Ever dreamt of leaving your routine job and setting off on an adventurous journey of passion? Imagine swapping your job for a distillery, and this episode brings you the real-life story of someone who did just that! Meet Martin Murray, co-founder of Dunnet Bay Distillers, who took the audacious leap from the oil and gas industry to distilling, creating jobs for himself and his wife, Claire. From developing the award-winning Rock Rose Gin to the Holy Grass Vodka, hear all about their tale of triumphs, challenges, and the central role of local wisdom and sustainability in their distilling voyage.
Are you pondering the risks and rewards of starting your own distillery? We discuss the personal journey of building a distillery from scratch, the pressures and fears he and Claire faced, and the lessons they continue to learn. Also, get a peek into the fascinating story of Rock Rose Gin and their unique strategies for creating a high demand for their product. From using social media effectively to leveraging word-of-mouth marketing, their incredible journey is a testament to the power of modern-day marketing techniques.
The captivating stories don't end here. Get ready to hear about the stunning transformation of an old mill into a whiskey distillery, the creation of Rock Rose's signature gin and Holy Grass vodka, and the innovative methods they employed. We conclude the episode with a potent discussion on the importance of sustainability in the distilling industry and Martin shares their innovative, eco-friendly approach. So, tune in and share our passion for the mesmerising world of distilling!
Ever dreamt of leaving your routine job and setting off on an adventurous journey of passion? Imagine swapping your job for a distillery, and this episode brings you the real-life story of someone who did just that! Meet Martin Murray, co-founder of Dunnet Bay Distillers, who took the audacious leap from the oil and gas industry to distilling, creating jobs for himself and his wife, Claire. From developing the award-winning Rock Rose Gin to the Holy Grass Vodka, hear all about their tale of triumphs, challenges, and the central role of local wisdom and sustainability in their distilling voyage.
Are you pondering the risks and rewards of starting your own distillery? We discuss the personal journey of building a distillery from scratch, the pressures and fears he and Claire faced, and the lessons they continue to learn. Also, get a peek into the fascinating story of Rock Rose Gin and their unique strategies for creating a high demand for their product. From using social media effectively to leveraging word-of-mouth marketing, their incredible journey is a testament to the power of modern-day marketing techniques.
The captivating stories don't end here. Get ready to hear about the stunning transformation of an old mill into a whiskey distillery, the creation of Rock Rose's signature gin and Holy Grass vodka, and the innovative methods they employed. We conclude the episode with a potent discussion on the importance of sustainability in the distilling industry and Martin shares their innovative, eco-friendly approach. So, tune in and share our passion for the mesmerising world of distilling!
3, 2, 1, 0, ever and lift off, Lift off, lift off. Welcome to the recipe for greatness podcast. Our guest today is Martin Murray, the co-founder of Dunnett Bay Distillers, home to the celebrated Rock Rose Gin and Holy Grass vodka. Nestled in the Northmost reaches of Maine and Scotland, martin, alongside his wife Claire, have transformed their dream into reality From a successful career in the oil and gas industry to pioneering in the Scottish gin revolution, martin's story is one of innovation, community engagement and profound connection to his K-thness roots. Also, martin received the outstanding contribution to Scottish Gin Award for his contribution to the industry. Martin, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, gene, you'd be on the podcast.
Speaker 1:I wanted to jump in and talk about your return to K-thness and why you decided to return to sort of a business, because it's briefly such a general introduction. But you're working in the oil and gas industry and quite big companies like Toso and BP, so what made you sort of thinking about sort of moving back home and starting up a business?
Speaker 2:That's a great question and to be honest, I kind of came with a change in a phase in our life and also a chance to go back to something I was passionate about. So I started at Heriot-Watt University and did chemical engineering. When we got to third year there's the opportunity to specialise for your masters and I really wanted to bring in distilling, loved all the topics around it. But when I went to a careers fair there was no jobs in brewing and distilling, so that was pre-craft beer revolution, pre-craft spirits. So at the careers fair there was quite a lot of big distilleries and breweries but not a lot of jobs, whereas in the energy sector there was a lot of jobs no free booze but lots of jobs. So with a student loan kind of hanging over me, I decided that I had to rule with the head and not with the heart and did my masters in energy resource engineering. So I went off to work initially in nuclear, then into oil and gas.
Speaker 2:Loved I was in kind of major projects later where we'd be starting up equipment for the first time and the challenge that comes with that in the North Sea on an oil rig is fantastic. But at the same time the work-life balance is definitely not there. It's mainly heads towards the work end of that and with young children we decided to try and really get a little bit more balance. And with project roles I was always going off based on milestones, so typically I wouldn't be on a routine pattern. A lot of the time I have to stay out to help out reach a milestone and it meant that I missed birthdays, celebrations and things.
Speaker 2:And when you're younger and you don't have other people missing you being there, it's less of an impact. But when you're saying to a two-year-old or three-year-old you might not be there for the birthday, it starts to change your outlook a little bit. And we love how we wanted to move back to Dunnett at some point. We built a house and always had that commitment that we would come back here at some point. It just was finding a way. We're in quite a fragile rural economy where there's not a lot of jobs, so the only way for us to both come home was to create two jobs. And that was the inspiration the love of brewing and distilling and the challenge to create two jobs, one for me and one for my wife Claire.
Speaker 1:Absolutely incredible. And in 2014, you brewed your first batch of rock rose gin and sold it. So, prior to that moment, what was the journey like? How many years? Was it years, months and sort of like coming back home to then actually setting up the distillery and then doing that first batch. What was that timeline and sort of what were you up to?
Speaker 2:There was always a seed there from university so I did whole brewing with a picnic cooler, making way too much stout and not drinking it. So in love with the process but not able to keep up with consumption and so not really winning any favours with Claire. When I made most of the washing stink of stout I was always brewing in our utility area where all the washing and things were. So I'd always had that passion and we did things like elderflower champagne. We played with different things and even when I worked offshore I built a whiskey business model, thinking that I could do whiskey, and then got quotes back and then kind of realized that I had a really big fundamental flaw with my plan and that was I didn't have any money, so to do whiskey was just not perceivable. So we'd always had that seed, We'd all kind of developed and you know there was definitely a change when the lights of Sipsmouth came along and started to do small scale distilling and then I really believed that we could do something similar. We could move home, we could create a product that would be inspired by our local area, contain local botanicals and kind of fulfill my urges to make product but also to be able to sell it. So I think the journey started even when I was back at university.
Speaker 2:I continued to do things behind the scenes, trying different business models but never really finding the right fit. I would have made a stout distillery in the north of Scotland if I had my way, but nobody up here drinks stout, or not enough for me to justify leaving offshore and gas to do it. So we picked away, we increased their learning. You know we, before we made our first batch we were we bought lab kit off eBay. We were doing it in the garage and picking different botanicals, learning from really experienced people. So the UK's oldest established herbalist, Brian Lam, lives locally. We went and walks with him. We picked things, we distilled them, tasted them, we learned about them, and then, with a countryside ranger, Mary Leg, she was really helpful in helping me understand what we needed to do to be sustainable. So you know, we couldn't take away berries that birds relied on. So we had to be very clever with making sure that we could grow our business but not have a negative impact on biodiversity in the area.
Speaker 2:So we did all that kind of things in the background and before we got to the first batch, we had a really simple goal and that was to make a gen that we went back to each weekend and you know, these things is almost like a novelty value. Make your own product and then by the third week you might be back to your tried and trusted gen. We wanted to break that barrier where after two months we would have it and if we were out we would genuinely want to drink that gen. So we did that. And it's a bigger challenge than you think because you're up against guys who are really experienced experts in their industry. So we have to learn from the ground up.
Speaker 2:And the way I did that was essentially a reverse to engineering, where I looked at things on forums and even like on the side of a bomby sapper bottle, where you find the botanicals of bomby sapper on the side of the bottle. I tried to make bomby sapper really simple take the ingredients, work out the ratios and try and recreate it. And it's difficult on a lab scale because your different equipment doesn't react the same way as the big equipment they have. But you learn so much doing that and by doing that reverse engineering you then have the building box to build up the way, and that's what we did. We learned where elements contribute to taste and built up from that.
Speaker 1:And what's that first batch made? You know an actual, you know distillers? Or was it still that small batch of micro-gits that you were making? Or did you decide to commit to sort of that big scale, you know, really commit to the project to move it forward?
Speaker 2:We scaled up from a 500 milliliter flask, then we went up to 50 litres in the big still, and then the final batch would be a 500 litre batch. So we made three recipes in a 50 litre size. So we kind of narrowed it down and we got to three at 50 litre. Now I quite like that because we found two that we really liked, and then there was one that was just too spicy for us and we thought it would be too spicy for everyone. So we thought, right, we've got two gins that are really tough, they're kind of neck and neck in terms of what we like, and we've got one that we don't really like.
Speaker 2:So what we'll do is we'll send those three gins to three different trusted people. So we sent it to a mixologist, we sent it to a hotel chef that we trusted, and we sent it to another bar and we thought it's going to be really easy. There's going to be one winner, because everybody won't like number three, and then that means there's a choice of two between three people. So there's going to be a two-one scoreline at least, or a three-nil scoreline, and what we got back was they all liked each one differently, so we had a one-one-one draw. Very helpful very helpful.
Speaker 2:It's not what we expected. But what we did do then was we asked them for a breakdown on what they liked the nose, the taste, the finish, this kind of thing so we could understand which bits of each they liked. And that then gave us the understanding of mapping that against what we liked and that then gave us the confidence to do the final batch, which ended up being mainly one and two, but there was a little bit of three in there as well for a reason for a little bit of spiciness in the middle, but kind of rained back. And then we did a 500-litre batch and all the way through I built the cut points really disciplined and how I did that. So that means when the first part of the gin we don't take, we leave that aside, we collect the product and then we stop. So those are the kind of start-stop points that I had determined and rigidly stuck. But then I got over excited when we did the first batch and we'll never be able to explain this I changed my cut points on the day and at the end of it I didn't really like what we had. I made it a little bit too spicy and a little not enough rose and I was stuck with a tank of gin for our first batch, which had sold out, which I didn't like, and I was like what do I do? Do I act like people are wanting their gin? We've pre-sold, we've promised delivery, but here we are with something that I'm not 100% happy with and we kind of need money. So what do we do?
Speaker 2:So I went home to sleep on it and I didn't sleep at all. I went to bed. I live in a club, I set up a bar. I got up at 4am and I just went and did a proper batch, did it all again. I thought we'll figure the problem of that other batch at a later date. We'll read it still, we'll use it another way and we'll do it right.
Speaker 2:So I went back down, I did it right. I was so proud of myself that I got it right and I went back to Claire to give her the first tasting early in the morning and she couldn't taste anything of it. I just realised that when I walked in she just brushed her teeth. So it was a worse time for her to do a tasting, because her half was the taste of mint from brushing her teeth. After that she tasted it and it was signed off and actually our first batch that ever listed distillery was actually the second batch. We never really told that story at the time because there wasn't time and we had lots of other things. But I tell that story now because I think it shows that we were always driven to do it right from the start, even when we had other pressures on us.
Speaker 1:And these the siloes you were using. Is it your own, or were you actually renting a space out to do your first batch or second batch as well? Or was this owned and operated by yourself, or Owned and operated.
Speaker 2:So I'm trying to think about this. We looked at rental space and the problem you've got up here is you have a limited pool and also you need certain requirements for a distillery. That you don't really generally walk into a building I think, oh great, it's got a channel drain, it's got a three phase power supply and it's got ventilation that we need for a distillery. So we didn't really have many options and I must have driven past this bit of land to go to all the other sites that I wanted to visit and not seeing the foresail sign. Or maybe I did see the foresail sign, but I just read it off because it didn't look big enough.
Speaker 2:And then my father-in-law said to me you really should have a look at that land. And I went to have a look at it and it was perfect. I had berries growing on site, I had three phase power supply on our grounds. I had a burn running down the back. I could not believe it. And it had been on the market for a while because it was next door to a hotel, so probably not ideal for residential. So I went to buy it and put an offering and it sold the day before.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:So I contacted the people at Botan, said would you like to make a quick sale before you do any legal work? Would you be willing to just let us buy it? And they did. They must have thought that, you know, they must have not been sure or had site doubts. But I never mentioned the distillery word because I said if we mentioned the distillery word they would think they had ransom over us. So I never said a thing and I guess they must have looked back and thought, god, we should have asked them what we were going to do with it they did it.
Speaker 2:So we built it and the way I funded it was I took a short term contract offshore as a startup engineer, so short term meant it was quite well paid and startup is quite a dangerous role generally, so it's even more well paid. So I used the money from that dangerous role to pay for the building here. And, yeah, I designed the stills when I was offshore in the evenings and it was quite funny because some of the vendors were offshore doing our project for BP. So there was like EX heat who were doing the gas heaters for the BP Andrew project and I would be badgering them at night when they were off high and I was like I really want to do a heater first still and I want to make sure that it can be controlled like this. And they must have been so fed up with me when they're on their off time asking me questions. But I ended up working the way else. We got the heaters from EX heaters who did the same or, yeah, far bigger heater offshore, but the same guys did the heaters for us and I designed the stills to make it work.
Speaker 2:And it was quite a challenge because when you design the process like this, if anything goes wrong. I don't have a team of engineers to say why did this go wrong. I don't have a manager to say well, what kind of got this wrong? It's like, well, we've paid for it, I've made the mistake, I have to fix it. But it also gives you a real learning where you really want to check to make sure everything is 100% right, because you know the impact it has on the potential, to make sure you're not making it to the next generation. And that's how we do it. So we distill it in about one kilometre from our house, so it's ideal. It means I don't have a huge commute in the morning.
Speaker 1:So you literally then did actually risk everything, even your life, basically to get this off the ground. So when you mentioned that decision to whether or not to sell that first batch, because you wanted money and the pressure was actually there, right, because you actually needed to get the money in, because you actually kind of put a lot of money on the line, essentially, yeah, and I think we were blissfully naive in life at that point where it made sense to us.
Speaker 2:But looking back with hindsight, we certainly think this was a far bigger deal. This was a far bigger decision, far bigger investment, far bigger commitment than we thought at the time and maybe with our youth at the time we didn't see it that way and it was for our benefit. Maybe if we were doing it again now we might be scared to commit, we might have seen things slightly differently, but we did and we believed it was the right thing. We were doing things for the right reasons. Again, looking back, we were so full of doubt about our ability to do it and now, looking back, I kind of wish I could have taken a bit more confidence. We were both hardworking, both smart and both committed to doing the project and I don't think we ever gave ourselves a credit for that. And I do even know if we do now, to be on, kind of still think that we're amateurs. Even after 10 years, we're still learning our trade and it's a strange feeling.
Speaker 1:And I read that that first batch sold out in you mentioned they're pre-sold, I think quite a lot of them, but also in the first 48 hours. I'm right in thinking it was all sold. How did you create that initial demand to get those sold so quickly?
Speaker 2:So almost 10 years to the day or, yeah, almost 10 years to the day we sent a season's greetings card to all the places we wanted Rock Goes to be in so I can't remember let's maybe 50 to 100 venues and Claire designed a really nice card. We hand wrote them and sent them out, and this was in December 2013. We thought we'd be launching around about summer 2014. So we said out those cards. We didn't hear much back and people got them, people read them and only then in the January and there was an interview with the Sheraton in London, in Edinburgh, and they were asked what their most exciting, what they were looking forward to most in 2014. And Hugh Guim said what goes Jen from the North of Scotland, and that was to like US and UK publication. I was like someone read what we sent to them. You know it's kind of bananas.
Speaker 2:So then Claire built up social media during that time and it was really great because we took people on our journey quite early. They got to see the distillery being built. They got the direct from the founders. So Claire still does all the interaction on social media. So you are interacting with the founder. Even after 10 years, she's still the voice there that you'll speak to.
Speaker 2:So we built up our story that way and we did not appreciate how much people would want our Jen. We literally had no clue. We were doing a launch and we did a launch when I was just going offshore or I just arrived offshore and I don't know why we decided to do it at midnight, like you would never do a launch at midnight, because nobody's online in midnight. So we did a launch at midnight, which meant I had to stay up late after being on a 12 hour shift, and then we just seen orders flying in. People stayed up to midnight to order our Jen and then by the next day we were like 500 bottles gone and by the morning and I was like this is there's got to be something, some sort of mistake, and then within that, for years, it's sold out. So then you know what happens when you sell something out and say first batch gone, you have even more demand because people have missed it. And we did the decision to put batch to straight on and it sold out even quicker.
Speaker 2:So both three they took back to the gun at 72 hours and it was like okay, we've tested this style but we've not really made the final recipe. But we've got 2000 bottles now to go to people and all they've seen is our story on Facebook. They never tasted it. So you have this weird moment where we were quite stressed. So I had to come back, I had to make the Jen have to get the recipe right, I had to bottle it, all of those things and then, as it was boxed and going out the door, you have this moment where you built your reputation up on social media and people are going to get it tasted, taste it for the first time. So your reputation then could be absolutely in tatters if it's terrible, because people who bought it via your social media can easily tell you quite quickly and it can easily spiral out of control.
Speaker 2:So after the orders went out, we knew when they would arrive. We were pressing F9 on our email, f9 on our website, refreshing on Facebook to see if there was comments coming in. We were that terrified that people might not have the same taste profile as us, even though we'd gone out to industry and tasted it. We didn't know what people would expect but thankfully people loved it and that organic word of mouth then meant that we were basically pre-selling batches all the way from the first 12 weeks to Christmas, we were struggling to keep up with demand, so we were making enough and then releasing it and then more would come in and it was really bonkers.
Speaker 2:Being from the highlands of Scotland, I like to think we're naturally pessimistic. So we kept saying, oh, we're new, we're exciting, it'll like flatten off. And it was oh well, it's coming up to Christmas, we're still quite new, quite exciting, it's gifting, we'll tail off. And then in January we're getting inputs from Germany and places like that. We're like, okay, this isn't really tailing off. And it didn't tail off. You know, we three years, we well, we saw their first year's production in those first 12, 14 weeks and then we just rapidly grew and we kept throwing more people that we bought employees on temporarily and they're still here now. So people came on for three months and like nine years later they're still here.
Speaker 2:And we did that like temporarily and like every week I'm like, wow, we really like made a lot of gin this week. I go through and just stop taking. I've got like 12 bottles. Where's it going? And then, you know, it just continued.
Speaker 2:That was our journey and I remember one night we I got a phone call. On a Friday night about five o'clock I was trying to go home. Phone rang. I thought it's probably clear, probably forgot something or want me to bring something home, so I thought I'll go and answer it or jack it on. Leaving it door I heard the phone run back and it was a plus one area code as a. Oh yeah, I know that number, it's a US number. So I answered it and the chat on the phone was oh really, like your Jenna tried it when we were over in Scotland and like to buy your gin, that's hard, okay, and we can't ship to the US, so you have to use one of these guys and they can help you.
Speaker 2:And there was like a pause and then he's like no, I don't think you understand, we want to buy a container of gin. I was like, oh wow, that's that's how we got our US deal. It was like bananas. They'd been over on a whiskey tour. They'd had whiskey all day and in the evening when they went for dinner, they didn't want to have a whiskey. They had enough whiskey. So they always asked for recommendation. And at that point we were really like quite new, still leaving up a couple of years, and all the bars were recommended rock grows and the guys fell in love with it, and after being on a whiskey tour, the first thing they wanted to order for the US was rock grows, which was amazing, absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1:That's absolutely incredible and what I love about that is just like there's so many because people talk about marketing, about everything you need to, you need to track, but there were so many things that you did, like the handwritten cards, where you don't know you can't monitor that. You know it's completely you know. You know you don't know who's going to pick it up and who's going to read it, but just making the effort, then eventually that payback comes in and you just don't realize those efforts and how far they can actually take things, because I was going to ask about the US launch, just basically, how did they ever come on the cards and just hear that story about just that word of mouth there's come from? Just the quality that you produced is just such an amazing story.
Speaker 2:You know, it's one of those things, even today that when we walk into bar, restaurant, retail and you see your bottle on the shelf, and especially places where you've been going for the first time, it's like wow, it's really cool. I remember doing a tasting and Atlas bar and they said, oh yeah, we know what was your one of the cocktails on the menu just now and I was like that's just incredible to think that one of the best jinn bars in the world is using you on the cocktail menu, is one of their serves and, as I, that that's a bit that you love. You love the feedback, you love the stories that people tell you about the first time they've had what grows and all of that is like what we live and feed off and you know, even today it gives you such a buzz.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to jump on to another story which I loved reading about, and I might be getting the name wrong. Is it Holly grass vodka or holy grass vodka? How do you pronounce it?
Speaker 1:Holy grass holy grass vodka about how that came about and because I know that you sort of that idea came to you because you Fell in love with the story. So maybe you could sort of give us some context of the story and Sort of, I guess funny that you mentioned about keeping up with consumption, because that was one of your main worries about what you'd have to do with what over slept over. So you tell that story, though it was just brilliant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So holy grass was a product that I wanted to do all along. So I wanted to do huge holy grass in our gin. But I love holy grass and I was felt that I would be. It would be to the detriment of the juniper profile or it would be to the detriment of holy grass if I used it in gin.
Speaker 2:Now the story of holy grass is that an amateur botanist in 1800s I called Robert Dick Discovered it growing here at the first place in the UK. Now he was a self-taught botanist and he was dismissed straight away, that's, you don't know what you're talking about. To be fair, it looks like every other long grass that you see, and so he was kind of Brovished at that point. But then he took botanists up and showed them holy grass and he discovered it going in two or three places. I fell in love with the story about the guy, robert Dick. He collected all the botanicals that grew in Keith's nest and he just loved, loved the area. But story is on the back of her bottle.
Speaker 2:I wanted to do holy grass but Craig wouldn't like me because we're so busy with the gin and I was like Can I really solo grass now as a vodka? And she was like no, because we're too busy with gin. So I was okay, I understand, I totally get that. And then, and you know, nowadays when people do a kind of product release, they look at like the size of the market, the trends in the market, the competition in the market. I did absolutely zero of that. I love totally grass as a botanical. I love the story and I create a product that I love. So I got permission from Claire to make a batch of 600 bottles and this is our plan I am going to make 600 bottles. If they do not sell, I will have to drink those 600 bottles from now Till whenever I pass away or I have to gift them. So that literally was our plan for holy grass. And but I did know someone who would get what was trying to do. The guy, simon, differed at differed guides. So when I did holy grass I thought nobody's gonna understand what I've tried to achieve with this vodka, but he will. So I sent him a bottle. He reviewed it, scored it five star plus for Scottish vodka highest scoring at that time for Scottish vodka and I was delighted because he got it. And then now, even now, when we do tasteings of holy grass. People fall in love with it, but they fall in love with their story. It's unique. It's the UK's only grass vodka.
Speaker 2:When I designed the method for holy grass, I started to use a Google translate to try and translate how they make bison grass vodka, and it was so bitty the translation and this is like this is not working. And then I kind of thought why am I doing this? We have all the kit here, we have people here and we have the skills here. Why would you not start with a blank canvas and say how do we want to do it or what ways can we do it? So that's what we did.
Speaker 2:It. We didn't bother with that. We just came up with a whole methodology and that methodology is still, as far as we know, you need to us and the way that we do it, and it's one best British vodka Vodka words. It's just been such a big success and Even last year or sorry, last year, this year and it's been our biggest growth and it deserves, then its own brand. So when we did the holy grass bottle initially, we used one of the backup options for rock rose again, like we didn't look at what other bottles were on the shelf. We did just because, you know, we were on a budget and we wanted to do 600 bottles, and Now we have given it its own beautiful bottle, beautiful design, and people have fallen in love with it either more. It's just such a unique product with a great story.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and I guess this leads me perfectly to another story that one jump on, because, talking about Basically, well, I guess you know there's so much history and tradition in Scotland and I think one of the main things about use being sort of like just restoring as much as innovation. So I'm curious about sort of what you know. You mentioned that you were, I know, used to drive past this mill all the time and I've seen pictures of this mill and Before anything was ever done to and it does look in it like you know, it's derelicts, it does look really hard work. What point did you start to think actually there's an opportunity here with this? How did that even enter your mind? Because I've seen the pictures. I'm Guarantraining on to look at them because there's not many people who would look at this and think, right, let's, let's do something with this.
Speaker 2:So you know, like that, and everybody dreams, there's things that you've seen a while, you know, and so when I first started to see Claire when I was 17, I've drive past the mill I lived in third. Oh, she's done it. I think that's such a cool building. So it starts off that's a cool building. Then it goes to like five years later or like 10 years, they're like that's such a cool building, I wonder how much it costs, or I wonder how bad it is. And then it's like it's really bad and it costs a lot. Okay, so then you're still like dreaming at that point. And then we do this business. I think I wonder if we could do something with that building, you know, even make it a storage area or what we could do with it. And then the little seeds starts to kind of grow and you're like, okay, what do we need to do to find out about the building? Like who owns it, how much would they sell it for, what conditions it in? And then you start this list that you kind of work through to make it stack up. And I love the building. I just I do. You know there's no two ways about it and you know I've always kind of almost had this thing in my mind where I think you can manifest that one day that will be your reality. I don't know when you know, and you might have been. I looked at it and it might be when I'm 60 or 70. I don't know. But I look at the building and kind of think that at some point that's going to be my feet in some way. And that's just because I'm a complete dreamer and I complete, I missed sometimes I align myself these moments in life where I can dream.
Speaker 2:And we got to the point and we did all that background checks. What we did was we did some side visits to check the condition of the building. We found out the owner, how much they wanted for it, what land came with it. Then we looked at infrastructure around it how could we get electric to it, what drainage, what access, all these things. We ticked all those things off and then the big one is like the condition of a mill. It's 200 years old and built on sand, which is not a great recipe for longevity. But as it turns out, it actually is the sand that compacted so much it was as hard as concrete. So we had to do those kind of final checks on it, and we did that. We laid distillery equipment over the footprint to make sure it all fits. We assessed the traffic around the corner. We did batch surveys, error surveys, order surveys Everything you would need to do to get to a point to convince yourself that it makes sense.
Speaker 2:And the way I justified it in my mind when we got to that point which was in January 2020, was that it comes with a lot of land. I will try my best with the mill, but in the very worst case, I've got an expensive bit of land that will possibly give us expansion for this place long term. So I thought myself into that reasoning and we were just about to buy in February 2020. And we all know what happened in February 2020. So I had to go to the landowner and say there's no way I can buy this land when I have wages to pay and I don't know what's going to happen in the world with being able to sell or anything. So he understood he held off from us. I said if you get better off, you have to take it, but of course there wasn't much happening during that period. So then we got through the summer, we were trading, we could see confidence and we bought the land at the end of 2020.
Speaker 2:And then, in 2021, we decided to take the planning the plans for the building outside the planning process and get feedback from everyone before it went into the planning process. We invested a year of our time just understanding what people expected from us and where we could come and stuck, and when we submit our planning application in 2022, it's sealed through. We'd addressed all the concerns ahead of that. So then we now have plan and permission, we now have a building warrant and we have not enough money to do the project. So, okay, that's fine, that's like you know. We could save for 20 years, save for 50 years. We could do something about that. But we launched a cask ownership program 200 casks and we sold them all, except for two, which we kept back. So that helped us.
Speaker 2:And we then had one last part to do to the mill, and that was there's one big risk with an old building which is built on sand. Well, it's stay up. So we had to do underpinning, and the structural guys said to me you're either going to need more underpinning, which is going to cost you some more money, or it's going to fall down. And so I was like, oh okay, both bad, both bad results in my eyes, but let's see what happened. So we'd already done trial pits, but trial pits kind of give you indication but they don't show enough.
Speaker 2:So when we started to expose it, we actually realized that we needed less underpinning. So we now got the position and got to the position with the mill that we've made the building save, we've cleaned it out, people do hard hat tours for the first time and we've taken off the old roof and we're now just about to enter the main contract, which is to turn it into a whiskey distillery. And it is absolutely terrifying but absolutely exciting. And the program for the mill is about 15 months. So by mid 2025, early 2025, we should be in there making whiskey. And it's just, it's surreal to think of that timeline, going back 20 years to it being without a pie in the sky, never going to happen to. We've owned it, we've got all the consents, we've got some funding, we've done the enabling work somewhere into the main contract.
Speaker 1:Now Incredible, and the mills called Castamil, and I recommend anyone to one see what it's like before, but then also follow your journey, because you guys doing great job of documenting each stage and it's really interesting to see that coming on. And I guess my other question is why whiskey distillery? The brand's called Stannagill and that this could be my knack of knowledge of understanding the whiskey industry. But whiskey, you know, you create a product and you have to wait some like five to 10 years before you can sell it, whereas like gin it's a lot quicker. So what's there about the whiskey business that's sort of attractive or makes it work?
Speaker 2:There's a couple of things that are in whiskey that makes it attractive. There's one that's got the global demand still, whereas gin and you can find great gin all over the world with whiskey from Scotland you definitely have the reputation and that's because of really our history of making whiskey and our expertise. The appeal for doing whiskey for the mill is well for that type of building. We can start to mill barley back in there so we can actually become a mill of sorts. We will be milling barley there to the MBU's and whiskey and lends itself well to the space that's there. The reality is, with a project like the Castle Town Mill, we need to find a way to make it stack up and doing whiskey means that we can make it stack up because of that global demand. There is still challenges. We still have to get you right, that three year conundrum where you have to make for three years and not sell. But the fortunate position we are in is that we have a strong gin vodka business and we can use that to then invest in a production of whiskey. We've tried to use the mill in such a way that the whiskey distillery will be almost part of the reason you come. We very much view Castle Town Mill as destination distillery where you come to find out about the past, the stories about the mill and then about the area. And then the last part is whiskey part. We know that whiskey is made in other distilleries and you can find out about how whiskey is made online or in these other distilleries. But for us the unique part is this beautiful mill which was built in two halves, one in 1818 and one around the late 1800s, early 1900s, and there's such a fascinating story there and such fascinating images. So we just released our first blend under the Castle Town Mill name and what we've done is all the labels for all the bottles are coming from old photographs that tell a story of the mill. So the first one is, and it's called the sagas, so the whiskey sagas of Castle Town Mill. The first one is the sagas of the Four Millers and we've got a beautiful image of Four Millers on the front of the bottle and we tell that story and we were given that image or that photo from Alice Calder, who was born in the mill and is still alive, and we've been reviewed for us and it's incredible.
Speaker 2:You know, we talk about the mill, about how I drove past it and how I loved it. And that's what I told me. A story and it's one that still kind of makes me go a little bit, a little bit emotional where she was brought up in the mill. She loved the mill but then, after moving out and seeing it deteriorate, she told me that every time she drove past the mill she would look the other way because she couldn't bring herself to see it going into a state of disrepair. But now that we have taken on a weeve shoulder the plan that we've involved her, she said she looks at the mill for the first time and she smiles when she goes past it. And I think, for all the things we are, all the reasons we're doing this project, that one there is one that will get me through hard times for the project, where it will be the pick me up. I remember there's reasons we're doing this that give us that kind of shot in the arm.
Speaker 1:People can see how it's on the video right, is it on one?
Speaker 2:of the videos.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's brilliant. So again, I definitely encourage people to go check out these videos because they are brilliant. And you mentioned the cars thing and the first batch release. Those are the first batches, so still online. I'm to say hello.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first blend is so we're doing a pre-release list, a waiting list for the next cast release, so it's filling up. So definitely get in touch about that. There are a lot more interests now in the project because when you start to see things getting built, it's a lot more exciting than trying to show people on paper what you plan to do. We've now done a really great thing where we've got the mail on a VR headset. So we've been walking around the future of the mail just me and Claire, nobody else has seen it and it is super exciting. So we will use that VR headset over the next year to let people into our world.
Speaker 1:That's incredible and I want to talk about. I guess that in the, you know your ethos around the product. There's so many factors in it. You know the Sonoshauth there's authenticity, heritage, quality, everything but one part is sustainability. And I wonder if you could touch on the refill scheme or I guess, what the refill patches now about. So how you approach that. I'm right, I think you guys were one of the first really to introduce this into the category, so you tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and no sustainability. At the outset it was part of my degree when I was doing chemically engineering and it was just obvious to me because part of the things that we do as chemically engineers we do things like process flow diagrams and mass and energy balances. And when we did that for this project, you know you've got waste streams and it's identifying how you can use those waste streams as a benefit. And then also things around like power. So we have a 22 kilowatt solar system here that produces lots of energy during the summer but not so much in the winter, so we're adding to that and we're adding batteries. So there's so many things that we that I know is an energy that we'd like to address. And one of the ones that actually came to us from our fans or customers. They loved our bottles, they think they're collectible, they wanted to be used them and they asked us what can we do to make it a bottle for life? And that really planted the seed with me, because I always find it like you look at the weights of bottles and like shipping around, it's quite a lot of weight to move, quite a lot of time and especially then with bottles, you can quickly use them and you kind of think, well, why can't we use that vessel again? So we explored that. We worked with Hines and Ion's Enterprise and we developed the concept of a refill pouch.
Speaker 2:Now the pouches that were available in the market at that time were not recyclable. So one thing we kind of dug our heels in is that you know it has to be recyclable and we have to understand and own that process. So I wanted to make sure that we could record how many people were buying the pouches and then how much of them were ending up being recycled. So one way we could do that was to do a free poster turn and I see that in cartridges but they're normally in a plastic bag which is kind of bogers. And we decided you know, we don't really want to give people an envelope or bag when you know we could just print it on the back of the pouch. So I challenged Royal Mail on that and initially was rejected and then I made arguments that were why I thought it was acceptable to do that and we were the first to be able to do a free poster turn, recycle pouch back to Distillery and that was brilliant. You know, we've now got a refill reward scheme. It's still our best selling product on our website.
Speaker 2:But I don't ever see this as a solution. I always think that as technology improves or as things become better, we will chase that. So we're looking now at like, okay, how do we improve the materials in our pouch to make it easier to recycle? How do we improve recycling efficiency so that it goes higher? And then how do we incentive and advise that? But you know, our customers have been fantastic. The return rates are super and it's been really well embraced and people are doing doing it for the right reasons.
Speaker 2:We didn't want to do it in a hospitality setting and we've been locked in a battle with each one See for three years, where there's a bananas old rule that doesn't let us use a pouch to refill a bottle if it's of a certain strength and a certain volume, but if it's a different, lower volume or a lower strength, then you can do it. It doesn't matter and it's it's bonkers. But we've never been able to win that battle and even though we've had advice that we can now do it because other people are breaking those rules, we now can say that we followed. I'm not comfortable with it. You know we need HMRC for our whiskey distilling. I'm not one to poke a bear and then with problems for whiskey distilling. But yeah, I mean, and even with the mill, we could easily go down the route of using a traditional fuel source. But we knew with our experience of using electricity distilling here that it's a brilliant option for us.
Speaker 2:Now the challenge is we've had to upgrade the infrastructure and over there on other people's land, that's a big project. We're investing about 50,000 pounds to allow us to take the right amount of power to build a big whiskey stall, and what that does mean is then we can tie into potentially a nearby renewable site to have all our renewables or electricity from that or a contract. So that's what we want to do. We want to try and work partner with either someone on site next door to us or someone a little bit further away to do that. And you know it's, you know we've already got our way streams kind of identified and look that we can use them as a benefit to to agriculture.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's, it's just part of who we are. We try not to shout so much about sustainability, rather just call it. We're trying to do the right thing and that's very much just beneath us, with us is we're trying to do the right thing and we will always try to improve, whether it's a big step change improvement or whether it's an incremental improvement. Because what our experience of improvements is that when you do incremental improvements are insignificant. That when you look back after nine or 10 years that we do now, so that's a massive improvement. But I didn't feel like it at the time.
Speaker 1:That's a perfect place to wrap up the interview and I want to just thank you as well for being such such a great interview, but also just not only for having a product with such amazing quality, but a brand that has just got so much authenticity, community restoration, everything evolved and it's just so nice to see you know companies doing this and, yeah, just hats off to just creating something brilliant. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing that journey with us.
Speaker 2:No delight to do that. Thank you very much for having me. It's always great to tell about our story from the north of Scotland.
Speaker 1:As always, guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and fire review would really appreciate it. Again, we'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgrenewoodcom. So, guys, as always, thank you and be great.