DISTILLERY PROFILE
Future proof
From thinking whisky was ‘disgusting’ to founding her own distillery, Annabel Thomas has been on quite a journey in the wilds of Scotland’s Morvern peninsula. Sarah Gillespie caught up with her to find out more about her conversion to loving Scotch, her vision for an organic net-zero distillery, and why the world of whisky has to change or be left behind
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF NC’NEAN/ANDY BATE, THE ANGEL’S SHARE
Spanning 200 square miles of Scotland’s western coast, the Morvern peninsula (population: 320) feels a little like the end of the world – and the 7,000-acre Drimnin Estate sits at its very edge. Wildcats and pine martens stalk its forests; white-tailed eagles circle overhead.
Annabel Thomas, whose parents bought a farm on Drimnin in 2002, wants to keep it that way. When Annabel’s father gave her the idea of starting a distillery in the old farm steading, she was determined to do so in a way that would cause minimal environmental harm.
FROM VISION TO REALITY
In 2012, Essex-born Annabel took a sabbatical from her London-based consultancy job, and visited her parents’ home to write up a business plan for an organic, net-zero distillery. There was just one problem: she didn’t like whisky. “I’d always thought it was disgusting,” she tells us. “But you can’t really be on the west coast of Scotland and not think about whisky; you can see Tobermory distillery from our house. In the end, I probably just tried it enough, and started to like it.”
Annabel travelled to Islay to learn the art of distilling. “Everyone was saying that they’re doing things the way they’ve always been done,” she says. “Which is not a bad thing – there’s lots of amazing tradition in Scotch. But alongside those traditional distilleries, I felt there was a need for a distillery that was more forward-looking, focused on sustainability and more modern and creative in its approach.”
In 2013, Annabel left her job to focus full-time on securing funding and overseeing the building of the distillery. By March 2017, Nc’nean – a contraction of Neachneohain, a Gaelic goddess of nature – was distilling its first spirits.
ABOVE: Annabel Thomas saw the need for a distillery that was forward-looking, focused on sustainability and both modern and creative
A LEGEND'S LEGACY
Instrumental to Nc’nean’s creation was legendary whisky expert Dr Jim Swan, whom Annabel consulted for what would be one of his last projects.
“Without him, we would never have raised the money – because obviously, investors looked at me and my dad and said: ‘But you’ve never made whisky before,’” says Annabel. “Having his expertise and reassurance that we can make a great liquid was absolutely central to everything.”
Jim’s biggest influence at Nc’nean was the adoption of STR (shaved, toasted and re-charred) red wine casks – a hallmark of many of the distilleries he’s worked with, from Penderyn in Wales to Kavalan in Taiwan. “This is not a traditional wine cask, because it has been recharred,” says Annabel.
“The wine has caramelised; it brings depth, spiciness and fruitiness to the whisky and it does so fairly quickly. As a younger distillery, that’s really appealing.”
Occasionally, Annabel adapted Jim’s advice to suit her own vision. “Jim had a view that there were only two yeasts you should use. But having drunk a lot of craft beer, I came to it from a beer perspective – you hear them talk a lot about yeast.”
Annabel kept the two Jim-approved yeasts, but often experiments by adding a third. “It could be tequila yeast, red wine yeast, beer yeast, rum yeast,” she says. “We trial them in five-litre buckets and see how the wash tastes; if we like it, we scale it up.”
Jim died in 2017, about two weeks before the first spirit came off the Nc’nean stills. Sadly, he never got to taste the results of his work.
ABOVE: Annabel in the still room at Nc’nean
ABOVE: All Nc’nean’s products are certified 100 per cent organic, including the crops of barley
SUSTAINABILITY: FROM GRAIN TO GLASS
All Nc’Nean’s products are certified 100 per cent organic. The certification process is a long one – especially for farmers, whose crops cannot be certified organic until three years have passed without any artificial chemicals being sprayed on the land. Yields are also smaller, which means more expensive barley – and a more expensive whisky.
But for Annabel, the environmental gains have been worth it. “Organic farming has an impact on the biodiversity of the area and on the health of the watercourses, because you’re not getting fertiliser runoff. There’s also evidence that organic farming builds up much more soil carbon sequestration, which is amazing.”
ABOVE: Water is recycled via the distillery’s natural cooling pond
ABOVE: Nc’nean’s biomass boiler powers the distillery’s two stills
Annabel believes that going organic has improved the taste of the whisky. “We’ve never sold anything that isn’t [organic] so you can never have a completely side-by-side comparison, but we think that at least some of the butteriness and creaminess we get in our spirit is attributable to the organic barley.”
Nc’nean is also certified net zero for Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions – in other words, for sources that they control directly, such as running the distillery on renewable energy. Scope 3 emissions – which include third-party emissions from packaging, haulage and barley farming – are harder to control. But Nc’nean’s zero-waste approach and use of recycled materials (such as recycled glass bottles) is helping to bring down the numbers.
PICTURED: organic barley at Nc'Nean
ABOVE: Exploring the art of the cocktail with Nc’Nean whisky as the base ingredient
REWRITING THE SCRIPT
At its heart, the Nc’nean ethos is all about ensuring the industry’s survival over the coming decades. That means adopting sustainable methods for a low-carbon future – but it also means combating the whisky purism that has alienated some drinkers, particularly among younger generations.
“I’ve only ever been offered whisky neat,” says Annabel. “That was a big barrier for me at first, and has informed my philosophy with Nc’nean. This kind of, ‘Oh, it must be drunk neat,’ and ‘Don’t you know the difference between a single malt and a blend?’ and ‘Don’t you dare put ice in it’ – it’s all such bollocks!” she says, laughing.
“I really want to break that down. So, we put a whisky and soda recipe on the side of our bottle, make it look different, and make sure we’ve got diverse pictures of people in our marketing – otherwise, Scotch whisky might die with old men in wingback armchairs.”
Has she faced any adversity as a female founder? “I haven’t encountered any terrible sexism or anything – the industry has been hugely welcoming,” she says. “But there is sometimes an assumption that because we’re women, we’re producing ‘women’s whisky’ – no, we’re just producing good whisky for everybody to drink.”
In 2020, bottle number one of Ainnir, Nc’nean’s inaugural single malt, sold for £41,004, quadrupling the previous record held for a first bottle from a new distillery. If that reception is anything to go by, the future of the industry is in safe hands.
Society members can look out for single cask bottlings coming your way from Nc’nean distillery in the future – watch this space!
ABOVE: Simon Hewitt is one of the distilling team at Nc’Nean