The History behind Shug, our Cooper

Casks are vital to the whisky-making process. The majority of our new make spirit is filled into either first-fill ex-bourbon or virgin oak barrels, so we don’t take any shortcuts when it comes to guaranteeing quality and ensuring the end result is a whisky packed with flavour. 

How do we do that? With our very own on-site cooper, Shug.

Shug is a man of a million and one stories, and so we thought we'd sit down with him and get this stories on paper.

Grab a dram and have a read!

Q: How did you first become a cooper?

My older brother was the Head Cooper and my uncle, whom I’m named after, was the Production Director at Universal Containers in Maryhill, Glasgow. I served my time as an apprentice here from the age of 16, I left school at 16 on the Friday and on the Monday I started as an apprentice there, a process which takes 5 years.

As an apprentice, you get teamed up with a Journeyman Cooper who shows you the ropes and the tricks of the trade. My Journeyman was a man called Jimmy Hogg, a man who taught me everything I know.

The way it would work back in the day was I would be paid a basic wage of £27, but the Journeyman Coopers were all on piecework – you got paid by the cask. My journeyman would also get paid for all the casks that I would make in a week so from day one the pressure was on to perform and make as many casks as you could. If I performed well that week my Journeyman would give me a cash bung on the Friday!

After the 5 year apprenticeship and a week before my 21st birthday, I passed my Trade Test and became an official Cooper. The best part of passing the test was that you were now on piecemeal, getting 100% of your cask earnings each week, which was £2.40 for a standard barrel, and a bit more for larger casks such as a sherry butt or a port pipe.

At 23 I applied for a job with Grants in Irvine, so I handed in my notice to my uncle… who was not too impressed. Concerned that I was moving away to make a little extra cash he asked me to wait a day and when I next came into the cooperage he told me I had an interview with J&B Distillers (later became Diageo in 1986) on Blythswood Estate in Renfrew. It turned out that it wasn’t an interview at all but ended up being a job that he had secured for me.

I was working piecework there; 40 casks per week would get you a basic pay but anything over would be on bonus. By this time I was well and truly in my stride repairing over 100 casks per week and making good money.

I spent 20 happy years there but in 1999 was offered to go into mechanical coopering – working more with machines than with your hands like the traditional method I was brought up on – so I decided to take voluntary redundancy, and for the next 14 years became a hackney black cab driver, thinking that my coppering days were behind me.

One day out of the blue a friend, my old managing director at Diageo asked if I wanted to do a job at Penderyn in Wales, the money was good so I went down to help them a couple of times, sharing my knowledge and helped them repair any faulty casks.

The same friend then asked me if I wanted to do the same at Speyside Distillery, which I did.

Then, in 2015, he asked me if I was interested in helping out a brand new distillery which had just started producing single malt in Hillington, an industrial estate on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was here that I met Liam Hughes, and the rest is history.

I joined The Glasgow Distillery just days after the first cask was filled, starting with one day per week. This one day per week became two, then three, and eventually became full-time as I am today. I have been with the distillery for nine years and have witnessed it grow from a start-up into a full-formed and successful producer exporting around the world; the growth has been remarkable but the team here still keep the same ethos within production that I witnessed from the very beginning.

Q: What is your favourite thing about being a cooper?

Coopering is an ancient trade that dates back centuries, and these days there are very few actual coopers left, I believe less than 300 in Scotland. To keep the tradition alive is a real pleasure, and I try to share my insights and skills with all the staff around me at the distillery to pass on the knowledge I have learned over the years.

The skills are very traditional and there is no automation (at The Glasgow Distillery) so everything is done by hand, with hammer and driver, I love being able to spend my time being active, physical, and engaged – I am not one for sitting still for too long!

Being a cooper in the whisky industry is especially rewarding as it’s a brilliantly social and enjoyable industry to work within. It's full of characters and I have made a great range of friends over the year, from my time in Diageo to my current position. People all around the world love whisky, it’s a real passion for so many people, and whether I am helping our team out at an event in Glasgow or showing some visitors around the distillery I am always blown away by the appreciation and special place that scotch whisky has in so many people’s hearts. It’s a privilege to contribute to that in my own, small, way.

Q: What do you think are the benefits of distilleries having an on-site cooper?

It’s very beneficial for a distillery to have an on-site cooper, but it is also very rare. As an experimental distillery we like to fill a wide selection of casks. We fill everything from standard bourbon barrels to sherry butts, a wide range of wine casks from all around the world: Hungarian Tokaji, Tequila, and a large array of fortified wines such as Marsala, Madeira, and Port.

The benefits of having a cooper on-site include the ability to remove and replace any faulty staves or ends within a cask; being able to make new hybrid casks from scratch; resizing existing casks as required; and having expertise when it comes to filling and managing cask storage too.

Each cask is inspected visually and by nosing when it arrives, before it is filled, and before it is emptied. If there are any cracks or imperfections within a stave I will remove and replace them before filling to ensure there is no leakage over time.

When initially checking a cask I am looking for many things: bad staves, cracks, any staves that seem porous (is there any visible history of leaks from bad grain or pinholes), any weak spots where the staves could shift once filled, bad hoops, ends that don’t fit properly, and more.

Casks can look shiny and new and to the untrained eye everything can look fine – but if you know your wood and you look a little deeper you can detect flaws and things that will soon go wrong.

As we use a lot of expensive casks, including virgin oak and sherry casks, to be able to make sure that the cask is in the best condition possible whilst it matures our single malt is essential in producing a quality final product.

We have a great distilling team at The Glasgow Distillery who produce an exceptional new make spirit, so I do my best to ensure all the effort and time that has gone into making the spirit is again replicated when it comes to maturation.

Q: What does a typical day look like?

No day is ever the same! Some days start with deliveries of new casks arriving on site which will mean directing the logistics of finding a place to store these casks and inspecting them as they come off the wagon. Any cask that has a stave that may need to be replaced is marked with an ‘X’ and then I will work on those casks throughout the day before they are scheduled to be filled.

Some days I am re-racking (moving the contents from one cask into another for a finishing period), some days I am filling casks with new make spirit direct from our spirit tank, and some days I am working in the office on the administration side of things to ensure every cask is correctly logged into our online database.

Outside of this I may be working alongside our Founder, Mike to meet potential new cask suppliers or working with our Head Distiller, Alex, to ensure cask management and the filling schedule is working in tandem with the spirit creation from the distillers.

Some days I draw samples from casks so that the whisky blending team can try them and plan out our future releases.

Other days I am helping our team on the road – with deliveries or showcasing our range of products at a whisky festival or spirits show. People like to meet the folk behind the whisky and it’s a pleasure to tell people about the casks and the management of the maturation for our different releases.

Q: Can you explain how important the barrel ageing process is in whisky distilling?

My Journeyman Cooper once told me “You look after the cask, and the cask will look after the whisky”. It's such an important part of the whisky making process and adds a large amount of the final flavour.
We focus on making a very fruity and sweet new make spirit (with long fermentations, slow distillations, and the use of select yeast strains) so the types of casks we use are very important to compliment the spirit we’re making and not over-shadow it.

We are fortunate that it's newer casks we fill at The Glasgow Distillery, these new casks add a lot of flavour and are usually fairly well made, so they are easier to manage and maintain over time.

Q: How has the art of coopering changed throughout your career?

These days in the larger cooperages everything is much more mechanical. When I was learning it was 100% manual but these days it does seem that it can be quantity over quality from some of the larger cask producers.

Q: Are there any old and traditional techniques that you still use today?

At The Glasgow Distillery, it is all old and traditional techniques.

I use a variety of tools in my day-to-day job:

A Cooper hammer.
A Driver; a tool used for pushing hoops down and tightening them.
A Crumb Knife makes sure the staves are the same weight (the same thickness) to prepare the croze – the shape every stave has to make sure the end fits in uniformly across the cask.
A Croze Block which cuts the croze.
A Plucker makes the outside smooth – a ‘cooper plane’.
An Adze – which is a multi-use tool for many different jobs.
A large compass to measure ends.
A Heading knife for cutting in ends.
A study, which is coopers anvil for hand riveting (there’s no rivet machine so I do this by hand and tighten the hoops by hand as I learned in my apprenticeship).

And a leather apron!

I was given these tools as an apprentice Cooper, and these are still the same ones that I use to this day. A cooper’s tools will last a lifetime if you look after them well. My old Journeyman also gave me some tools which were presented to him when he started, so they must be over 60 years old.

Q: What is the most rewarding part of your job?

Passing on the skills I have learned over the year with the young team we have at the distillery is a real pleasure. For me, it is all about the people.

Seeing a cask go away for 20 years and it hasn’t leaked one bit is also a real pleasure. Of course, the other side of that is seeing one that has gone away for 20 years and come back empty!

It’s a big responsibility to fill people’s casks – they have invested heavily in the spirit creation and wood itself, so it’s a pleasure to have their trust and to provide a service which will look after their investment over time.

Q: What is your favourite way to enjoy a dram?

Despite working within the industry whisky is not my preferred choice of drink! I don’t drink much, but if I do it will be an ice-cold beer instead. From our portfolio, I do like Glasgow 1770 The Original.