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01 November 1998
Speyside Cooperage
By
Gavin Smith
Nowhere - except perhaps in The Vaults is whisky wood taken as seriously as at the Speyside Cooperage, located near the distillery village of Craigellachie and just four miles from the 'whisky capital' of Dufftown. Only sixteen cooperages survive in Britain, and the Speyside is one of four working in the north-east of Scotland. It is the largest independent cooperage in the country, and the only one with a visitor centre. It is part of the 'Malt Whisky Trail' and attracts people from all over the world. Around forty percent of visitors are from overseas, with Germany and the USA being particularly well represented in the visitors' book. Some 25,000 members of the public pay to see the cooperage each year, and an expansion of non-production facilities is currently under way.
According to Visitor Centre Manager Joy Thomson 'we are building on a tasting room for spirits, beers and wines that have been matured in oak casks, along with an enlarged shop and provision to offer tea and coffee. £250,000 is being invested in this prqject, and the new retail area should be open for Christmas, with the rest of the development starting up for Easter 1999'. Visiting members of the public experience the 'Acorn to Cask' exhibition, which explores the 5,000 year old heritage of coopering, along with an accompanying audio-visual presentation which has a soundtrack in five languages.
The visitor learns that Quercus alba, the American White Oak, is one of the best species for cask construction. The optimum wood comes from dense forests where trees grow slowly, giving tall trunks with few side branches or knots, and a strong fine grain. American forests now provide in excess of ninety percent of the wood used in Scottish cooperages, and each spring, Douglas Taylor of the Speyside Cooperage travels to Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri to select timber for cask-making. The public also line the viewing gallery and watch in fascination as the team of twenty-seven time-served coopers and their apprentices make from new and also renovate hogsheads, butts and puncheons at extraordinary speed. A 'piecework' payment scheme partly explains the rapidity, but these are highly-trained craftsmen who have served a four year apprenticeship, and they manage to make a difficult art look easy.
Many of the tools and processes used by today's cooper are very similar to those employed in the past, but just as 'high tee' elements have found their way into modern distilleries, so even this most labour-intensive and traditional of crafts now utilises some innovative methods. Micro-wave techniques are used to heat and shape the barrel staves, and radio frequencies modify the chemistry of the oak far quicker and more consistently than conventional steaming and charring.
The average age of employees is just thirty-five, which comes as a surprise to anyone with the popular perception of a cooper as a leathery-faced old man. This is very much a family business, where staff are on first name terms with the owners, and several generations of families have worked for the firm.
The Joint Managing Directors are brothers Willie and Douglas Taylor, whose mother is Chairman, and now the next generation of the family is involved, as Douglas' daughter has recently joined the company. The Speyside Cooperage has been owned by the Taylors since 1947, with the business beginning in quite basic premises. Douglas Taylor recalls 'we started with just six coopers in 1947, and now we have a stcifJ if around eighty. We were always short of room to expand, so when we got the chance in 1989, we bought the present site, which had been a farm.'
The Taylors invested £1.3m in creating the present purpose-built cooperage, which opened early in 1992. Coach parties on the way to the nearby Glenfiddich distillery tended to call in at the old cooperage, asking to look around, which led to the idea of incorporating a visitor centre into the new premises. In theory, the public side of the business would help offset any lean years on the production side, and certainly it has helped to raise the profile of the whole operation.
Apart from anything else, the cooperage has won eleven awards for its visitor facilities. According to Douglas, the company has just enjoyed its busiest ever year in terms of coopering work. 'We are currently repairing about 80,000 casks per year, and making 65,000 from new: he says, 'They are mainly hogsheads and barrels. We work for lots of companies, including major ones like UDV, Chivas and Allied, so in effect we work for about eighty distilleries - from Highland Park on Orkney to Girvan in Ayrshire in the south. We are also merchants, buying and selling casks.'
Not content with this volume of work, the Taylors also have a second cooperage in Broxburn, near Edinburgh, presided over by Willie Taylor, who points out 'we make another 80,000 or so casks at Broxbum each year, and seventy or eighty percent if that business is for grain distilleries such as Port Dundas'. The cooperage does a thriving line in gift items made from redundant casks, ranging from lathe-turned carrier bag handles to garden furniture. A full-time wood-turner has been employed for the past six years, making items to sell in the gift shop, and demand is in danger of outstripping supply. Joy Thomson notes that Christmas is a busy time for gift sales, and the shop produces a catalogue of available items and provides a delivery service throughout mainland Britain.
Looking down into the workshop from the viewing gallery, Joy observes that 'when they are about sixty years old we turn them into things like chairs.' As this seems to be a company which cares about the welfare of its staff, the presumption has to be that she is referring to the casks and not the coopers themselves. The most popular pieces on sale are flower tubs, and few gardens around Craigellachie and Dufftown fail to feature sawn-off 'hoggies' filled with marigolds and lobelias. It's nice to know that even after the last drops of whisky have been drained from tlle casks they can continue to contain something of beauty.
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