Today’s winners come from Scotland.
The night shift at a Chivas Brothers distillery screwed up this week and accidentally flushed about 6,000 gallons of Scotch whisky down the drain, according to reports from Scotland.
The 80-proof goof happened early Tuesday at a bottling plant in Dumbarton, where workers were cleaning equipment. Instead of purging the wastewater, they instead expelled 18,000 liters of bulk whisky into the local sewage system.
“It was like someone turned on a tap, and it just ran straight down the plughole,” an “insider” toldThe Scottish Sun.
There’s more at the link.
I haven’t been able to confirm rumors that workers at the local sewage plant had isolated the drain from Chivas Brothers and were distilling its incoming liquid, rather than putting it through the normal purification process . . .
Peter
Or as the ad slogan went:"It's the water, and a lot more."
How hilarious. Somebody is going to pay. Chevas is good stuff. Sometimes I miss those days. Oh, well.
I can't imagine that that quantity of alcohol arriving unexpectedly was good for the bacterial at the sewage treatment plant
Oh noes… I'm thinking some folks are going to be FIRED!!! That's 'conservatively' $960,000 down the drain!
Scotland should bring back drawing and quartering for such a crime.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY, GOD…WHY???
1) I just bought my brother-in-Law a liter of duty free Chevas 12 year old at Newark Liberty Intl. Airport. So I'll email this article to him and see if I get a response….HEH.
2) Constipated Muslims in the area are sueing because they're afraid to sit on the toilet, less thay get alcohol splashed on their posteriors.
That journalist failed math, galons to liters is about a 1:4 conversion, not 1:3. So it's either 4,500 galons or it's 24,000 liters, depending on which figure is accurate(if either).
I suspect that at some point in the re-reporting and editing process, someone assumed that the report out of the UK showing 18000L =~4800Gal must be in UK gallons, so they did a spurious conversion from 4800 UK gallons to ~6000 US gallons. Anyway, according to thespiritsbusiness.com, "Media reports speculate that around 18,000 litres of alcohol was washed away, although a Chivas Brothers spokesman declined to comment on how much was wasted, he told The Spirits Business “it’s not as much as that”." I suspect that 18000L was the tank capacity, and the goof was reported in time to close the drain valve before all had gone.