MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Whisky innovator Annabel Thomas
ANNABEL THOMAS, 37, aimed to shake up the whisky industry when she founded Nc’nean — a 100 per cent organic and sustainable whisky distillery — in 2017. married to huw, a lawyer, she lives in london with their two-year-old daughter.
WHISKY is quite a male world. There’s this inbuilt assumption that women don’t drink it. And I want people to embrace using it in a long, mixed drink or a cocktail. I’m a massive fan of a whisky highball.
I spent eight years working as a management consultant, where I did an 18-month secondment with Innocent Drinks. The work was stimulating, but there wasn’t enough purpose for me.
In 2012, I took unpaid leave and went on a whisky road trip to Islay in Scotland and began to wonder why so many distilleries do things exactly the same way they’ve always been done.
I wanted to shake things up, so I decided to start an independent distillery on our family farm on the remote Morvern peninsula, on the west coast of Scotland. My father and I drew up plans. We spent the next two years raising money and getting planning permission. We had to dig a 2.5 millionlitre cooling pond and it wasn’t easy getting our huge woodchip boiler down a single track road and into the barn.
We source our organic barley from local farmers and it is malted for us. We have more than 1,500 barrels of whisky ageing in our warehouse at the moment.
We started distilling in March 2017. The product has to be at least three years old before we can release it as whisky, so I’m excited to say our first batch is going to be released in late summer this year.
Our lamp-glass-shaped stills encourage a gentle distillation and a lighter spirit with fruity notes. I also started experimenting with taking the whisky before it matured and redistilling it with botanicals — sorrel, heather, thyme — growing on our farm. The result is a spicy gin alternative.
It was never in our business plan, but our Botanical Spirit was named one of the top 10 innovative new spirits of 2018. When we were featured on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, there was so much interest, the website crashed.
Before lockdown, I spent every third week working in Scotland. We offer tours of the distillery and we set up an internship for women: we had 170 applications from across the world for the last one.
However, this year our team has had to work remotely. We’re lucky enough to have the space on the distillery to continue production while adhering to social distancing rules, but I’m missing being there!