Sustainability & soda – the remote Scottish distillery shaking up the whisky industry

About ten years ago, on the end of a craggy peninsula in a remote region of Scotland’s west coast, sat a collection of old farm buildings. Time and weather had battered them into disrepair, but their owner had a dream. Annabel Thomas and her father had always wanted to turn them into a whisky distillery. It was a fanciful notion, but one that would resurface, every so often, glowing with the rich, dark allure of the spirit itself. Eventually, perhaps for no other reason than that the idea had fittingly matured, it was time.  

Whisky, however, is a slow business, and not just when it comes to the process of infusing flavour. It took Annabel years to bring everything together, visiting other distilleries, building a team and pitching to over 800 investors to get the 40 that finally made the project viable. The more she learnt, the more she realised that there was something she never heard discussed. Sustainability. 

“Whisky is a very traditional industry, that’s part of what people love about it,” she told us as we sat in the shade of the small tasting room, ”But that makes it hard for new ideas to take hold.” Those new ideas encompassed everything from branding, to water sourcing, packaging and serving suggestions. The traditional cardboard tubes were made optional, the spirit was designed for mixing with soda and even the name, Nc’Nean, a shortening of Neachneohain, a pagan goddess of the moon, was chosen to be as far from the usual “glen somethings” as possible while still giving a sense of local grounding.   

While some of the decisions that would shape the business came from Annabel’s own passion and professional past, working with brands like Innocent, others were born of necessity and nature. “There’s a reason distilleries are often built by rivers,” Annabel explained, “you need a lot of water, for cooling.” Although water is everywhere at Nc’Nean, there’s not a drop to distil. The solution, which she was repeatedly told would never work, was a circular feed and natural cooling system from a large, specially created pond, which is not only efficient but hugely reduces the impact on the ecosytem compared to using river water. Along with other innovations including a giant biomass boiler that sits poignantly next to the old farmhouse fireplace, it makes Nc’Nean incredibly low impact and led to them receiving coveted B Corp certification with an incredible score of 135.6.  

The other natural pressure was time. Most whiskies are casked for around five years, absorbing flavour and colour from the wood of old wine, sherry or bourbon barrels, meaning a long wait for anything you can bottle and sell. The way round it, which happily chimed with Annabel’s own taste in whisky, was to focus on the spirit as much as the casking. As we stood by the huge copper stills in the glass-walled room overlooking the sea, she told us about crafting the Nc’Nean taste.  

“A lot of the flavour of older whiskies comes from the casks, so people focus on that and not on the raw spirit. We discovered that organic barley, which we were going to use anyway, gives this lovely body to the flavour. Then we have very high, what’s called cut points, coming off the spirit still and you can pick and choose which parts of this rainbow of flavour you use. From that we were able to create a light, elegant whisky that still has depth with only a few years of casking.”   

The lightness and elegance were important to Annabel, who wasn’t content with only taking a fresh perspective on the manufacturing process. She talked about the stigma surrounding drinking single malt Scotch anything but neat or with a dash of water, and the perception that if you don’t like whiskies of eyewatering strength, you aren’t a proper whisky drinker. Nc’Nean is designed to be drunk neat or with soda, with a message and a style that strives to welcome more people into the world of whisky. 

As for welcoming people to Nc’Nean itself, that’s a different matter. In stark contrast to some of the large-scale distilleries, mostly owned by giant drinks brands, Nc’Nean has no restaurant or palatial gift shop. One of the farm buildings houses a few bench tables and a simple bar, on which a “whisky refill station” stands next to a donations bowl for a local mental health charity. There are a couple of shelves of whisky, some bottles of the botanical spirit made as an experimental side project, and an air of casual calm to the staff, as if you’d just dropped round to a friend’s house.  

Annabel says that only a few hundred visitors a month are bold enough to follow the single-track road and bump their way up the hill to the distillery door, but their rewards are substantial. The magnificent sight of the sound of Mull, the delicate, honeyed charm of Nc’Nean whisky, and something harder to express — the feeling that they’ve unearthed, deep in the layered, smoky world of whisky, a note of beautiful freshness.   

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