You have to brace yourself when you enter Willem Stemmet's workshop – the fumes hit your nostrils before you can say "witblits". My eyes water as they adjust to this unfamiliar world that few people get to see. Copper stills glint in the half-light, between ladders, spades, a help-my-trap hanging from the ceiling and a bookshelf stuffed with files. There are six stills, ranging in size from 25 litres to 700 litres – and they were all made by hand.

"Yes, this is my job," Willem says. At 86 years old, he's one of only a handful of still-makers left in South Africa. "You take a copper sheet and you put it in a mould. Then you take your flame and you take your mallet – your big wooden mallet. You have to heat the copper until it can stretch, né, and then you start to hammer. Then you take a smaller mallet and smooth out the dents. Later you take a steel hammer to temper the copper, and you finish it off."

Willem reckons there are only three copper still-makers left in the country. Their days are numbered, he says, because machine-made stills are taking over.

"Dis robbies daai, man," he says adjusting his glasses. "These guys making stills with machines. Those still mean nothing. Dis robbies. They use very thing sheets of copper. I don't know how long those stills will last. This one," he points to one of his own stills, "my grandchildren will be able to use."

Willem was 19 years old when he started working at KWV in 1946. He worked there all his life – his nickname was Willem KWV.
It's not coincidence that he was attracted tot he dsillery world as a young man. "Ja-nee, I must have been in standard 1 when my dad got two stills to make witblits on the farm near Montagu. They prepared the stills at around four in the afternoon and at 8pm my dad would go in and distil until midnight. Sometimes I stayed up with him."