Drinking on the job

[cowdery]

No, not me. Drinking is my job.

A comment in another thread got me thinking about distillery workers stealing whiskey and drinking on the job.

Many actually do have to drink as part of their job. This is about the ones who don't.

In Louisville there is a place called Distillery Commons. It's an old National distillery. The warehouses and other buildings have been reused as offices and studios. The guy who bought it back now maybe 30 years ago had a commercial photography operation. He liked having so much studio space so he could set something up for photography and just leave it. The buildings were so huge.

I knew him pretty well back in the day. He told me that when he started remodeling the place he found thousands of pint Old Grand-Dad bottles stuck in every possible nook and cranny, where the workers had discarded them after consuming their contents. Everytime he opened a wall or removed a fixture, there they would be, the accumulation of years of drinking on the job.

[MikeK]

I briefly worked at an old mill complex up here in MA. It was converted quite a while back to office space. It has great atmosphere, the spaces are large and I love the huge old timbers.

The other thread mentioned the tradition of "dramming" in the Scotch whisky industry. Workers were given 3 drams a day at scheduled times. If they had a hard or dirty job to do, they usually got additional drams.

I'm curious, was there any similar practice in the US whiskey industry, either institutional or otherwise?

Thanks,

[cowdery]

I know that many breweries simply had open taps and people could help themselves. If they got too drunk to do their jobs properly they could be dismissed for that, but the beer was there and it was up to them to regulate themselves.

Distillers, that is the people who actually work in the distillery part of the operation, have to do some sampling as part of their job. They can spit if they want to, but for the most part they are expected to regulate themselves.

This, however, is a small part of the total workforce. Most of the employees are in the bottling house, have no job-related reason to sample, and what with the heavy equipment and fast pace, there's a good incentive to keep them sober.

I do believe some of the distilleries give employees bottled product periodically as an employee benefit, but most have very strict rules about actually drinking on the job.

Another issue of distilleries that is different from most other kinds of businesses is the excise tax. Since the tax is on production, not on sales, product that is given away is pretty expensive. This, even aside from the alcohol liability issues, makes distilleries much less liberal with free samples of any kind than are other kinds of food producers, snack food makers, for example.