Mc Dougall, John; Smith, Gavin D.
Wort Worms & Washbacks

Neil Wilson Publishing LTD, ISBN 1-897784-65-1, GBP 7.99, First Published 1999, 215 Pages, 21,5 x 14 cm, Paperback

EVERY YEAR over one million whisky lovers visit Scotland’s distilleries and witness the making of Scotch malt whisky. There they are exposed to a professional facade behind which the day-to-day running of kilns, matting floors, still houses and tunrooms seamlessly engages to create one of Scotand's greatest gifts to humanity. Well, that's what they are told by the tour guides! What these innocent bystanders will never see is what realty goes on behind the scenes.

In Wort, Worms & Washbacks John McDougall reveals the real life of one of Scotland's top distillers. Starting out as a young city lad at Aultmore Distillery on Speyside (where he arrived for his first day at work in a Jaguar as the manager eyed him suspiciously from the seat of his bicycle) McDougall's career took him to Dufftown, Girvan in Ayrshire, Islay and back to Speyside before a head-office job brought him to Glasgow. Along the way he turned Laphroaig from a rustic Hebridean distillery into a modern-day plant, sorted the yield problems at Ladyburn Distillery by ditching automation, prevented an overnight catastrophe at an Islay distillery when the stillman had gone to the pub for a sty pint but was cut off by floodwater on his return, and faced down an expectant Glaswegian workforce at a bottling plant on Christmas Eve to inform them that their wage packets had just been stolen.

And the characters he deals with seem to harken back to another age when time and motion men hadn't even been conceived. stillmen, excisemen, brewers, warehousemen and salesmen abound in these memoirs - many of them for entirety the wrong reasons.

This is the 'other' side of the whisky industry about which no-one ever hears, recounted by a highly respected insider who has seen the industry in good times and in bad, and who finished his management days at the world- renowned Springbank Distillery in Campbeltown. 

Gavin D. Smith is a freelance journalist and broadcaster who specialises in horseracing and whisky. He lives in Perth, Scotland.

John McDougall has over 35 years experience in the whisky industry covering distilling, personnel management, quality assurance and product development. He is currently acting as a consultant to the whisky trade and lives on the Clyde coast.