Life in the cask and keg team – Callum Mcevoy

Tell us a bit about what brought you to Robinsons and what your job entails

My dad and my uncle both work for Robinsons. I work in the Cask and Keg team. So my day to day can be one of three roles really. Working in the yard with the forklift, cleaning and re-filling our casks or kegs so that they’re ready to go out again, and handling the empty cask and keg returns (things like organising all the kegs and separating out the different customers). If you’re on the cask racker, you’re either in charge of cleaning out the empty casks and knocking new keystones into them, or refilling them with fresh beer. If you’re looking after the kegging line, things are a bit more fiddly. Generally, we work on a weekly rota, and so we know what we’re doing each week.

What's your favourite role? 

I like being in the yard! I like just being able to get my head down and get on with things. Yeah, I mean, as long as you keep getting the empties inside, it’s quite a nice pace. 

 Even when it's raining?

Yeah, I don't mind, I enjoy it when it rains because you’re just left to it. I've been out in the coldest day of the year, with the snow, I don't mind that! You just get on with it. I went through a phase of being out there permanently for a while. So I really took it under my belt and kept the yard looking perfect. 

So you’ve been watching the changes happen with the new brewhouse and I suppose even before that. What have you noticed?

The new stuff is a lot more manual, actually. It's a slightly slower pace now, where we used to have four lanes of kegging, we have just one now. Which although things are more manual, has simplified the process too. The keg plant was a proper stressful job at times. In the days where we did a lot of contract kegging, occasionally customers would send in kegs in all sorts of conditions, trying to get them to run smoothly on the line was a nightmare. And you know, very fiddly!

So what's kept you here for 10 years? 

 It's a good group which I enjoy working with, a nice place to work. But mainly, I'd say the people who I work with are a big part of what keeps me at Robinsons. A good team. People stay a long time. There isn’t a lot of change in our team, but even those who've retired, they were all a good craic. I’ve been in the Cask and Keg team the entire time, except for six weeks when I went into the tank room whilst I was covering for somebody. 

I like to be busy,  the busier we are, the faster the day goes. The more difficult days were recently when we shut down for two weeks to move equipment into the new brewhouse. When you have to actively look for jobs rather than do our regular day to day, time goes slower. We’re used to coming in and cracking on with the day. 

As a team, we work until the job is done. If there has been a delay somewhere in the process, then there might be a delay our end too. We just crack on and work together until we’re finished. We've got a team where we will not go over until everything is done. I remember one Christmas, something had gone wrong and we were here until about nine o'clock at night. But we got the job done! We had a problem on the machines, they spent most of the day fixing it, and after that, we finished the production. They did treat us to a subway though!

And what’s a regular day on the cask racker look like?

It depends on the area you’re working in that week. If you’re on the cask racker, the beer is ready in the tank from the night before. So you get the racker all prepped for the day, then the lab team come down and run their tests.

We’ll then start the line running, the first few casks we fill, we dispose of and once the lab have called us to say that we’re good to start we can start filling the casks properly.

We start by taking the stickers off, the keystones and shives out of the casks and put them on the washer to remove and residue. We then put in new key stones and labels ready to go to be filled. The filler (which we call the racker) will fill the casks with beer ready to be rolled out the other side and collected by the forklift to go to be stored. Once the casks have been filled for the day, we then have to clean everything, ready for the next production. 

Once we’ve finished the cask racking for the day, we make sure all the tanks are cleaned, we then run co2 through them to finish the clean and bring across the next load of beer from the brewery. Once the beer is in the tank, the lab team come to run tests, to confirm it is in spec for the following day. The final stage before the end of the day is to put the tanks into storage mode.

So aside from working in the Cask and Keg team, you are the official Krazy Races driver…

 Yeh, this year I’ll be racing the kart for the second year. I’m not sure how I got voted in, but I was off on the first meeting about it, came back and it had been decided! Which was totally fine, it was good fun! This year we’ve just got to do a few modifications to the car and then we're rebranding it as well this year.

What keeps you busy when you’re not in work? 

I love to keep busy, I need to keep my mind occupied, I can't sit still. So, I enjoy working outside, whether it be like a bit of building work or on the farm repairing things. I also enjoy spending time with my girlfriend and my little sausage dog, Richmond. Or getting out to enjoy a bit of motorsports -either riding my motorbike or watching banger racing too.