SCOTCH WHISKY RIOTS By John Haydock Whilst the glare of the world’s media fell on central London and Oxford Street on May 1st I chose instead to focus my gaze on the annual Mayday Dufftown Whisky Riots—so often overlooked by the industry press, but to the people of Speyside a yearly reminder of how closely single malt whisky and global anarchism are aligned. Imagine a cross between a seventeenth century Pope-burning, an eighteenth century apprentices’ riot, the bacchanalian bravado of a nineteenth century holiday fair-fortnight at the seaside, and the unfettered aggression of an east Fife football riot and you begin to have something of a picture of the fearsome spectacle that descends on malt-whisky’s most famous town. When I walked down the high street towards the landmark clocktower at 11.50 I felt like Gary Cooper approaching High Noon. Deserted streets, the occasional twitch of a net curtain, a glimpse of an anxious face peering through a window, the bark of a stray dog. Shop windows boarded-up, corrugated-iron barriers straining in the wind in front of innocent domestic doorways. In the side streets sinister armoured vehicles carrying cargoes of heavily protected riot police, with dogs and horses straining like greyhounds in the slips, and overhead, like the opening scene of Apocalypse now, the deep throated throbb of Chinook battle-cruisers, hungry wasps around a half-empty jar of strawberry jam. Of course it all started many years ago with the strike against the heart of the then DCL in Elgin, when the newly completed office built for fortress-malt distilling was destroyed by a suicide bomber who claimed allegiance to the shadowy IPLSM (International Patriots for the Liberation of Single Malts). On the evening before the building’s official opening a still-unidentified terrorist secreted himself in the Managing Director’s lavatory, igniting an incendiary mixture of liquid explosive and cask-strength Glenfarclas with a Bunsen burner—committing himself, and much of the building, to eternity in the cause of liberating some of the Distilling behemoth’s marvellous malts from the hands of the mercenary blenders. No surprise then that when I drove through Elgin on my way to Dufftown the reconstructed offices in Trinity Road were sandbagged and bunkered down—nor that the beleaguered faceless men of malt had apparently wired Harrods—‘Riot imminent, send guns’ on hearing of a possible diversionary attack from the KKK (Karamel Killers Kollective). In Dufftown it was all set to kick off at midday at the clock tower, and as I got closer I could see all the usual old faces. The softies, set up by the puppetmasters of disorder to put the forces of law and order at a misguided ease before the hard-headed footsoldiers of terror set to work. Every bizarre fringe group you could imagine was to be found was there. The baggy trousered Skateboarders for Scotch, campaigning for the introduction of a Red Bull finished Glenmorangie; the stern and silent Frankfurt Front for More Limited Editions of Macallan 1956 24 year old; the New Age Maltsters Alliance, digging up the streets and planting hand nurtured low-yield barley genetically mirrored on 200 year old beare-barley, the middle aged, prim and proper Indigent Ladies Association for the Listing of Historically Insignificant and Decayed Distillery Buildings; and the pony-pulling, pony-tailed Hippy Collective for Making Malt Whisky More Like it Used to be in the Old-Days Man. In the almost carnival-like atmosphere these innocent stooges created were the hazily defined KMFF (Keep Malt Filtration Free), the self-styled and bombastic CCMMB (Crazee Chemists Make Malt Better), the rather tasteless OLMMBB (Own Label Malt Makes a Better Buy), and the prickly Avenging Sons and Daughters of Rosebank. All these groups are united in their denial of any relationship to the militant Lunatic Fringe for Whisky (LFW). But these naïve innocents unwittingly harboured vipers in their breasts, and before I knew it I was walking in the company of some of the most dangerous men in the shadowy world of malt mayhem-makers. The most frightening beyond doubt were the World Alliance of National Know-it-alls, a shadowy Internet-linked group who trade graphic and almost pornographic images over the web of arcane distilling equipment. To be a member the test is to possess at least four hundred different images of wort-coolers, and to show their metal they intimidate hapless distillers with questions of hopelessly irrelevant and devilishly contrived detail. ‘We want your fermentation rates and we won’t wait’, they chanted through their facemasks, fists raised to the sky. The atmosphere amongst the fun-loving crowd quickly changed as they pushed and pulled their way through, pausing only to share the contents of their photo-albums with like-minded souls. Suddenly the sky turned black as the sun was eclipsed by a shower of worthless pointed, yet somehow pointless books, hurled towards the advancing lines of riot-police by the WWWGF (Whisky Writers Want Greater Fees), some of whom I swore I recognised beneath their heavily bearded faces. Try as I might I couldn’t escape the crowd, whose anger was only further incensed as we were cordoned into a tight circle around the clock tower and taunted by the baton-wielding stormtroopers, who periodically broke into the crushed crowd to pull out a suspect, many of whom were heavily beaten before being forced to drink large quantities of Bells and Whyte & Mackay as an act of indignant vengeance. How I survived I will never know. Afternoon passed into evening as the frustrated and increasingly dispirited crowd remained pinioned within sight of Dufftown’s famous seven hills, and seven or so stills. Even I felt sympathy with some of the misguided souls who, fortified only by occasional drams of Mortlach (succulent sherry sweet with citrus, hints of bananas and over-ripe kiwi-fruit, with a suggestion of peat perhaps ?) and Balvenie (rich fruit-cake flavours with sweet-shop jars, corned beef sandwiches and, perhaps, peat ?), gradually realised that for yet another year their attack on the bastions of Malt Distilling was doomed to failure. And yet, as I later reflected over a dram of surprisingly peaty Craigellachie, they would be back next year, as sure as summer follows spring, straining at the leash of social order, barking savagely, and lunging ferociously to bite hard at the hand that feeds them. And, of course, so would I.