“If you’re looking to get a quick return on your investment, you don’t do whisky,” chuckles Angus MacMillan founder of Benbecula Distillery.
"You don’t do salmon farming either, because that I took from egg through to plate,” he says of a previous business venture. “So I'm a bit of glutton for punishment on these things.”
Angus joins John in the first week of May from Benbecula, a small island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, “on a beautiful sunny day.” The Scotch whisky industry has just learned that President Donald Trump is going to abolish tariffs on Scotch whisky imported into the United States, making the outlook even sunnier.
“Spring has sprung,” Angus enthuses, “and moving on to summer. So we’re now looking forward to a really busy season ahead of us.”
It’s almost two years to the day since Benbecula Distillery, one of the newest in Scotland, first started producing new spirit. It’s been an eight-year journey already and it’ll be another three years before the first whisky is released. But Angus admits he’s like “an excited parent” as he shows off a sample of his early spirit.
“I’m not sure if you can see the colour, but it’s starting to take colour. This is cask number six. Pedro Ximénez. This is at 66 percent. And I’m getting all the flavours that I’m really delighted to experience.
“There’s a saltiness. There’s the fruitiness. There’s some of the heather infused peaty taste. And the texture is smooth.”
Angus can’t call it whisky yet. He’s not allowed to until it’s been in a cask for three years.
But he can’t help himself: “Yeah the whisky there after two years, John, is everything that I would expect and want it to be. And can’t wait, obviously, until it’s a single malt as five-year-old being bottled in year six is probably what we’re waiting for. So three years to wait, but I would drink that as it is.”
A proud Outer Hebridean, native Gaelic speaker and entrepreneur, Angus began pulling his business plan together in 2018.
However, inspiration for the distillery came in 2012 shortly after he sold his salmon farming business, which had employed between 75 and 80 people throughout the Western Isles.
He’d kept the processing plant in Gramsdale. But the jobs had gone. “I thought right,” he recalls, “what’s going to happen to this? These jobs can’t just be allowed to disappear.
“So I was on a tour to Orkney and I walked into Highland Park, and the archway as you walk in there said, ‘Established 1798’ and that really hit a chord for me and I said: ‘My goodness, if you’re looking at a project that can provide population retention and jobs and families and everything else, then this has got to be it.’
“There are not many opportunities, but you know we have water and we have barley because actually in Gaelic Uist is called Eilean an Eòrna, which is Island of the Barley. So then the only other ingredient in making whisky is yeast.
“So water, barley and yeast.”
But that's only part of the story of Benbecula Distillery as far Angus is concerned. There are two other essentials: place and people. And place and people, he argues, separates Benbecula Distillery from the what you get on the A9 with Speyside distilleries.
"You know," he says, "you wouldn't from the outside say right I'm going to put a distillery on Raasay" - a distillery he very much admires and wants to emulate - "you wouldn't say I'm going to put a distillery on Benbecula, far from the market, far from travel. But the upside is the story."
Join John for the story of Benbecula Distillery: the place and the people. And soon the whisky...
Slàinte!
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Socials: @C2GWhisky | @JohnRossBeattie
Creator & producer: David Holmes
Art work & design: Jess Robertson
Music: Water of Life (Never Going Home)
Vocals: Andrea Cunningham
Guitars: John Beattie
Bass: Alasdair Vann
Drums: Alan Hamilton
Bagpipes: Calum McColl
Accordion: Gary Innes
Music & Lyrics: Andrea Cunningham & John Beattie
Recorded & mixed by Murray Collier at La Chunky Studios, Glasgow, Scotland
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