Dances with valves

Me & my factory: Duncan McGillivray

Yesterday I spent four hours sitting on top of a boiler the size of an old steam train, trying to fix the crown head valve. It had seized and was chucking out steam everywhere.

We're basically working with Victorian machinery here, but it has been agreed we'll never replace it. We're the only independent distillery among seven on Islay, and we feel strongly that Bruichladdich should be run in the traditional way, not like some big conglomerate.

For example, we don't chill-filter. If we bottle whisky below 43% ABV, at certain temperatures the natural oils in the spirit can separate from the water, which means the whisky goes cloudy. So the big brands generally chill their spirit to 2°C, to make the oil droplets solidify, and then filter if off. That's why most of the whiskies on the shelf in supermarkets are a uniform, golden colour. But when you lose the oils you also lose a lot of the flavour. And you don't get that silky texture.

We bottle slightly stronger, at 46%, which prevents the separation. We don't add caramel either. And we also distil very slowly, which the big volume producers obviously can't do. A still is like a big kettle with an element in it. If you boil it fast and hard, the impurities go over the top into the condenser. If you boil it long and slow, only the finest spirit goes over the top. Bruichladdich is light, smooth and fruity. It's a really 'dancing' product.

I started working here in 1974. I'd just married and was living on about £4.10s a week when a job came up in the distillery that had a house with it. I've been associated with the distillery ever since, and this is definitely the best it has been.

This year we've converted the old distillery manager's house, together with the customs officer's house next door, into accommodation for our Academy of Islay Single Malt, where we run week-long residential courses. We've had enthusiasts from all over the world paying £1,300 a week to learn about whisky-making.

The distillery was actually shut down from 1995 to 2001. We'd been owned by a succession of big companies. Then in 1994, as part of Invergorden Distillers, we were acquired by Whyte & Mackay, and they saw us as just another production unit. Within a year they closed down Bruichladdich and two others: Tamnavulin, on Speyside, and Tullibardine, in Perthshire.

The day the closure was announced I was offered a job as service manager at the local Volkswagen garage. To find yourself on an VW electronics course in Milton Keynes and be the oldest by 15 years was no fun. But I was lucky to have a job, and I stayed there the whole time Bruichladdich was closed.

Tamnavulin is still mothballed. But Bruichladdich was bought in 2000 by a group of private investors, and we were back in production the following year. The CEO, Mark Reynier, and his partners put together a consortium of 35 people, half of them on Islay, and re-formed the original Bruichladdich Distillery Company. One of the new shareholders was Jim McEwan, who came in as production director. He's a master distiller who used to work for Bowmore. It's great for visitors to the Academy to be able to learn from people like Jim.

In January 2001 I met the directors over dinner, and they asked me to come back as distillery manager -- provided I could guarantee we'd be open for the Islay whisky festival at the end of May. It was just like Changing Rooms: we made it with hours to spare.

I was born and brought up on the west coast of Islay. I didn't speak anything but Gaelic until I went to school at five. I worked on the family farm, went into general engineering for a while, then started here as a trainee still-man, learning the whole art of distillation from a wise old guy called Gilbert Carmichael. Then, because of my background, I began working for the engineer, Ian McKinnon.

Ian was a clever, clever man. Whatever the problem, he was never stuck. It's an island thing. You can't just pick up the phone and get a guy in to fix things, so you learn to solve problems yourselves.

I know the process here inside out because I've taken most of the machinery apart and rebuilt it. I would never have come back to work for a multinational that was going to spend millions on computerised plant. A guy who just sits at a control panel might know that a particular valve is closed but he won't understand why.

When I walked back inside in January 2001 I hadn't been here for six years, and I thought: what have I done? By March, I'd got most of the old guys back here -- the ones that hadn't retired -- and we worked through the plant, unseizing things, lubricating, fabricating. A lot of the guards on the machinery had rusted away.

We've got two huge oil-fired boilers to heat the stills, and because ours had been shut down for five years we had to have NDT (non-destructive tests) done as well as the usual visual inspection. That showed up a crack in one of the furnace tubes so we had to cut the boiler in half and fabricate a new tube.

There's not much we can't repair given the time and the patience. I've got a printed circuit board on my desk at the moment, which I'm told will cost £875 to replace. It's the soft start unit for the mixer in the mash tun, where we ferment the malt. The motor is under so much load that if we tried to start it at full speed it would probably blow every light on the island, so the soft-start unit powers it up gradually.

Our supplier says there are only two circuit boards left in the country, and because they're obsolete he's recommending we buy them both. But I've already fixed this one once myself, so we'll probably just buy one other for now. Repairing circuit boards isn't to be recommended, but electronics companies are a bit like double-glazing companies.

On the production side, the two things that hold us back are time and money, probably in that order. We're hoping to be in profit by the end of this year, but we're not out of the woods yet. Having said that, if we had an open chequebook there wouldn't be much of a challenge.

For the first three years we were just distilling. Our biggest seller is our 10-year-old, so it's years before you can start bottling. You have to have deep pockets to open a distillery.

Fortunately, although we had a gap in production between 1995 and 2000, we've got reasonable stocks from before that, some dating back to 1964. Most Bruichladdich used to be sold to other distillers for blending -- interest in single malts is a fairly recent thing -- and we've been able to re-acquire a lot of stock we were holding for other people. We've also been able to exchange some of it for the new, un-aged spirit we've produced since 2001.

In our first year we distilled 120,000 litres. It was up to 300,000 last year, and it will be the about the same this year. We'd like to do a lot more, but I've had to transfer most of our guys to the bottling hall. We need to generate money daily to make this place function.

The bottling plant opened last year, built in one of our old warehouses. There was no roof -- just walls and an earthen floor -- so it was a big renovation. About 350 tonnes of concrete went into the floor alone. It's classed as a food production area, so we had to answer to Building Regs, the fire department, Health & Safety Executive, environmental health, Customs & Excise -- even Historic Scotland, because the whole distillery is listed.

Before we began bottling we were sending spirit off to the Glasgow area to be filled for us. We only use Islay spring water, so we were sending tanker-loads of water over too. Otherwise it would have been Glasgow tap water going in. We expected to bottle about 15,000 cases in the first year of doing it ourselves. It was actually in excess of 30,000, and this year it may end up even more.

The irony is that Bruichladdich was built in 1881, so it has been here all along. But it's only since Mark, Jim and the others took over that it's had a chance to breathe. And now we've got people coming to see us from all over the world. Interview by Mick Whitworth

Personal

Name: Duncan McGillivray

Age: 53

Career highlights: Worked on Islay all his life. Trained as an engineer before joining Bruichladdich as trainee still-man. Progressed to brewer and distillery manager before the 1995 shut-down. Returned as distillery manager in 2001.

Domestics: Married to Susan, with three daughters (29, 27 and 22) and grandson Adam

Outside work: Enjoys hill-walking -- time permitting -- and has just bought a small fishing boat. Member of Islay coastguard for 35 years.