The distillery swapping tradition for sustainable whisky

In terms of gender stereotypes, the assumption remains that distilleries are a man’s world – conjuring images of Mad Men’s Don Draper-type characters drinking bourbon to celebrate, forget or look cool.

However, contrary to public perception, the world of distilleries is changing and Annabel Thomas, the founder of Nc’nean – the UK’s first fully organic distillery – is one of its many new faces.

Her distillery, which started operating in 2017, is based on the Drimnin estate near Lochaline in Scotland, where she is hoping to shake-up the traditional image and rules of scotch with a more modern and sustainable approach.

Thomas grew up in Essex but her family often went to Scotland for holidays and there were always talks about starting a distillery around the dinner table. While working at consultancy firm Bain she took a sabbatical and went on a distillery tour with her husband.

She told The Independent: “It was an amazing trip but I felt like every distillery we went to had the exact same story and it’s an important one for scotch but I also felt like there was room for people to start thinking about sustainability and thinking creatively about the spirit.

“By the end of the fourth tour, I could have done it myself because it was just all the same. The focus was on tradition only and obviously tradition is essential, we wouldn’t have an amazing product like scotch without it, but times are also changing. I realised there was an opportunity to do something about it and I wanted to be the one to make this change happen.”

Thomas left her job in 2013 but it took her two years to raise the £7.5m needed to build the distillery and another £2m to launch the business.

“My savings got me thorough the first two years of raising the money. We started building in 2015 but we stayed under the radar. It was just me and I needed to focus on building a distillery not a website, a logo or anything else so we kept it under wraps. Then you have to start making whisky but that takes another three years. Hence it’s quite a cash intensive business.”

Although Nc’nean first year was bumpy due production issues, the firm is now about to start making whisky and its team is slowly expanding.

From a team of two the company has grown to a team of six and it should nearly double again this year.

At the moment revenues come from pre-selling casks with prices starting from £3,000 and Nc’nean has sold over £360,000 worth of casks so far.

Through it’s experimenting and innovating philosophy Nc’nean’s has also come up with an innovative product – its £30 Botanical Spirit, a whisky-gin hybrid that showcases the distillery’s unaged whisky spirit as its base alongside a selection of botanicals including fresh grapefruit and locally foraged wild herbs.

Launched in late 2018, it was voted “top 10 most innovative new spirits” by The Spirits Business and has helped raise Nc’nean’s profile as a creative player in the spirits category. It has brought about £50,000 in revenues so far.

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According to Thomas, sustainability and innovation is what really makes her brand stand out.

“We have the advantage that we built the distillery from scratch, so it was really easy for us to add these things. If you look at the pie chart of the carbon emissions of whisky, we reduced it in every way,”

Nc’nean uses organic barley, which doesn’t use all the fertilisers and pesticides that conventional barley does and it’s also much better for biodiversity. On the production side all the energy that the company uses is renewable energy.

As a very remote site, Thomas stresses that it was very important for the company to be energy efficient.

“Most of the energy we use in the distillery comes from our biomass boiler, which uses timber from the local forest and it’s literally a mile from the distillery. So we harvest the wood, we let it dry, we ship it ourselves and then we replant all the trees that we harvested.”

The other factor that makes Nc’nean different is s a less traditional approach to the production of the spirit itself.

“Typically what distilleries have done in the past is to use one type of spirit very consistently which was important for this trading and use different casks to create different flavours which is fine but it has already been done.

“Our approach has been more to say, if we use an amazing spirit to begin with and combine it with an amazing cask it doesn’t need to sit in there for 20 years.

Being a woman in the male-led whisky industry is also advantage, according to Thomas.

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“People remember you if nothing else,” she says before adding: “The other advantages is that it gives me a different perspective, which is the whole reason why diversity in the workplace is good in the first place right?”

Last year, Nc’nean ran an internship programme to bring two women to work in a whisky distillery for a week. Thomas expected about 40 application but some 170 women applied.

“I still have people say to me – despite the fact that I spent seven years of my life working on a distillery – do you actually drink whisky? They would never ask that to a man.

“So I really hope we’re changing perception, because it’s a ridiculous think to be asked in the 21st century.”

This summer, Nc’nean whisky will be a ready to go on sale and the next five years will be all about spreading the word and growing sales

Although, Thomas admits it was a longer journey she has no regrets about quitting her 9-to-5 and hopes other women will follow her lead.

“There’s nothing in whisky that women can’t do, just try to get some experience first to see if you like it.

“If you actually intend to start a distillery you have to be prepared for a very long journey. There are a lot of friends who have started a business when I started the distillery and they’ve already sold it and moved on with something else, while my whisky is just about to be ready.”