal -love which transformed this crazed expedition into a search for whisky's forgotten roots, to a time beyond the slick marketing and back to a sense of community and people. This was life, this was whisky. Satori if you like."

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