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THE first surprise, when I walk through the doors of the Isle of Harris Distillery, is the open fire immediately facing me – a cheerful stove with flames merrily flickering. It doesn’t feel at all like a butch Scottish industry but like the lobby of a stylish but very jolly hotel.
The second is how many folk I already know, like beaming Murdo Farquhar at reception or Shona MacLeod from management or the gracious nod I get in passing from the lofty Alexander of Scalpay. Everyone here, it seems, is in the happiness business.
The third is that I am immediately offered a drink. ‘Other distilleries don’t give you a taste till the end of the tour,’ smiles young and petite Shona MacLennan, ‘but, here on Harris, we give you a dram at the very start…’ This, managing director Simon Erlanger has told me, is indeed a ‘social distillery’.
Shona and I sit in the tasting room, rather like the high-end office of a James Bond villain. The walls are panelled with dark barrel staves. There is a sort of giant abacus, with big tightly-sewn beads of Harris Tweed in assorted warm and earthy colours – coded for flavour notes in your dram, she explains.
Even the big, U-shaped table is a statement, in solid oak and with a stone slab at the centre. ‘That’s anorthosite,’ says Shona, ‘found in south-east Harris…’
We exchange wry smiles. When I lived in Harris – from 1993 and for 12 interesting years – this rock was at the centre of enormous controversy. Redland Aggregates wanted to start what would have been among the largest quarries in the world, cutting a goodly chunk out of the island coastline and which would have left a hole, it was said, visible from the Moon.
Many ferociously opposed the scheme. Others, though, were desperate for jobs. The row raged for years, until the company finally abandoned its plans in 2003.
Now Harris has, instead, a distillery, on reclaimed land in the pretty ferry port of Tarbert and overlooked by Gillaval, a barren, lowering mountain that looms over the place like an evil old man.
The vision of one Anderson Bakewell – who owns outright the offshore island of Scarp and whom his employees here describe warmly as ‘modest’, and everyone else as a recluse – the complex opened in 2015 for the first whisky production (or, at least, its first legal production) on the island since Victorian times.
BUT whisky cannot be sold – and cannot even be called whisky – until it has spent three years maturing in oaken casks, even as the men and women here work on and money pours daily out. So they decided, too, to make gin.
Gin is the drink of the hour and all sorts of imaginative varieties can be spotted in niche bars and classier offsales everywhere. Remarkably, Shona tells me, 70 per cent of all British gin is now distilled in Scotland – and it takes only three days to make the stuff, and it can be sold immediately.
What no one here foresaw was the immediate success of Isle of Harris Gin. Even the bottle – subtly rippled, with a blue base, and putting you in mind of the shell-sanded ocean shallows by the island’s wonderful beaches – has won awards, as connoisseurs everywhere rave about the drink’s silkiness and subtlety.
Still, the long-term goal is ‘The Hearach’, a lightly peated malt whisky from the waters of the mighty burn pouring down bouldered Gillaval, and already maturing in ever greater quantities in the company bond by the adjacent village of Ardhasaig.
I’m invited to sip from two elegant little tulip glasses. One holds a blend of three well-known Scottish malts. The other, far more intriguing, is a clear spirit – freshly produced ‘whisky’, made right here, and (as she wisely warns me) at this stage a formidable 70 per cent proof.
The anonymous malts are OK – buttery, warm, a hint of oak and sherry. The native hooch, though, tap-dances on my tastebuds and, juvenile as it is, there is the unmistakable note of peat.
I comment that (unlike Lewis, with its deep bog and where every loch is the colour of strong tea), the water of Harris isn’t particularly peaty. ‘Oh, but the peat in whisky doesn’t come from the water,’ says Shona. ‘It comes from the grain – the ground barley, grist, smoked over peat…’
Mr Bakewell, she says and with a faintly holy expression, has been visiting Harris for decades, loves it to bits and wants to share his love of it with the world. ‘And he asked himself, “How could I bottle the essence of Harris?” – and here we are…’
Everything about these premises is calculated to ooze warmth and welcome. Locals drop in all the time. There is no swanky café for visitors, for instance; you enjoy soup and home baking in the workers’ canteen.
But everything done by Mr Bakewell (and 17 private investors, from all over the world) has besides been done to maximise employment, as Mr Erlanger explains.
‘Our founder wanted to give Harris jobs, and we have deliberately designed the operation to give as much local work as possible. And, indeed, we hope it’ll have a magnetic effect – draw other enterprises to our island…’
The distillery now has 19 full-time staff and up to eight more seasonal staff when the place seethes with tourists in the summer.
The central hall, with its mighty fire, is also a cheerful shop – not just for gin, but assorted Harris souvenirs. Nor will you find Isle of Harris gin in your local supermarket.
It can only be bought here or online (the website is brilliant; and you can collect a bottle within a couple of hours at assorted local ‘hubs’ throughout our cities) and its packing and despatch – which most distilleries would sub-contract to a distant wholesaler – has created quite a few of those jobs.
All employees live locally, most are native-born and all were trained from scratch.
I am now ushered upstairs to find myself standing in what feels like a faintly wacky chapel.
There is a central table, where covers are lifted to reveal ‘elements’ of the dram – raw barley, malted barley, smoked and malted and surprisingly tasty grist.
Chunks of the local rock – Lewisian gneiss, among the oldest in the world – and aromatic peat and ponging dried yeast and, finally, copper pipe (which, though no one can quite explain how, removes impurities).
Even the colours in the company logo reflect its ethos – blue for the sea, grey for the rugged rockiness of Harris and warm red for hospitality by the peat fire.
Whisky production here is straightforward. Grist is fed into a mighty ‘mash tun’ where it is then stirred continuously in pretty hot (but very soft) local water, breaking down its sugars.
An increasingly interesting liquid is then drained away into an ‘underback’ and piped on for brewing proper. The soggy grist left over is now called ‘draff’ and is an excellent food for livestock – though, rather boringly for cows, has not a trace of alcohol. Here, on Harris, it’s given away for free to local crofters.
The liquor or ‘wort’ then spends three to five days in ‘washbacks’ with yeast – in what you might describe as the ‘brewery’ process – before it is once and then twice distilled, casked and stored for three years in cool airy conditions. Inevitably, some spirit evaporates and this is known affectionately as ‘the angels’ share’.
Isle of Harris Gin is a little more complicated. On the facing wall stand big sweetie jars full of dried things. Whisky, explains Shona, has only three ingredients but gin
is flavoured with nine different ‘botanicals’, one of which must – by law – be juniper.
I spend the next few minutes politely sniffing bitter orange peel (Christmas), coriander seed (curry), cassia bark (incense), liquorice, angelica, orris root, peppery cubebs, juniper berries and – in big, dried flakes – the showstopper: locally harvested sugar kelp.
This seaweed grows at depths of at least ten feet in assorted secret beds off the east coast of the island and is hand-harvested by a sturdy diver, Lewis MacKenzie, who eschews scuba gear and prefers to snorkel. The distillery buys the dried sugar kelp from him in 50kg (110lb) bags – and for each of them he has to cut a ton of the wet, raw weed.
I am invited to taste it. It’s rubbery and oceanic and indefinably sweet and reminds me most of raw limpet.
There is a clink of bottle on glass and I have my first taste of Isle of Harris Gin. It is fresh, clean, citrusy, with lingering notes of the sea itself. A few drops of their Sugar Kelp Aromatic Water – also for sale here – bring out the oceanic flavour still more. Walter Gregor’s Scottish Tonic Water is particularly recommended, and perhaps a slice of pink grapefruit. ‘But not Schweppes,’ says Shona sternly, ‘never Schweppes.’ Each bottle is finally labelled and capped by hand, and each cap is solemnly printed with the map co-ordinates of the distillery.
And the bottom of each bottle is embossed with the Bakewell motto, ESSE QUAM VIDERI – ‘to be rather than to seem’.
In all, says Shona, it’s meant to look as if you found your tasty Isle of Harris Gin washed up on the beach. We turn to a sort of high altar, with a row of jelly bean dispensers atop dispensing their candy in a host of flavours reflecting desirable hints in the eventual Hearach dram.
ABOVE this, though are big dramatic black-andwhite photographs, in intent and workmanlike poses, of five identically attired men in sensible boots.
‘Our distillers,’ declares Shona. ‘Donny, Kenny, Donald, Billy and our newest recruit, Norman Iain…’
I know most of them and remember how tough life on Harris has been. Her population has more than halved since the war. There were six schools in 1993: there are now only two.
I have a photo from 1994 of the Harris Under-18 football side; of the 15 lads, just two are still on the island. This place isn’t just a business. It is a determined endeavour to save a community.
And on that note we enter the sanctuary of the still room, after I obediently turn off my mobile phone lest a spark ignite the alcohol fumes and blow us all up.
In a far corner, across an expanse of treadplate, are five great staved and hooped wooden tubs, covered with no less mighty wooden lids. These are the washbacks – ‘made from Oregon pine’. A flap in one lid is opened and I gaze down upon a sort of devilish bubblebath and get a mighty lungful of most aromatic carbon dioxide, as if from every glass of fizzy pop I ever glugged. They are experimenting with three-day and fiveday fermentations, but the room is most dominated by the stills – great tall, curvy, sexy things, made in Italy. ‘You have to wait years to get a still built in Britain,’ says Shona. In a cubicle all by itself, like a dotty aunt, is the still for Isle of Harris gin. A single ‘run’ produces a thousand bottles, and when operations started here there was one a fortnight. It’s now one a week, though at a high point last summer there had to be a ‘run’ every day. But those for the whisky are loftier still. Nearest the washbacks – and above the invisible mash tuns – is the wash still, from which spirit glops generously into the glass ‘safe’. The second is the spirit still, and from this the pure and final Hearach sings into its own safe as the finest but constant trickle. Finally, I am taken back downstairs and into the ‘private bond’, a cool airy warehouse already thick with stacked ex-bourbon casks of maturing Harris whisky. Each holds 300 bottles of whisky and each has been prepaid by individuals (many of them local).
Each, too, has been imaginatively named – I glimpse one keg called Death Star; others with such monickers as Great Expectations, Casqueteers, Batwash Dramas, Fox and Hounds and, rather bathetically, Basil.
Back in the tasting room, I am joined by Sandra Fraser from the office and Peter Kwasniewski, who is ‘front of house’ and joyously moved to Harris after some bleak rat-race years in Surrey.
I’ve been genuinely surprised how many folk work here, I observe; and what an enjoyable hour I have had. ‘Yes,’ says Sandra, ‘and so many young people.’
‘That’s what we pride ourselves on,’ says Peter. ‘A great visitor experience, a real Hebridean welcome. And it’s why we start with the tasting. It’s more welcoming and it makes the subsequent tour much easier to understand.’
I gaze wistfully at my own tasting glasses, still almost full – but I am driving.