Meet Shona Macleod, Blender at the Isle of Harris Distillery

Alex Boag-Wyllie, Social Media & Campaigns Coordinator, Wilderness Scotland: You haven’t always done distilling and whisky?

Shona Macloed, Distillery Blender, Isle of Harris Distillery: No, no, none of us did because there was no history of distilling here on the island. Not in Harris, not in the Outer Hebrides like there is in the Inner Hebrides. So there’s no tradition of it here. You can look around and see how rocky the landscape is. It’s not somewhere that there have been barley fields. So we feel like we’ve been doing it for a long time now, but we’re very young in terms of a distillery because we’re only 10 years old. Some of our neighbours in the Inner Hebrides or Skye or Speyside are 200 years old.

My background was in hospitality. That’s what I did, and I ended up working at the distillery, but my job was guest services manager there for the first few years. But because there was such a small team of us, there were 10 of us to start with, we were all involved in spirit quality from the beginning. We were all tested for our sensory abilities and that sort of thing, and I didn’t know that that’s something you could do.

Alex: How do you go from having good senses to being a distillery blender? What’s the process? Do you get… Is there a course? Do you have a mentor?

Shona: Because we needed to develop those skills in-house, it didn’t make sense to go and helicopter somebody else in who already could do that job. So my role at the time just developed quite naturally into that.

It was an unusual path, I suppose. You can’t just go to another distillery and get a job that you have relatively little experience in. But because we’re a small company, and we were learning everything ourselves, it was possible to do that.

When we started, because there was no distilling here, no history of it, we didn’t have a specific spirit type that we were trying to make. So it was quite nice to have a bit of a blank canvas in that way, and just to see how it would develop, because you can make the whisky in the same way somewhere else; it’s never gonna be the same. The biggest factor maybe is when we have all of these casks delivered empty up to the yard at the distillery, they’re delivered right next to the shore. So they’re definitely getting a little bit of salty maritime character there when they’re waiting to be filled.

Alex: And can you tell me about the new one?

Shona: The new whisky? Yeah.

Alex: Because this is very much, I mean, you’ve been part of the journey throughout it, haven’t you?

Shona: I was lucky enough to sit in my lab office and create the recipe myself. So that was very exciting. I created about eight versions of the recipe and then narrowed it down, and I had two favourites. I had my own favourite, but a couple of colleagues looked at both of them, and they picked the same one that I did as my favourite without knowing.

It’s really exciting and quite terrifying in equal measures, really, to see how it’s received. But we had a staff training day yesterday, so 40 people tried it, and I got a nod of approval from them.

That means there’s no rush. Which is a great name for a whisky cask.

Alex: Aptly named.

Shona: There are a very funny ones. I’ll point one out that you might have to edit out of your film. But anyone who lives near the Central Belt or anything to do with Glaswegians will appreciate this one here.

This is my cask. Well, I should say our cask in case he watches the video. So, we called our cask ‘Hold Fast’ because that’s the Macleod clan motto.

So sometimes the bungs come out straight away, and sometimes they don’t. So you might have to cut and paste a little bit if I can’t get that out very quickly. I think I’m gonna have to go on the pallets. You might want to go around there.

Alex: Oh.

Shona: There we go. Okay. Right. Let’s have a little sample. We’ll probably have a bit of a spillage. I’m not as skilled as the … all of the people around. There we go.

Alex: Amazing. Look at it.

Shona: This was filled in 2018. You can see that badge there. This is cask number 1363, filled with Harris spirit in 2018. So when we’re doing sampling, normally we pull the bungs, and we’ll just smell the cask.

Alex: Yeah, but you can really smell it, can’t you?

Shona: I don’t have the right hairstyle for doing that because I usually end up dripping in whisky, but … But this one is really nicely perfumed. I’d probably pick that as a single cask if I was selecting one today.

Alex: Yeah. Could you get that just-

Shona: If Wilderness Scotland would like to buy one?

Alex: While we’re here.

Shona: I’ll have a taste.

Off-camera: It is our 25th anniversary.

Alex: If you’re ever gonna buy a cask.

Shona: Happy birthday. Perfect. Perfect idea.

Alex: Thank you.

Shona: That’s really nice.

Alex: Wow, the smells.

Shona: I grew up on the island, so I’ve got certain sensory memories of things like flowers on the machair, clover, that sort of thing, that I quite often identify in our whisky.

It was quite emotional because I was thinking of all these other things that have happened in the last 10 years, and because it was my first time essentially putting a recipe together myself, sort of like a storyboard of 10 years from me to whoever’s gonna open it and enjoy it.