For as many distilleries as there are in Scotland in 2019, there are still horrid swaths of countryside void of distillation. You might think the Outer Hebrides, the Shetland Islands, or small isles like Raasay might be such deserts of distillation, but you’d be wrong on all accounts. Instead, it’s place like the Northwest Highlands and, most shocking of all, Angus in the heart of Scotland where one struggles to find an oasis. This changed for Angus in 2015 when Arbikie distillery opened on a farm near Arbroath.
I caught wind of Arbikie during my week distilling at Strathearn in early 2017. My friend Jeff and I toured Tullibardine distillery prior to our work week, and there we happened to run into Christian Perez-Solar, none other than the man who helped kickstart Strathearn with Tony Reeman-Clark. Christian had moved over to Arbikie distillery where he was conducting curious experiments on a new single-estate distillery, and I took his card and promised to get in touch down the road.
The road finally led to Arbikie during my exploration of eastern Scotland last year.
It’s not the easiest place to find.
I performed a few loops on Angus farm roads, the coast hovering just to the east, before I tentatively pulled into a cluster of houses and farm buildings, straining to see some signifier that this the oasis I sought. As luck would have it, Christian was walking toward me, empty coffee mug in hand, heading to his house for a refill (talk about a short commute). Fueled up on coffee we trudged across the cracked asphalt mercy to the day’s wild winds and ducked into a farm shed the size of an aircraft hangar.
Christian is the friendliest. Originally from Chile and with a background in wine, he came to Scotland to pursue distilling. Maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise, but there aren’t a lot of winemaker-to-distillers in Scotland, and as Christian led me around Arbikie’s facility I quickly came to deeply appreciate his vintner background. His eyes lit up as he pontificated on the qualities of yeast and mashing on skins.
First, grain.
Arbikie is a single-estate distillery. They grow all of the products they distill. That’s impressive and entirely unique in Scotland. Arbikie was founded by the Stirling family in 2013. Specifically, brothers Iain, John, and David are the idea men behind the distillery, which stands on the family farm. They hired Kirsty Black as their master distiller and brought Christian on as another distiller and production manager. Together the team aims to produce a portfolio of spirits entirely sourced and produced on their estate.
There’s something incredibly romantic about being a self-sufficient distillery. In fact, soon (if not already) they’ll even take to malting the barley grown on the farm, thereby closing the circle on the production process.
Christian has me smelling mountains of barley and troughs of potatoes — potato vodka is the base spirit for one of their gins — as we wander among Tio Pepe Matusalem barrels aging rye whisky and single malt. Yes, Arbikie has rye whisky nearly ready when I visited, and as of this writing they are first Scottish distillery to have produced rye whisky in 100 years! In fact, it’s considered a grain whisky because there aren’t even laws around what constitutes Scotch rye whisky. This is not the first example of Arbikie’s maverick approach to distilling.
Christian tells me the whisky is laying down for a minimum of 14 years. FOURTEEN YEARS! Suffice it to say it’s nice to have capital.
Arbikie’s stillhouse, which looks out to the Angus coast, is the distiller’s version of a mad scientist’s laboratory. Christian Carl pot stills from Germany anchor one corner while a massive column still reaches to the house’s lofty ceiling in the center of the space. Steel washbacks, a mash tun, pumps, hoses, a de-methylizer, and other equipment I’ve never seen before cluster around a rustic bar where Arbikie’s current offerings stand by a tidy box filled with botanicals like Hebridean seaweed, orris root, and angelica root.
Christian walks me around the space spitting out facts and figures about their distillation processes. He’s got all the numbers and the science to back it up. I get a taste of Kirsty’s Gin with its potato vodka base and AK’s Gin with smoked cardamom, mace, and honey. Both go down quite smooth and delicious, but I want to talk about whisky.
Arbikie is classified as a Highland distillery, and while some baggage might come with that in terms of style, Arbikie seems to once again be doing things their own way. A 96-hour fermentation is sure to lead to a spirit with some fruity tones, and Christian goes on to describe the newmake as containing notes of orange peels and toasted pecans. Sounds wonderful. Too bad I’ll almost be 50 when it’s ready.
They have a plan at Arbikie, though. When that rye whiskey is ready, they’ll fill the bottles and then put newmake single malt into ex-Scottish rye barrels. Not only are they growing and sowing all of their base materials, they’re also seasoning their own barrels.
My head is spinning a little bit as Christian sells me on the idea of terroir in whisky (another idea borrowed from wine). Arbikie has the opportunity to try and make this work — he even wants to try wild fermentations. I hear about varietal whiskies and soon wine and whisky are on the same continuum and I’m thinking “why wouldn’t this work?” as I look around the mad scientists’s lab.
The Arbikie lads and lasses are doing something major here. This is a ride you don’t want to miss.
Disclosure: Christian is a friend and he showed me around Arbikie out of generosity. All thoughts and opinions expressed here, as always, are my own.