DISTILLERY PROFILE
Here’s to Harris
The huge success of its gin gave Isle of Harris distillery more time, and resources, before it released its inaugural whisky. Now members of The Scotch Malt Whisky Society can experience the first independent release from Harris, after taking our iconic green bottles on a journey to Tarbert and back. Unfiltered editor Richard Goslan followed them on their odyssey to the Outer Hebrides, to meet the local Hearachs and discover more about this distillery with a social mission at its heart
PHOTOS: MIKE WILKINSON
It feels like there’s a special connection between The Scotch Malt Whisky Society and Isle of Harris distillery – and not only because we’re here on the island to fill three casks of Harris whisky into Society bottles.
It turns out the very notion of opening a distillery on Harris was met with a similar scepticism that faced Pip Hills and his pals when they decided to set up the SMWS in the early 1980s.
“The idea for the distillery came from a chap called Anderson ‘Burr’ Bakewell,” managing director Simon Erlanger tells me.
“He’s been involved in Harris in one way or another for about half a century and in that time the population has gone from about 4,000 people to less than 2,000. He wondered whether you could do something about it. Could you create an enterprise that would provide sustainable employment, not just for five years, 10 years, but for generations to come?”
The answer to Burr Bakewell was to find a way to capture the essence of Harris in a bottle, send it out to the world, and then bring the island to the attention of a wider audience. The answer, evidently, was to build a distillery.
“With a distillery, not only would you create employment, you’d encourage more tourism and it would act as a catalyst for wider economic regeneration,” says Simon. “But Burr had spoken to a lot of people in the industry who said it was daft – there had to be a good reason nobody ever built a legal distillery on Harris before. Clearly, we don’t have the malting barley, so there’s no indigenous reasons for distilleries here. But he was determined to make this happen. That’s when I became involved, along with [executive chairman] Ron MacEachran. We got together in May 2011 and started to sketch out a business plan.”
ABOVE: Isle of Harris distillery is right at the harbour on Tarbert, the perfect location for visitors arriving at the ferry terminal
PICTURED: picture postcard views across Tarbert and the Isle of Harris distillery
DEFYING THE SCEPTICS
Fast forward 13 years and, like The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, the Isle of Harris distillery has thoroughly defied its sceptics. The distillery was constructed next to the ferry terminal at Tarbert, the perfect spot for visitors stepping off the boat, and officially opened in September 2015. By 2019, more than 100,000 visitors were coming through the doors. And Harris gin was taking the world by storm.
“The gin just exploded, it surpassed all of our expectations,” says Simon. “Soon, we were in 24 countries. We started off with five washbacks, and within two years, we had the money to add three more. So we actually added 40 per cent to our whisky-making capacity, which was never in the original business plan. That was what the gin did for us.
“But perhaps as importantly, the gin helped us to create a reputation. People would say, well, if the gin is this good and the bottle is this beautiful and the story is this intriguing, I wonder what the whisky’s going to be like?
“So you can’t underestimate that element of the gin paving the way for the Hearach, which was coming down the line.”
ABOVE: Isle of Harris distillery managing director Simon Erlanger
PICTURED: The warehouses on Harris have capacity for 15,000 casks
A SENSE OF PURPOSE
We’ll get to the Hearach, the first whisky from the Isle of Harris distillery. But first we need to understand what a Hearach is, and why the distillery has been so critical to the island’s future.
For that, there’s no better person to speak to than Shona Macleod. She was part of the original ‘Tarbert 10’, so called because the initial team were locked up in the town’s old police station most of the time, trying to work out how to bring Burr Bakewell’s vision to life.
Shona subsequently ran the guest services team and has now graduated to become the distillery blender, responsible for the first release with the name Hearach.
“The Hearach is a person from Harris, so I’m a Hearach,” she says. “The vision [for the distillery] was always that it was a social enterprise as much as a business. It was a means of halting depopulation, giving people a reason to come back to the island and giving people here a different form of employment.
“The whole idea behind it was to try and offer interesting jobs for people to stay here or to return after studying, and for people like myself that moved home after living away for quite a long time.”
In the stillroom, distiller Thomas MacRae is charging the washbacks before distillation. He’s typical of many islanders who are ready to turn their hands to a range of jobs before finding something that clicks.
“After leaving school I worked on my dad’s boat as a fisherman for a year, but I didn’t have the sea legs, so I figured I was better on land,” he says. “I worked in a shellfish factory for a bit and then I was a civil servant for a few years. I was going to move away because I wasn’t happy at that job and I was struggling to find anything else. Then I saw this one – the only thing I knew about whisky was how to drink it, but I applied because they provided training, and that was it.”
Since then there’s been no looking back for Thomas, one of five distillers.
“It’s the best job I’ve had, by miles,” he says. “And it’s the same for everyone else here, giving jobs for people locally and stopping them from having to move away and get other jobs. And it does so much for the island as well, seeing all the bottles around the world and getting tourists in. We get three tours a day and everyone comes to see the still room and the shop and the story behind it as well. It’s done a lot.”
ABOVE: Local Hearach Shona Macleod is part of the orignal ‘Tarbert 10’ who brought the distillery to life, and is now the distillery blender
PICTURED: Distiller Thomas MacRae at work in the still room at Harris
ABOVE: Sandra ‘Sandy’ Fraser has been with the team since the very beginning, and is now guest team manager
ISLAND CHARACTER
Over in one of the distillery’s warehouses, Jillian MacLennan echoes Thomas’s sentiments. She’s also a Hearach and had moved to Glasgow to study but missed island life, without having any clear opportunities to return.
“I was finding it difficult being away from home and I was looking for a reason to take me back,” she tells me. “I helped out in the distillery’s Glasgow pop-up shop in 2021, then I was offered a seasonal role the following year. I joined as a shop assistant, and quickly became a tour guide. Now I’ve moved on to the role of private cask coordinator, looking after all of our private casks here.
“You can really feel the support that the community gives to the distillery. And I think everybody appreciates it for the job opportunities. We’re very lucky and it’s something that a lot of us are always going to be grateful for.”
Sandra ‘Sandy’ Fraser is another Hearach who has been with the team since the very beginning, and is now guest team manager. She emphasises not only what the distillery means to the island, but what the island’s character has brought to the whisky.
“Harris needed something like this for years and years,” she says. “I’m so proud and very grateful for the opportunity to be here living in my homeland. This is the beginning, so hopefully if we do things right now and produce quality spirits, then this will be sustainable for the future of Harris.
“For us on the island here, one of our main values is that life takes time. And living on an island, you have to be a wee bit more patient with life. There are various things that make the pace of life here on the island so quiet and so much slower. But I think that’s relevant in regard to whisky. You cannot rush whisky and life takes time with that.”
ABOVE: Jillian MacLennan found an opportunity back on Harris working in the shop, as a tour guide and now as private cask coordinator
A NEW REGION
Ah yes… the whisky. As we’ve heard, the success of the distillery’s gin meant that there was no need to rush out a three-year-old bottling as soon as it was ready to officially be called whisky. Instead, the team waited until September 2023, the distillery’s eighth birthday. And the name Hearach took pride of place on the label – a statement not only of where it’s from, but who it’s been made by.
“We don’t have a history of distilling here, so we were never trying to create a dram that had the character of a specific region or a specific flavour profile,” says Shona Macleod. “This is a new region for whisky, the Outer Hebrides. So it’s our own – it’s Harris, it’s the Hearach.”
In character, it’s lightly peated, with a very gentle note of island peat smoke, with both floral and fruity notes. “We set out to create a dram of complexity and something distinct,” says Shona. “I think that’s what we’ve managed to do.”
“There’s a lot going on in there,” agrees Simon. “It’s got a sweetness to it. It’s very slightly peated, but most of the smoke comes through at the end rather than the beginning. You don’t really get it on the nose. It’s hard to say: ‘This is the style of Harris whisky.’”
The beauty of it is that now, members of The Scotch Malt Whisky Society can discover for themselves what Harris whisky is all about – with the distillery’s first ever independent bottling coming out in Society bottles in December this year.
It hasn’t been a straightforward process to get to this point. The fundamental ethos of Burr Bakewell’s vision for a social distillery was that every aspect of the creation, maturation and even bottling would be done on the island, to ensure that as many jobs as possible remained on Harris. That meant the Society bringing our bottles to Harris, rather than the whisky coming to us.
ABOVE: A big day for both Isle of Harris and the SMWS, as our green bottles travelled to Tarbert for the distillery’s first independent release
PICTURED: a display of cask staves with the names of some early supporters of the distillery
ON THE BOTTLING LINE
SMWS whisky director Kai Ivalo is here on the bottling line at Tarbert to witness the big moment when Isle of Harris whisky is sealed in Society bottles.
“It’s an unusual situation for The Scotch Malt Whisky Society to do a bottling elsewhere,” he says.
“We knew there were restrictions in terms of the way that Harris have set themselves up where no bottle of Harris whisky would leave the island unless it was in glass. So we basically brought the glass to Harris so that they can do the bottling for us.”
As to what’s in those bottles, the Society has selected three first fill ex-bourbon barrels, each one filled with the same new-make spirit but into casks from three different Kentucky bourbon distilleries.
“We wanted to give members an honest sense of spirit character with these initial releases in ex-bourbon barrels,” says Kai. “But we’re also going to be filling some new-make spirit into a variety of different casks, including sherry casks, a few years down the line.”
For Simon Erlanger, it’s also a special moment to see his Harris whisky go into the Society’s iconic green bottles.
“I’m a fanatical member. But knowing the reputation of the Society, knowing the beautiful access you have to so many whisky lovers around the world, I just thought, well, maybe we should try this out.
“So this is a first, and hopefully the start of a partnership that will continue for a long time.”
ABOVE: SMWS whisky director Kai Ivalo was on Harris to witness the bottling and says there is more to come, including sherry casks
PICTURED: The glorious landscape at Luskentyre, famous for its turquoise water and stunning views