The Trials of a Distillery Tour Guide

Notes from a North Sea Island

"Where am I?"

The rather large American lady bumbles through the door behind her fellow cruise passengers. For a split second concern registers in my brain that she might not fit through. A flash of horror …. what if she got stuck?

It’s eight o’clock in the morning and I’m handing out drams of whisky to our guests with a huge, if slightly cheesy, welcoming grin fixed firmly on my face.

“What’s that” the American lady booms stretching out a podgy hand to meet the tumbler I’m holding out to her.

“It’s Highland Park whisky”.

The nose wrinkles, and with a rather loud sniff the hand drops heavily to her side.

"Is that what you make here?”t certainly is”. I try to keep the despair out of my voice.

“It’s too early in the day for me”, the glass is pushed back at me as she flounces past, her shoulder bag floating out behind her, as though trying to give her wings, and almost knocking the tray out of my hand.

“Oh yeah, I’ll have one of those”, the companion of the American lady reaches out eagerly to receive a glass of the amber nectar. About to follow her friend into the viewing room, where a short introductory film is about to be shown, the second lady suddenly stops dead in her tracks, as though something deeply significant has just occurred to her.

“Where are we?” I’m perhaps not quite able to hide my puzzlement.

“You’re at the Highland Park Whisky Distillery”, I answer as clearly as possible, wondering whether the poor woman’s suffered a sudden ‘bad turn’, causing her to have some kind of bizarre brain storm.
“No, I mean which Port are we in?” the lady persists, sounding a little desperate now.

Ah, the joys of a luxury cruise. See the world in twenty three days, a different city every night, see a million sights and try to remember which monument, museum, structure or statue you saw where. I guess it must be confusing.

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A brief calm as the visitors watch on screen how the ‘water of life’ is made while sipping their drams, before the guides take them out on a tour of the Distillery in groups of fifteen.

So, first off the Barley Loft and Malting Floors. Here the visitors exclaim over the huge steeps, the size of the barley store, capable of holding up to six hundred tonnes of grain, and delight over the two Distillery cats, Malt and Barley, frolicking together on the floor in the group’s midst. Visitors love the idea of being handed a handful of the green malt to examine in minute detail, before allowing it to run through their fingers back onto the floor.

Next stop, the first of Highland Park’s two kilns. I once took on tour a group of annoyingly cocky school children from Amsterdam (I guess I must have drawn the short straw that day). I was patiently explaining to them that we use coke (a type of coal which has had its gases removed) to dry the malt, rather than natural coal which could possibly impart an undesirable flavour to the malt, when a small hand went up. Momentarily I was thrilled to think I had held that young person’s attention for long enough to encourage her to raise a question. My delight, however, quickly turned to horror.

Oh dear, I thought. She hadn’t been listening properly after all, especially as I’d been holding a piece of the grubby black stuff in my hand all the while I was talking. I imagined the girl was now seeing the kiln stuffed full of cans of cola in her mind’s eye and was probably wondering if she could have one.

“Yes, I do”, I affirmed. I was just bending down to pick up the piece of coke again which I had dropped onto the floor, when I was arrested half way by her desire for further clarification of this point.

“Do you mean ‘coke’ as in cocaine?”

I think my jaw must have dropped to my boots. I must admit it took me the best part of the rest of the tour to recover from the shock.

To the Mash House. The anecdote that never fails to raise a few smiles is the one about World War II when the Italian POWs stationed on the Islands allegedly came to the Distillery in the early mornings to take their bath in the huge washbacks used for fermentation. I always took pains to reassure my group that the evidence of this practice has long since disappeared as the washbacks are steam cleaned after each use.

The Still House is, of course, always a ‘wow factor’. Seeing the four great stills at such close quarters cannot fail to impress while one’s nostrils are infused with the intoxicating vapour of raw alcohol, which some days is almost totally overpowering.

Last, but by no means least we come to the bonded warehouse, home of the maturing whisky for the next dozen years or more. While admiring rows upon rows of casks in this dark and almost spooky place visitors learn about Magnus Eunson, the Distillery’s founder going about his clandestine activities of producing illicit whisky when he wasn’t preaching to his devoted parishioners.

On returning to the Visitor Centre there is the chance to sample another dram, if desired, and to purchase a few souvenirs and a bottle (or maybe two) of the fine product produced at this, the most northerly Scottish whisky distillery in the world.