Wee Scotch Whisky Tales Read Free Page A

described 15 years later as ‘a wild mountain village, where drinking, dancing and swearing went on all the time’. The Cabrach, to the east of Glenlivet, was another lawless area, again with a couple of hundred active stills. There was no comparable mass production in the Highland areas proper.
    Suppressing the trade was especially difficult because many landlords connived with it, since the money it brought in ensured that their tenants could pay their rents, otherwise a difficulty due to the low crop yields of these marginal lands. Barley made into whisky was estimated to produce between five to ten times its economic yield as a food crop. In some kirks of the North-east at this time a portion of the gallery was known as the ‘smugglers’ loft’, where they would sit holding their heads high because they could easily pay their pew rent – and their farms rents as well.
    THE BACKGROUND
    Whisky has been distilled in Scotland from probably the 15th century, but by the middle of the 18th it had become the national drink. Distilleries had to be licensed by the state, and most of these legal distilleries were fairly large-scale. By law they had to have a minimum still capacity of 500 gallons. The problem was that after the Union, as a price for access to English colonial markets, Scots had to accept a share of England’s tax burden – a bargain which the Scots found unreasonable. As mentioned in Chapter 2 , the imposition of malt tax caused the most resentment.
    The malt tax, along with the high excise duty (which it was suspected was to protect English gin producers) on the spirit itself, meant that large distilleries which were open to excise inspection were at a major disadvantage, compared with small law-breaking distillers in remote areas who avoided all taxation. John Stein, a Lowland distiller, stated in 1797 that ‘owing to the interference of Highland spirits, we have been unable to find sales’. Stein and other large-scale distillers like the Haig family were paying seven shillings a gallon excise on their product and could not compete with the sma’ stills that were paying nothing.
    For Robert Burns and many other Scots, whisky went not only with freedom, but with good health. One exciseman agreed with Burns, noting in 1786 that ‘the ruddy complexion and strength of these people is not owing to water-drinking, but to the
aqua vitae
.’ It should also be mentioned that until well into the 19th century, and even afterwards in country districts, whisky was the only painkiller available to most of the common people, who could ill-afford the legal but expensive opiates at the time. One doctor is recorded as asking a countryman what happened if any of his family were ill.
    ‘We drink fusky’ was the reply.
    ‘And if you don’t get better?’
    ‘We drink mair fusky.’
    ‘And if you still don’t get better?’
    ‘We dee.’
    ORGANISATION OF THE TRADE
    The illicit whisky smuggling trade was highly organised, and often ingenious methods were used. Women walking with their wares to market in neighbouring towns would acquire miraculous pregnancies – inflated bladders full of the whisky which they would deliver or sell to customers. Innocent-looking parties on coffin tracks, walking to the cemetery and resting awhile from the labour of carrying their burden, might well be over-refreshed – not from drowning their sorrows at the loss of the supposed deceased, but because the coffin held supplies of whisky for delivery to consumers.
    But the main method of delivery of illicit whisky was a well-organised armed convoy. Once the amber dew had been distilled, it was poured into barrels (called ‘akers’) and these were set on panniers over a pony, which generally carried four five-gallon barrels. A long string of ponies was tied together, and the animals proceeded to walk, accompanied by 20 or 30 men, on the outward journey to their destination – then the men would ride back home on the empty animals.