DISTILLERY PROFILE: LOCHLEA
Under the radar
This farm distillery in Ayrshire has quietly started producing whisky and lured John Campbell away from Laphroaig in Islay in the process. Unfiltered editor Richard Goslan paid a visit to find out more about the distillery’s ambitions in this feature from Issue 68 of Unfiltered back in April 2022
PHOTOS: PETER SANDGROUND
With so many new distilleries coming online across Scotland, you expect to hear them make as much of a song and dance about their plans long before any new make spirit even fills the first casks.
Planning permission is publicised, distillery teams are promoted, an anticipated flavour profile is celebrated. And then the waiting game starts, to see what might or might not unfold when at least three years and a day has passed.
Not so with Lochlea. Let’s face it, who had even heard of the Ayrshire distillery before Burns Night this year? Stealthily and surreptitiously, owner Neil McGeoch converted his 220-acre cattle farm into a working distillery with no fuss or fanfare, bringing in Malcolm Rennie – previously of Annandale and various Islay operations – to provide the initial distilling expertise.
Construction began in 2017, with farm buildings including the piggery converted into the stillroom.
Cattle sheds became bonded warehouses and fields were given over to producing malting barley. Lochlea distillery was commissioned in August 2018, and its first release dropped on a fairly unsuspecting whisky world on January 25 this year.
Production at Lochlea began in 2018
John Campbell has left Laphroaig after almost 30 years to become production director and master blender at Lochlea distillery in Ayrshire
The significance of the date shouldn’t be ignored either. It is of course the birthday of Scotland’s bard, Robert Burns, and is celebrated both at home and abroad enthusiastically every year.
Whisky and Burns often ‘gang thegither’ but in Lochlea’s case, the connection is genuine. The aspiring poet lived and worked at Lochlea farm from the age of 18 to 25, during which time he founded the famous Bachelors’ Club in nearby Tarbolton, just over three miles away. It’s fair to say he wasn’t enamoured with farming life, later describing it as having “the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave”. Poetry offered an escape, and Burns was all too keen to embrace it.
Given a connection like that, you’d be missing a trick not to exploit it, and as well as releasing their inaugural bottling on the Bard’s birthday, the team at Lochlea have adopted Burns’s words of ‘Dare to be honest’ as the distillery’s mantra, along with the claim that the farm has inspired the ‘honest, passionate and progressive nature of Lochlea whisky’.
FROM ISLAY TO AYRSHIRE
If Lochlea is nailing its colours to the mast through its connections with Burns, there’s another legendary character now making his presence felt in the stillroom and beyond. A fixture at Laphroaig distillery for almost 30 years, John Campbell is now production director and master blender at Lochlea, following Malcolm Rennie’s departure to oversee the resurrection of Rosebank distillery for Ian Macleod Distillers.
It couldn’t be a bigger change for the soft-spoken Ileach. He’s swapped island life for the mainland, the scale of Laphroaig for a tiny start-up like Lochlea, peated for unpeated and a distillery with more than two centuries of tradition for one with mere months under its belt. There were various reasons for John to make such a momentous move, but when we sat down together in the tasting room at Lochlea, he explained that the fallout from the global pandemic and the resulting lockdowns played key roles in his decision.
“If it wasn’t for lockdown, I probably wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have even questioned what I was doing. I loved what I was doing, and I’ll always love Laphroaig,” says John. “But there were just so many strands that this [move] felt easy and right. My children are all on the mainland now and it was too good of a chance from both a personal and a professional point of view.
“There’d be nothing wrong with spending the next 20 years working at Laphroaig and that would’ve been awesome. But it was just like: ‘Aye, if you’re going to do it, do it now – scratch this itch and see what happens.”
If people think that island life on Islay is slow, they clearly haven’t been working at Laphroaig for 27 years. As John explains, it’s not just in the scale of production, but in the pace of life here, that Lochlea differs. The Ayrshire distillery is currently producing about 4,000 litres of pure alcohol (LPA) a week. That compares with the 80,000 LPA being produced at Laphroaig.
“Lochlea will do in five days what Laphroaig would do in five hours,” is another way that John puts the difference in scale into perspective.
“It’s a complete different pace, and change happens more slowly here in Ayrshire compared with Islay, which is not the normal way round. The process is slower, so there’s more thinking time at Lochlea.”
FIELD TO BOTTLE
Much of that thinking time has, and continues, to go into what the character of Lochlea whisky is going to be. Its location may be firmly Lowland, but the distillery’s publicity urges readers to ‘forget your preconceptions about Lowland whisky’.
“We’re looking to build depth,” says John. “There will be a lot of fruit in Lochlea, we’ve got that in the spirit, and we will accentuate the grassy and the cereal notes. The barley is all grown on the farm, and there are slightly different characteristics to barley grown in this southern part of Scotland, and because it’s non-peated, you should get these barley flavours coming through in the spirit as well.”
To achieve the desired flavour profile, John explains that during the mashing process they are going for a semi-clear wort rather than something cloudier, to promote fruit and cereal notes. They carry out two shorter fermentations and three longer ones, from 68 hours through to 120. The longer fermentations produce more grassy notes, and the shorter ones more fruit.
The yeasts come from Mauri and Fermentis and the resulting wash is all married in one receiving vat before distillation. Both the first and then the spirit distillations are carried out slowly, with higher cuts to get the required balance of flavours and with the heavier, oily flavours being ‘recycled’.
As John explains, Lochlea’s own barley is also playing an integral part in the distillery’s story. The goal is to not only produce all of the barley they use on the farm itself, but to put in place a floor maltings on site.
“I have the experience of running a full maltings, and we’ll be doing trials before our own floor maltings comes online at Lochlea,” says John. “We want to accentuate these barley flavours, and floor malting will definitely do that for us.
“We’re going to start to get the fields ready for the barley soon and we’ll have control of the whole process, from getting the soil ready, to planting, growing, harvesting, malting, grinding, and ultimately distilling it. Every part of that will have been on the farm, and there’s no one else doing that on the same scale as we will.”
Future releases will follow the agricultural year, from sowing, harvesting, ploughing and fallow, with a variety of cask maturations coming into play, from first-fill bourbon to STR (shaved, toasted and recharred) casks, as well as oloroso sherry.
As for peat? John left that world behind at Laphroaig, but he does have a Lochlea planned which will be matured in casks previously used to mature peated whisky. Which ones? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Find out more about Lochlea distillery at www.lochleadistillery.com
All names and job titles were correct at date of publication (April 2022).