Back by popular demand, or the demand of my one follower, anyway

'So, you'll have a wee dram, then?'

I'm on a press jolly up to Aberdeen, half for a book festival, half to tour the delights of North East Scotland. We've pitched up to Glen Garioch (pronounced 'Geery' for some unfathomable reason) distillery in Old Meldrum and Kenny, the witty and sharp fella who runs the place, is offering us some whisky.

It is 10.00 a.m.

Conscious of the time, Kenny serves us the eight-year-old as it is much smoother and will have less of a kick. It's so smooth, I end up having two or three as we watch a DVD of the history of the distillery, which puts me in a rather merry mood and I think of a new slogan for the brand: "Glen Garioch: The Breakfast of ex-Champions."

Kenny then leads us on a tour through the imposing granite distillery itself,which has been producing whisky since 1797, apart from a few years off when times were lean. It is an impressive series of buildings, and the process still seems very wonderfully Industrial Revolution: it is all gears and cogs and shiny vats and heavy solid machinery with Willy Wonka-esque coppery stills; in the entire tour I see only one computer.



Yet though the process on the surface has not changed, the industry has. Kenny tells us when he started there were 25 guys here, doing heavy, physical labour. Most of that is done off-site now under the auspices of its parent company Morrison Bowmore, and with increasing mechanisation, there is only need for a skeleton crew: 5 employees, one of which is full-time in the visitor centre, another is a cleaner. But you can tell Kenny himself has spent at least some of his working life using his brawn; he is square jawed and squat, a sort of Soviet Realist ideal of the working man, his hands bashed and mashed from years of moving hundredweight casks of whisky around, though one has an incongruous, tiny, delicate Sailor Jerry sort of swallow tattoo near the base of his thumb.

Glen Garoich used to have a peaty flavour, but when it was bought up by Morrison Bowmore (who themselves are owned by Japanese drinks giant Suntory), they were made to change to a sweeter more accessible drink. It is a strange thing. The whisky industry prides itself (and sells itself in a Mockintosh, tartan tat way) on tradition and how processes haven't changed in 200 plus years, but there are almost no independent distilleries in Scotland anymore. I couldn't help feeling as I left Glen Garoich some vague sense of loss, that in time past decisions might have been made in Old Meldrum for the benefit of the people living and working in the town, and now they are now being made by be-suited men in a Tokyo boardroom.