The Second Plantiac Pilgrimage

Before reading on, it is perhaps useful to know two things. First, this was written in a time when I knew next to no facts about the world of Plantiac and Plantinga. Second, the time in which it was written contained a much younger, more naïve and certainly less refined version of myself.

The second part of the Pilgrimage to the Plantiac Factories started only a short time after the first part, when I called UTO in Schiedam.

Mr van Zee, the man who had toured us through the Sonnema-Plantinga Distillery, had given us the phone number of this company. He didn't give us a big chance of actually being able to get a tour there but, so he said, we could always try.

So, on one distinctly dreary and rainy day, I called the UTO Company. A female employee by the name of Mrs Kort (English: Mrs Short) happened to answer the phone. Upon her shoulders dropped the fate of having to listen to a complete recital I burst forth about ST NEWS, Bolsward, Mr van Zee, and a Holy Desire to visit the Plantiac Factories (although especially the latter wasn’t quite worded like that).

She really didn't like what she had to tell me: Tours were not given at the UTO Company. They did do tours in a sister distillery where they made a kind of gin called "Notaris" (which we had also heard about during part I of the Pilgrimage), but the actual main factory hall was off limits to the public. It had never before happened and it would never happen.

I felt my chair slowly give way below me. Was this to be the cruel death of the second part of this Holy Quest? Nipped in the bud in its earliest stage?

I gathered my voice, trying desperately not to have it tremble too much. I asked if it could perhaps maybe be possible to make the tiniest of little exceptions.

There was a moment's silence on the other side of the phone. Apparently, such blatant boldness had never been encountered before.

"Why this particular interest in Plantiac Vieux?" she asked.

"Well," I replied without hesitating, "because it simply tastes great!"

There was another moment's silence, after which she asked whether I would hold.

I answered affirmatively, a faint flame of hope kindling in the depth of my heart. She left me listening to some Everly Brothers music.

Then she returned.

"Mister?"

"Yeah, yeah?!"

"Well I had never considered this possible, but you can get a tour."

"...." (I didn't utter any sounds but my heart leapt and the kindling flame flared into a virtually uncontrollable blaze)

"Mister? Are you alright?"

"Yeah, yeah!"

I was happy again. The Quest would happen. The first part of the Pilgrimage would find a worthy sequel. The sheer thought of never being able to visit the Plantiac Factories had left me with a feeling of thorough depression, but now I felt as though I could handle anything life was prepared to hurl at me.

She went forth to explain something about the production process in use at the UTO Company, which resulted in it being impossible to pinpoint a date for the Visit already. Several different products were made and bottled using the same main assembly line, and only when a need occurred would Plantiac be made again. That could be days or weeks, or even months. We would have to wait until such an event occurred. She would have someone call us at least one week beforehand.

I put the phone down in a state of bliss.

The Visit would happen.

On my way to the bathroom on the morning of Wednesday, November 6th, the phone rang. Careful so as not to reveal the nakedness of my physique to the entire world outside the living room windows I stalked up to the phone, lifted off the receiver and spoke my name.

My heart started beating in my throat when I heard on the other side the voice of UTO Company's Mrs Kort - she who had become to me the Arch Angel of the Divine Fluid.

She told me she had already tried to contact me once before, somewhere at the beginning of August she seemed to recall (i.e. precisely during the time I was at the Delta Force International Coding Conference #2, having toothpaste put in my hair among other things).

I humbly apologized for not being there, which she accepted.

"Anyway," she told me in a voice that started to sound like that of an angel more and more, "we'll be producing Plantiac again tomorrow afternoon. If you can come, you'll be expected at 1400 hours by Mr van de Klooster."

That day after, I had my weekly day off from University. This was brilliant, just brilliant. Everything couldn't possibly be more perfect. I was about to weep with joy.

I will save you the further major part of the conversation which entailed the explanation of how to get to the UTO Company by car.

I went to great length to thank Mrs Kort, put down the phone and immediately called Stefan, our beloved Master Undead Ex-Ex-Editor, at his work.

He was in - which was an exception all of its own, worthy of praise.

However, he told me he would not be able to go that next day as he had to go to so some convention where a couple of thousand people would attend. Postponing would be impossible, and he simply had to go. With a voice that told me he was on the edge of a mental breakdown he blessed me, told me I should go alone.

"Just be as verbose as possible in your descriptions," he said, almost sobbing, "and make sure you get everything you get in duplo."

I promised him to do whatever I could.

With a sense of desolation I put down the phone again.

I would have to go alone, without the inspiring company of The One Master Editor. And, what was even worse, I'd have to go by Public Transport - God knows how far the UTO Company would be off the nearest bus station!

I rung back Mrs Kort, telling here that I would come alone.

I will save you the major part of the conversation which entailed the explanation of how to get to the UTO Company by Public Transport.

At least the UTO Company turned out to be only an estimated 10 minutes' walk from the nearest train station.

The Visit would happen. The day after.

At several minutes to two, the cab dropped me off where I wanted to be. Before me I saw a fairly large complex with neon lights "UTO" on top of it, not lit.

It was located in a somewhat dilapidated part of town, the neighbourhood where you'd not particularly like to walk in the dead of night, and where you'd not be advised to park a car without its burglar alarm switched on.

It was altogether quite awfully much more un-romantic than the folklore-ridden distillery we had visited in folklore-ridden Bolsward.

Number 6 was a somewhat stylish 18th century house. I entered.

A camera sensed my presence and started transmitting my image to a room beyond my immediate vision. I pressed a button next to the name "Mr van de Klooster", after which a buzzing sound indicated I could push open the next door.

I advanced into the elongated hallway of the old house, somewhat at a loss of where to go. In the background I heard the noise of many empty bottles. I decided to head straight on, guessing I looked quite silly with raindrops on my glasses and a bunch of flowers in my hand.

From one of the rooms in the rear a long man in his mid fifties, wearing a grey striped suit, emerged to welcome me. He introduced himself as Rinus van de Klooster (which, incidentally, would translate to 'Rinus of the Monastery' in English). Although he had a sweaty handshake, he proved to be the jovial type of chap, with an elaborate moustache, greying hair and quite a large spot of baldness (bigger than mine, anyways).

He beckoned me to temporarily store the flowers in some water in the kitchen as Mrs Kort turned out to be in another building altogether, in the marketing department. I could see her later.

It was then that it dawned on me. Through a door I saw an office of which the back wall was made of glass, as if looking outside. Through that glass I could see the production hall, and the noise of empty bottles I had heard earlier had been that of empty Plantiac bottles!

For a moment I reeled, feeling overcome with emotions and utter religious ecstasy. I quickly regained my composure, however, and followed Mr van de Klooster into the office.

The office was quite spacy. Two PCs of some previous generation were positioned on desks, together with the usual utensils office people need to work with. Really boring, really.

Most prominent in the office, however, was a wall that displayed each and every kind of bottle (with contents) they produced and/or bottled at the UTO Company. There must have been at least 200 bottles, containing many different kinds of alcoholic beverages including different kinds of Vieux, liqueurs, gin (that which I called 'geneva' in Part I of the Pilgrimage) and even whisky and vodka.

I took off my coat while keeping the immense wall of alcoholic delicacies in sight. Impressive. Very impressive. I had expected them to do about two dozen different drinks, but this was beyond what I had expected.

After Mr van de Klooster had finished his cup of coffee, we went down to the production floor.

As the door to the production hall opened, the muffled sound of empty bottles turned into the cacophony of glass noise so characteristic of bottleries.

The radio blared Michael Jackson's new single, "Black'n'White". Funny how you remember those little things.

Lift trucks were driving to and fro with pallets filled either with empty bottles or filled 12-bottle Plantiac cartons. One of the drivers jocularly told my part-time guide to stay out of the way and to keep an eye on 'the visitor' (i.e. me) as regular company policy was never to have any guided tours.

I was explained that this was the busy time of year. November and December usually get more demand - due to the cold. People obviously like a nice drink to warm their insides.

The production hall featured three large, fully automated production lines, the biggest of which was at the moment being used to bottle Plantiac. A fourth one, secluded from the others, was used for smaller orders such as those of miniature (i.e. 40 cc) bottles. A fifth one was in another room altogether, which was used for exclusive limited-quantity stuff solely.

By the end of eight working hours that day, the main production line would have bottled 30,000 litres of Plantiac. About once a month they do a day of Plantiac production, amounting to 360,000 litres per year, of which nothing is exported and most is sold to the Northern part of the Netherlands. During the fifteen minutes I spent at the production platform I witnessed almost 1,000 bottles of Plantiac being made ready for utmost enjoyment by real Vieux lovers.

The production hall was the nerve centre of the company. Metal conduit-pipes ran to and fro other rooms around the hall, where the storage rooms were situated.

On the contrary to our experience at the Sonnema-Plantinga Distillery in Bolsward, the smell of alcohol was prevalent at this production platform. As we walked past the conveyor belt on which the empty bottles were lead to the filling machine, it quickly started to smell as if one was actually hanging above a swimming pool filled with Plantiac - a heart-warming sensation, I can assure you.

Filled to the brim with copious quantities of Plantiac, the bottles progress onto another conveyor belt to the screwing machine (For lack of a better word: The machine which screws on the caps). After that, they get a code ink-printed on each cap by means of which it is possible to identify when and where the bottle was filled (something which applies to all products bottled at the UTO Company, see further for an explanation).

This coding system is necessary to enable UTO Company to check back where the source of an error was in the case of one of the possible complaints: A carton containing fewer than 12 bottles, bottles not being fully filled, or quality not being up to the usual standard.

The first mistake should never occur, van de Klooster assured me, as the machine that puts the bottles in the cartons stops when it fails to grab 12 bottles. It is, however, possible that the machine is restarted before the required number of 12 bottles in that particular carton is actually present.

The second mistake, again, should never occur. Someone at the production platform is always monitoring the filling. Someone else checks the machine that puts the pallets of empty bottles in the sorting mechanism that puts them in a queue on the conveyor belt and, finally, someone is present to check on the packaging process.

Complaints about quality can occur too; samples of each production session of each product are retained at the UTO Company for later reference in these cases.

After the little device that sprays the code on the caps, the Plantiac labels are put on the bottles. These labels are coded for possible reference as well. Each label is first glued and then rolled onto the bottle.

The last step in the production process of Plantiac is the machine that lifts up 12 bottles at a go and puts them in a Plantiac carton that is then automatically glued, sealed and piled on a pallet for lift truck transport to the nearby expedition centre.

After I had seen everything there was to be seen at the production floor, I was shown into the adjacent building of the old distillery. This part of the building, he estimated, was about 200 year old. It was now filled solely with storage tanks of the various alcoholic drinks UTO Company manufactures. They towered above me - huge, shiny metal tanks that each contained thousands of litres of liquids for which the average drunken bum would sell (or, for that matter, kill) his mother.

The largest storage tanks, however, were located right under our feet and were referred to as 'ground tanks'. Each 12,500 litres in size, they contain even more liquids. I was sent gazing into a manhole through which I could see 12,500 litres of gin (Dutch: Jenever) being pumped around and mixed. The scent was distinct, almost intoxicating. It was as if I heard sirens chanting their alluring songs.

It's a pretty weird experience once you realise that you're walking on top of thousands of litres of alcohol.

"Before the products are moved from these ground tanks to the bottlery," van de Klooster explained, "they get filtered as you will not find it hard to understand that it's easy for something off a shoe to drop in a hole like that, you know."

He demonstrated how easy it was for some minor parts of dirt to fall in the hole. The sirens immediately stopped chanting.

In total, the UTO Company has about 30 to 40 of these enormous subterranean tanks, each of almost 13,000 litres size - 21 of those were located in the floor of the old distillery. They had enough stuff there in the ground to cause at least a million moderately to extensively severe hangovers - and I don't even take the tanks above the ground into account here.

We walked on through the old building that was also filled with smaller 'soak tanks' (Tanks where herbs can soak into the individual products) until van de Klooster stopped before a stone oven. Was that a lump of old memories he was swallowing?

This was the only remaining of the old distillery ovens, he explained, still burnt on coal, wood and busted pallets. They did not use is much any more, but some gins and liqueurs were still made with its assistance.

The trembling of anticipation grew worse in me. I had yet to see the location where thousands of litres of Plantiac were stored, and I could notice by the way my senses got into a higher state of awareness that it was getting closer. Closer and closer. Slowly, but certainly.

Before he finally brought me to the last (and most modern) of the storage rooms, he offered me a quick glimpse into the egg nog room, the room where a thick yellow drink called egg nog ('advokaat' in Dutch) is made. Special equipment was needed for this, as that stuff needs to be cooked (with egg yolks and stuff) instead of just put together and stirred like the other products.

But then the Moment started. I was led into a room where about two dozen huge metal cylinders stood. They stood mighty and emotionless, almost defiant. I frantically scanned the chalkboard writing on them until I finally read "Vieux K.P." on one (K.P. stands for Klaas Plantinga, the original Plantiac Vieux inventor).

Before a production session starts, a sample of it is tested in the laboratory, a small secluded room adjacent to the production hall. This testing involves extensive chemical analysis to check for the right amount of alcohol (35% for all kinds of Vieux) and all that stuff that interests none but those of a chemical persuasion. It also, however, includes tasting each and every product, each time it is produced. Van de Klooster told me he did some of the tasting himself - which is not all that magnificent as one may think, as production usually starts at 9 AM and the tasting has to be done before that.

For the chemical testing, UTO Company employs a man in his mid twenties, hair dyed black. A black leather jacket hung against the door. All I missed was some hardcore thrash music resounding through the lab room. I somehow found it hard to see this person actually using the advanced chemical equipment on a table in the rear of the lab - but, then again, I'm just prejudiced here.

There, they both attempted to explain the bottle cap code to me.

The bottle code on the cap consists of a number of digits. These digits represent the production line, the day of the year, the year and the quarter of the day. This all sounds pretty unintelligible, I know, but let me explain by means of a practical example.

The hardcore thrash fanatic showed me a bottle of egg nog with the number 3301161. He explained that this means 'production line 3', 'the 301st day of the year' (this would mean October 28th in this case, as we had no leap-year), 'in the year 1991' and 'in the 61st quarter of the day' (i.e. between 15:00 and 15:15 hours).

I did not get a chance to check the code of the Plantiac bottles that were being produced, but in case you get a bottle with '3311153' or '3311154' you can cherish the thought that I have witnessed them being bottled. It also proves that the coding system explained to me is actually correct.

After the visit to the laboratory, where I unfortunately didn't get the honour of tasting some pre-prod Plantiac, we went to the actual expedition - the place where all UTO Company products are stored and made ready to be shipped to licensed victuallers and the like.

Due to certain custom laws, all bottles were not allowed to go outside before they got shipped (don't ask me to explain this law as I didn't quite get it myself). For this purpose, they had not torn down an extremely battered and ultra-old bit of building that joined the buildings of the actual factory and the expedition.

This building had to be propped by metal supports, the same kind you'd normally find in coal mines and such. Without these supports, I am sure it would have collided as we spoke. The walls were literally breathing age. You could smell it. It was as if we entered a different era of time altogether - only the presence of bright yellow striping on the floor and the repeated passing of lift trucks with flashing lights reminded us that we were in fact in modern times, in the year of The Pilgrimage, the year 1991.

The building of the actual expedition company was modern again, and it was buzzing with activity. Even more lift trucks drove to and fro here, and many people were busy compiling packages that needed to be sent to retailers either in the Netherlands or abroad.

Here, van de Klooster also told me that they imported and sold wine (mainly German), sherry and port. They didn't bottle that themselves, though - they import it with bottle and all.

At this point, standing between racks piled with storage of many different kinds of UTO Company products in many different bottles, I found the moment right to subtlely complain about the fact that 'they only sell 1 litre bottles in Utrecht'.

He got the hint, turned around, dove into a carton and took out two miniature bottles of Plantiac - the ones that are quite rare.

Triumph!

We walked back to the office now. I had seen everything there was to see. On the way back, I did get a chance to catch a glimpse of their development laboratory - i.e. a kind of kitchen in which lots of existing drinks are tried out when mixed with Seven-Up and the like, creating new drinks that may be marketable. Their latest development was a kind of vodka with lemon taste.

We spoke a bit about marketing before he finally had to go back to his usual work of making schedules and deciding what product would have to be next on the production list. He told me Plantiac was actually one of the major products of the UTO Company, together with Mansion House whisky, Vlek young gin (Dutch: Jonge Jenever), the Kabouter product brand and lots of liqueurs among which Cool Brazil (which was promoted a lot at the moment).

They don't advertise for Plantiac because it sells steadily to regular buyers - especially in the North. A long time ago, Plantiac had sponsored a Utrecht student society, and van de Klooster claimed that would probably be the cause for it to be available in selected shops in my home town.

I left at three.

Mr van de Klooster had called Mrs Kort to say that I would be arriving soon, holding a bunch of flowers.

I thanked him for his time and the trouble of guiding me. Again I shook his sweaty hand and left.

Mrs Kort was in another building, at about 100 yards' distance. It was raining quite heavily, but I escaped major wetness. Mrs Kort was in the new, most modern part of the UTO complex, which housed the marketing-and export-departments.

As I arrived she came down the stairs. My arch angel.

She was an awfully nice woman who just refused to cease thanking me for the flowers. She had rummaged through some drawers and cupboards, on the search for promotional material they might still have lying around of days when Plantiac was still promoted more.

She had been able to find two decks of Plantiac cards and a set of Bamzaaistokjes ('little bamzaai sticks' - don't ask me to explain as I don't even know what to do with them in Dutch). She handed them to me. I received them with shaking hands and carefully deposited put them in my bag.

Now it was my turn to thank her.

We talked a bit about Plantiac and ST NEWS, after which she let me out.

It was raining much more intensely when I emerged from the building again, at about ten minutes past three. Autumn was still finding it necessary to make its presence known, and started to soak my coat in not much of a gentle way. The rain lashed at my face as the wind yet increased. I spat a curse and went in search for the railway station.

Chilled and soaked to the bone I entered the main hall of the station after a quarter of an hour I had spent fighting the elements.

Finally.

I went up to the platform where my train would leave in about ten minutes' time. I bought a Coke and a cheese sandwich and listened to the sound of the birds whistling inside the station. This was soothing, as outside there had merely been the sound of wind and cars driving on wet streets, the downpour of rain.

When the train finally arrived and I got in, I couldn't help but wonder how much richer I was than all those people occupied with boring parts of their daily routine. I had seen Plantiac produced. I had seen the Creation of The Divine Fluid. Utter Religious Satisfaction.

I had to switch trains for the last time that day several minutes later, at Rotterdam Central Station.

Of course, my connecting intercity train left right before my eyes. Another bad omen? God - or Whoever - was surely punishing me for the blasphemy I had committed that day.

I hoped that a girl with beautiful legs would get to sit opposite me again when I finally entered another train, but I hoped in vain.

I was getting sick of bad omens.

Of course, the train was delayed.

It was near dark as I came home.