DISTILLERY PROFILE
Campbeltown rising
The region once known as ‘Whiskyopolis’ has suffered from a dire lack of distilleries for decades. As Tom Bruce-Gardyne reports, that’s all about to change with not one but two new ventures confirmed in or around Campbeltown. Tom caught up with the team from R&B Distillers to find out more about their plans for Machrihanish distillery
When R&B Distillers began talking of opening a second distillery, the choice of location seemed clear enough. The clue was in the name – if ‘R’ stood for its Isle of Raasay distillery founded in 2016, ‘B’ was for the Borders. That’s where co-founder Alasdair Day has long-dreamt of making whisky like his great grandfather, who had his own blend as a licensed grocer in Coldstream.
Instead, Campbeltown was picked, thanks to Alasdair’s business partner, Bill Dobbie who has his own ties to the region. Bill takes up the story: “During lockdown, my son William, who’d joined R&B as commercial director, said: ‘Why don’t we consider building a distillery in Campbeltown, because after all, that’s where your mum’s family are from’.
I agreed, but said I wasn’t sure we wanted to do it so quickly, to which he explained: ‘It’s taken us 10 years to get to this point with Raasay, and Campbeltown will take another 10’.”
The point was taken, and Alasdair also liked the idea, with one proviso – that they build on what they had learned from Raasay and create a farm-to-bottle distillery. “We grew a small amount of barley on Raasay for three years, and you could see people really engaged with that,” he says. “And that’s why we decided to buy a farm where we could build the distillery and distil our own barley.” They knew barley did well on the Mull of Kintyre, where one farm had already been supplying R&B with some of the malt used for Isle of Raasay.
The sad closure of the Campbeltown Creamery in 2019 meant there were a few dairy farms for sale. Last November R&B Distillers bought the 160-acre Dhurrie farm, a few miles north of the town, and in February it announced plans to build the Machrihanish distillery there. It was widely-reported to be the first new Campbeltown distillery for 140 years, until, like the proverbial London bus, a second one was announced a week later – this being the Dál Riata distillery in the town itself.
“My thoughts are that cloudy worts play a big part in this as both Springbank and Glen Scotia have almost 200-year-old cast-iron mash tuns with rakes which gives you that style. I think cloudy wort does give you a nutty, oilier spirit.”
Alasdair Day, R&B Distillers
Alasdair mentions plans for “a new experimental distillery at Springbank” and says: “I know of at least two others.” If true, Campbeltown could have as many as eight distilleries before too long. It won’t quite be a return to the days of ‘Whiskyopolis’ when the town positively bristled with pot stills and whisky barons, but something is clearly happening down the end of ‘Scotland’s longest cul-de-sac’.
The A83 runs from halfway up Loch Lomond around the entire length of Loch Fyne and down the Kintyre peninsula, before crawling into Campbeltown 98 miles later. There is a 45-minute flight from Glasgow to Machrihanish, but if you drive to Ardrossan and find the CalMac ferry is playing up, which is not unheard of, it is a long detour, believe me.
This sense of isolation makes Campbeltown what it is, though with its superb natural harbour it clearly felt connected during its Victorian boom years. “It was the heyday of the puffer and of steamers coming down the Clyde,” says Alasdair.
“And, being so close to Northern Ireland, barley came from there as well.” He believes its implosion as a whisky town in the 1920s, when no fewer than 17 distilleries closed, stemmed from the era of the steamship giving way to the railways which so benefitted Speyside. There was also the infamous ‘Campbeltown reek’, where he says distillers’ “use of coal to dry the barley gave an oily, pungent style that fell from favour”.
Machrihanish is aiming to be a net-zero distillery, with no fossil fuels in its production, so that rules out coal, which is probably just as well.
However, there is a distinct oiliness to the region’s whiskies which as Iain McAlister, Glen Scotia’s distillery manager told Unfiltered in February is “part of the DNA, part of the make-up that is Campbeltown”. He traced it from “the malted barley, through fermentation and from the shape of the stills which in Campbeltown tend to be quite short”.
Alasdair agrees about small stills, which Machrihanish will also employ, but adds: “My thoughts are that cloudy worts play a big part in this as both Springbank and Glen Scotia have almost 200-year-old cast-iron mash tuns with rakes which gives you that style. I think cloudy wort does give you a nutty, oilier spirit.” He is thinking of installing a mash filter which “may sound a bit counterintuitive” he admits, and mentions having a long, three-to-five-day fermentation, similar to Raasay.
“We want to be sustainable, and the organic matter [in the soil] is clearly very high, being an old dairy farm … we’re trying to do regenerative farming.”
Alasdair Day, R&B Distillers
PICTURED: Dhurrie farm and inset, a rendering of the future distillery
Focussing on provenance and keeping things artisan is all part of the ethos and extends to Dhurrie farm. “We’re not driven by yield,” Alasdair insists. “We want to be sustainable, and the organic matter [in the soil] is clearly very high, being an old dairy farm.”
He talks movingly of microbes and says: “We’re trying to do regenerative farming.” Some 90 acres have been declared suitable for barley which should supply the distillery with a third of its needs, with the rest coming from neighbouring farms.
This drive to keep everything as local as possible should hopefully create over 20 jobs, which is just what Campbeltown needs given the closure of the town’s wind turbine factory last September.
So, maybe whisky can help fill the void? Machrihanish has appointed the Danish architect who built Stauning, and is hoping to have a final planning application in by the end of the year, which could mean it will be distilling in 2025.
“We’ve been really heartened by the reception in Campbeltown and from the local community,” says Alasdair, and the same is true of Springbank and Glen Scotia. Iain McAlister is euphoric about this latest Campbeltown whisky boom:
“It’s fantastic, absolutely brilliant, and long may it continue.”