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RICHARD JOYNSON
As your leading journal dedicated to all matters Scotch we thought we would investigate the practicalities of blending for a world brand. Those of us who have been on a distillery tour will know that making Scotch whisky is a relatively simple craft process involving a stream of water, a sack of barley, a bag of yeast, an oak barrel and some bottles. The bulk handling [language!—Ed.] of Scotch is not part of the traditional skill-and-craftsman imagery perpetuated by isolated London-based marketeers. Their belief is that if the imagination of a whisky drinker is allowed to stray beyond the glens and into Scotland’s central belt the enjoyment of their brands’ unique features will be spoiled. Those fans who subscribe to this theory (yet wish to persist in reading this piece) should console themselves with their appreciation of the product, despite the handling it is subjected to. The pleasure, quality and enjoyment is why we are here. Your reporter’s thoughts on the vulnerability of Scotch during its journey from field to bottle are well documented; creation of the Loch Fyne blend (married after blending) and observations from our own Living Cask are supported by Master Blender Richard Paterson’s comments in Beyond Distilling II (SWR17), “we try not to rush the various stages, allowing the whisky time to settle. You have to be as gentle as possible”. Richard is responsible for Whyte & MacKay, a blend that famously describes itself as ‘double matured’ referring to a second period of returning to cask for a period of marrying once the final blend of malt and grain whiskies is assembled. Such time consuming and costly care must have a beneficial effect otherwise the cost and profit police (aka accountants) would have outlawed it by now. Consider the world’s leading whisky brand, Johnnie Walker. Red Label sells 6.8million cases each year. In shoppers’ terms that’s 87m 70cl bottles. The older sibling, Black Label, sells half that quantity while J&B, the number 2 brand, achieves 77m bottles (per year mind). These three brands alone would float the new Queen Mary II and are part of a portfolio of over 100 Scotch whisky blends produced by the world’s biggest spirits company, Diageo. Diageo was formed 7 years ago (220m seconds) [all right - that’s enough!—Ed.] by the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan. Guinness begat United Distillers in the late ’80s after the acquisition of the mighty DCL—the Distiller’s Company Limited—which in turn arose from the merger of the pioneering whisky giants of the late 19th century, principally: Walker, Dewar, Buchanan, Mackie (White Horse) and Haig. The result of the merger is a streamlined cost-efficient giant, with Diageo concentrating globally on Johnnie Walker and J&B Scotch, Smirnoff vodka, Tanqueray gin, Captain Morgan rum, Cuervo tequila and Baileys cream thingy. Other brands with regional focus include Bell’s, Buchanan’s, White Horse, Old Parr, the Classic Malts & Cardhu, Gordon’s gin and Archer’s schnapps. After the merger, Turnbull Hutton, currently principal guest columnist for your Scotch Whisky Review, was director of Spirit Supply and established the current regime of spirit production in Scotland located across 45 sites. Facilities include 27 malt and 2 grain distilleries, 4 maltings, 4 cooperages, Abercrombie the coppersmith, 3 animal feed plants, 7 major warehousing sites, 4 blending centres and 3 bottling halls. In Scotland Diageo employs 3,800 people and produces over 650 million bottles of spirits (half Scotch, 200m white spirits (gin and vodka), 100m ‘ready to drink’ (Smirnoff Ice, Archer’s aqua) and 6m bottles of rum). (See also SWR15 interview with Turnbull Hutton and SWR16 Beyond Distilling I.) So you want to produce a world blend? From the simple process described above and done well you should make a profit and expand your business. In time you may even become a challenger to Diageo, but before this investor considers buying shares you have to show that you can handle 400,000 tonnes of grain, (180,000t of malting barley and 220,000t of wheat—incidentally 95% of all their grain requirement is from Scottish farmers, the balance sourced from the east of England because of a favourable earlier harvest). On a distillery tour you may have been shown a yeast store of 25kg sacks. Well 400,000 such sacks of yeast are on Diageo’s shopping list! One million oak casks are filled each year. Boggled? Just wait! To move that lot about the country requires a fleet of 200 articulated lorries and 250 forklift trucks. Quality is assessed by the utilisation of 3 million 10cl sample bottles every year. Coordinating the movement of this lot is Pru Jowett, Logistics Manager for Spirit Supply Scotland. Pru is neither grey nor bald as may be expected of such a seemingly neurosis-inducing task but is in fact a sensible, cheerful biochemistry graduate of 14 years service with the company. Her remit is the planning and movement of new make spirit (malt and grain), blended spirit and casks (full and empty). Pru also handles imported rum in bulk for maturation, blending and forwarding to packaging and the movement of GNS, grain neutral spirit, produced at Cameronbridge distillery for onward production to vodka, gin, other white spirits and ‘flavoured’ products. Central to all Scotch movements are the warehouses. New spirit from most distilleries is tankered to one of 13 filling stores where casks are filled and moved to a nearby warehouse, the selection of which is ‘it’s nearby and has space’ or technically ‘locality and vacuity’. This may be a distillery site or more likely on this scale one of 7 massive warehousing sites located in the central belt, the biggest of which is Blackgrange, 49 houses near Alloa holding 3 million casks. At any one time Diageo has over 7m casks maturing (1.1 billion litres of pure alcohol—3.6bn 70cl bottles at 43%—enough to flood an area the size of Wales to a depth of... [Stop it! —Ed.]), both their own make and part of an ongoing spirit trading agreement with the rest of the industry. Talking with Pru about her job is vastly entertaining and inspiring as the scale of the operation becomes apparent. Imagine 7 million casks in 500 warehouses across Scotland; imagine a blend requirement of typically forty components of differing specification—distillery, age and wood type. Now go and find those casks in the most efficient manner. While you are at it you had better find the casks to make up the other blends you will be bottling in the next week. Now go get those casks, empty them and blend and transport the whisky to the bottling hall. Be careful to get the proportions as specified by the blender and ensure you never mix the wrong casks. If you do—run away! Each warehouse is a monstrous three-dimensional rack and tier chess set, so many casks high, umpteen wide and ohmygosh deep. Each cask and each cask location is identified with a barcode and every movement is logged constantly. Every drop has to be accounted for to HM Customs & Excise (yes, there is a greater entity than Diageo). A recent demand for a manual stock check at Leven bond fingered all one million+ casks recorded, many of which were entered on manual ledgers long before computers and barcode zappers, to a negligible error. Whiskies destined to be single malts tend to be stored at traditional distillery warehouses (‘in the north’) with a steady turnover of stock all the time. Throughout the year, housekeeping is performed by eight warehouse flying squads, teams of three men who will hit a site and attempt to rearrange casks for efficient removal when required. It is worth avoiding having to remove an entire row of 30 casks simply to pick the mature one at the back—a process known succinctly as ‘minimising the non-goers’. Once a plan is created for the next year’s spirit production, Pru’s team will establish the requirement of each distillery to achieve its goals. Spirit from the stills is filled into on-site tanks and her job is to ensure that there is always space to take spirit while also transporting it away in the most efficient manner. NOW ASSEMBLE YOUR BLEND. Pru is at the beck and call of the bottling and packaging units who in turn respond to orders. It is her job to see that blend is available on demand for bottling. Generally for a Diageo blend there can be up to 40 components. The blend quality team will have advised Pru the quantity, type of whisky, age and wood type used for maturation for each blend and she can then source those specifications. Each week she will assemble a blending programme based on the bottling requirements. This will be a fiendishly complicated mix of standard blends, deluxe blends and single malts, typically 26 separate products including for example: a Walker Black Label to be blended and bottled at Kilmarnock, a J&B blended at Blythswood and then bottled at Shieldhall (near Renfrew), a standard 4yo to be blended at Cambus, bottled at Leven and some single malts vatted and bottled at Leven. However before they can be blended they have to be emptied and this would be at one of 5 dedicated disgorging units (DU) only two of which are at blending sites. As Pru said “Oh dear I’ve lost you”. [Just a bit—Ed.] “Okay. For example, for a ‘recipe’ involving 4 grain whiskies and 36 malts that we have selected from 12 warehouses across the group, a cask may be selected at Inchgower’s warehouse near Buckie on the north-east coast. That cask is then allocated to a blend operation number that determines its future as part of the blend. The cask (and others) will be transported to the DU at Auchroisk 20 miles away, where it will be joined by other casks selected from distillery warehouses throughout the north for that week’s blending programme. All casks with the same operation number will be tipped into a trough and vatted ready for transport to a blending site. If there are more casks than a road tanker can hold then these will be transported to a site where they can be added to another component of the blend; we don’t like moving tankers unless they are full. “This ‘part blend’ from Auchroisk may be tankered to one of our four blending sites or tank farms, let’s say Blythswood, where it may be joined by 3 part blend tankers from the DU at Blackgrange (including casks from say Talisker and those spares from Auchroisk) and 3 from Leven and 1 from Bonnybridge. These ten tankers would fill a 250,000 litre vat and is now a full blend. The large part of the result could then be tankered to the bottling hall at Shieldhall, some to Leven that can handle miniatures and half bottles and some to Kilmarnock that handles larger and odd shaped bottles. “Once at the bottling hall the blend is reduced and packaged. The Leven bottling lines are also able to handle smaller volumes, such as our single malts. The planning process operates in a five week window but from cask selection to bottling generally takes five days. “My team is responsible for 4,500 new make tanker movements, 5,250 part-blended and 4,650 fully blended (tanker) movements. In a year we will blend 110m litres of pure alcohol and transport 1m casks from disgorging to filling store to warehouse. “This is all bread-and-butter to us.” It is here that the true skill of logistics becomes apparent. Does it run smoothly? “Yep! Compared to the complexity and the volume we are doing I suppose it goes wrong very rarely. With the people and checks in place screw-ups are picked up very quickly, long before they become a problem. Incidents such as snow blocking the north A9 route for example are managed as they present themselves. It is important that each tanker turns up at the right time in order to fill the right blending vat. They have a 30 minute time slot and if a driver is late he becomes a statistic for discussion later. I’ve even done air freight once but I don’t want to do that again! “Contamination among whiskies is prevented in tankers, pipes and vat by water flushing and special colour coded seals. Transport is contracted out and most regular visitors to Scotland will recognise those companies involved in moving the world’s favourite spirit. Once Pru’s tankers have done their bit it is up to packaging who bottle and prepare the whisky for despatch to a thirsty market. One of the 8 lines at Shieldhall fills 600 bottles every minute, enough to keep one drinker guided by the government’s recommended daily intake happy, and smug, for 29 years. |
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