Why Isle of Barra is natural home for whisky galore

Isle of Barra Distillers is investing £12 million to develop the distillery in the Castlebay area. When complete, it will be capable of producing more than 300,000 bottles of single malt a year. The distillery will also be home to Isle of Barra’s existing gin still, as well as a bottling site, bonded warehouse, and visitor centre with shop and café bar. Ultimately, it is hoped the business will have grown its headcount to 40 within its first 10 years of operation.

“It’s just a really exciting time to be honest,” Morrison told The Herald Business HQ Monthly. “It is something we have been working towards really since we started the business. We kicked off in late 2017, always with the hope of working towards whisky. But to be in this timeframe [after] seven years, where all going well, we should open the whisky distillery within 10 years of us starting the business is pleasing.

“Taking the business from an idea, basically, sitting in Glasgow, to opening a single malt distillery is pretty good.”

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The Morrisons’ dream of constructing a new distillery on Barra is built on strong foundations. It is a story that began when the then 16-year-old Michael and 17-year-old Katie left the island of their childhood for Glasgow in search of higher education and opportunity, and initially saw them work in furniture design and crafts. Morrison opened his first business aged 21, providing high-end gift packaging for distillers such as The Macallan, Glenglassaugh and Bowmore.

The duo ran the business for five years and Morrison admits they may still be doing it today, had technology such as Zoom and Teams been as widely used as it is today. The firm depended on him being “close to the client” but his wife, who had worked in the hospitality industry in Glasgow, was “desperate to move back and start a family”. It meant the end of the road for the first business, but the opportunity arose to try something different when they returned to Barra.

“We couldn’t move that business back and there was the opportunity to go into the gin,” Morrison said. “It was hot for a couple of years and we just felt, ‘give it a shot’, and if it didn’t work out it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

“So we went off to the bank to see if they could help us out. We managed to secure a £57,000 loan and basically all of that went into label design, bottle design, a new website, things like that. We felt if we could the market the product and sell it, then we could really have a chance of being a success at it.”

It was a nerve-wracking start, however. Morrison recalls staying in the Premier Inn at Braehead in Glasgow when the gin went on sale in August 2017, and fear rising up within him when the website crashed. “I remember sitting in the hotel room going ‘Oh man, this is not off to a good start!’. But obviously, in hindsight, it was really because the demand was there.”

Notwithstanding the usual ups and downs that can affect any new business, Isle of Barra Distillers grew steadily from the off and was in a position of strength when Covid struck. The couple had the not insignificant challenge of welcoming a baby daughter into the world less than a week after the UK Government announced the first lockdown. However, they need not have worried, as the firm – and others in the industry – benefited hugely as people diverted disposable income they may have previously spent on going out to bottles of premium spirits to enjoy at home. There was also an upsurge in purchasing for gifts.

“Just overnight the business completely transformed, all positively,” Morrison said. “Typically, we would have seen 150 to 250 people visit our site a day at that point. Then, pretty much from the start of lockdown that April, we would see anything between 3,000 to 4,000 people. In April 2020, we turned over more in those 30 days than we did in the 12 months of the last financial year. Then, in May [that year], we did more than in April, and again we did more in July.

(Image: Isle of Barra Distillers) Isle of Barra spirits range

“I think our highest-grossing month was August – we grossed over about £220,000, finishing off with about £840,000, £850,000 [for the year], going up from £140,000 the year before. So you can see the growth of the company really took off.”

The firm’s success allowed it to purchase a new still, which they christened Ada after their daughter who was born early in the pandemic (manufacturer Forsyths said it is good luck to name stills after female family members).

And while Isle of Barra no longer has a Covid bounce to drive sales, it has been successful in widening its retail distribution for its Atlantic Gin, which is distilled using locally hand-harvested Carrageen seaweed, through Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. Exports have also grown, with the brand now available in 12 markets.

With the business firmly in growth, Michael and Katie decided in early 2021 to push on with plans to build the new whisky distillery. The planning process has been “difficult” in part because the location, while on family land, is classed as a special protected area. After the proposals were altered to account for habitat management – the site includes a corncrake nesting area – permission was secured in December 2022.

Morrison said: “Essentially, we kind of took a year off almost in 2023 because there was so much focus on things like planning: we just wanted to focus back on the business. Then, early this year, we shifted focus back on the distillery. Now we are on the verge of breaking ground.”

He said a key part of the project is to help regenerate the area, from an ecological and economic perspective.

“To kind of put it into perspective, if the same project was done in Glasgow, it would create 22,000 jobs for the population,” he said. “It gives you an idea of the scale of the impact it is going to have on Barra.

“It’s just not been done on Barra before basically, that is the bottom line. That is why it has come with its challenges but also with a lot of excitement and a lot of interest from other parties: the network of people we have gathered throughout the years, our customer base, but also from a wider spectrum.

“There are a lot of people with an affinity with Barra: they have relations there, they have seen it, they have heard of it. I just think a lot of people want it to be a success.”

Morrison said that until now the island’s main connection to whisky has been the famous Compton Mackenzie book, which was also turned into a popular film in 1949. “There’s so much to play on,” he said. “We’re actually about two miles away from the house Compton Mackenzie wrote Whisky Galore in, so there is a wee story there. We will play on it, but we wouldn’t want to be too heavily into it. We have our own story to tell. We call ourselves the family distillery because it started as that, but it is broader now. You are talking more about the Barra family and that wider audience that want to be part of it.

“You saw that come through in our first share offer. We were oversubscribed within 24 hours and that was purely because people did not want to miss out on the chance of owning their own piece of the Barra whisky distillery.”

The business has funded the development costs of the distillery project so far, supported by a share offer in August which raised £1.13 million (and sold 20% of the company in the process). This January, a similar amount will be targeted in a second share offer.

“Then we will keep pushing on like that,” Morrison said. “Total build and running costs for the project is £12m, so it’s not small change, but a project like this, the cost just comes with it.”

He insists he does not feel daunted by the amount of money involved, stating: “This is where we want to be, and I think we have the platform to do something really unique and special. It just adds so much to other people’s lives. It is never really about the money or worrying about it. It’s just more the potential we have to do something.

“This year alone, for example, our staff have travelled to Tokyo, Mumbai, Shanghai, New York, all on business and all have come back with successful trade deals.

“But they wouldn’t have these opportunities if we didn’t have the company on Barra. It is as simple as that.There is no other business operating on Barra the way we do.”