The Silent Season
We've just completed our annual shutdown here at
the Aberlour distillery. Essential repairs have been made to the
copper stills, other equipment has been overhauled and the insurance
men have made their check on the boilers. This break is also a
chance for us to go away on holiday or spend more time in the
garden.
We still call it "the silent season",
a traditional term that goes back many years. Half a century ago,
a distillery at work was a pretty noisy place. There was hammering
and thumping from the cooperage, the scraping of shovels as men
shifted spent grains or coal, and the steady roar of the steam
boilers. Aberlour had its own peculiar sound, too - the whirring
and creaking of the belts and spindles turned by the waterwheel.
When that lot was still, the place really must have
been silent. In those days, too, the silent season lasted a long
time. From early summer, the distillery closed down for at least
three months and most of the workforce was simply laid off. A
few lucky ones stayed on to do odd jobs, such as cutting heather
bundles to make besoms for scrubbing out the washbacks, but the
rest had to find casual work.
Nowadays, of course, the workers keep their jobs
all year, because the distillery has to operate round the clock,
seven days a week, to keep up with the demand for Aberlour malt
whisky. There is plenty of work for them all in our much shorter
version of the silent season - though, thanks to modern production
methods, the distillery remains a pretty quiet place even at the
busiest of times.
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