Ep. 238: North Uist Distillery with Jonny Ingledew and Jacob Crisp Show Notes
Downpour Gin, Bere Barley, and Whisky Shaped by the Outer Hebrides
The Outer Hebrides have been quietly building one of the more interesting spirits stories in Scotland. I first found my way there through Isle of Harris Distillery, and fittingly, that connection led to this episode with Jonny Ingledew and Jacob Crisp of North Uist Distillery.
North Uist started as a whisky dream, became a gin business by necessity, and is now circling back to the original plan with a distillery that feels unusually connected to the place around it. Not just “island whisky” in a marketing sense, but whisky shaped by an old stone building, local crofters, bere barley, salty Atlantic air, and a team trying to bring production as close to field-to-bottle as possible.
From the Cairngorms back to Uist
The origin story begins away from the islands. Jonny and his partner Kate were living in Aberdeen, working in very different fields, while spending weekends hill walking in the Cairngorms, visiting distilleries, and drinking whisky around campfires. Over time, that turned from hobby into idea, and from idea into decision.
The plan was always to move home to Uist and build something there. Jonny enrolled in the brewing and distilling master’s program at Heriot-Watt, where he met Jacob, then went on to gain practical experience in gin production before returning home.
The first version of the dream was ambitious: a whisky distillery built from scratch on a greenfield site. After two years of planning and a painful amount of money spent on designs, the numbers came back too high to be realistic. Several million pounds is a hard sell when you don’t yet have a track record, even if the idea is strong.
So they pivoted.
Gin first. Whisky later.
That decision, while born of necessity, ended up giving North Uist the foundation it needed.
Downpour Gin and building the audience first
Gin became the bridge between dream and distillery.
Compared with whisky, the equipment needed to start making gin is manageable. North Uist began in a small industrial unit with a modest still, building the business organically around Downpour Gin. The name fits the place, and the liquid was designed to hold its own in the glass. Big flavor, heavy botanical loading, enough structure to avoid disappearing once tonic hits.
The recipe took roughly 250 trials to settle. Not a single lightning-strike moment, more a long process of building a botanical library, distilling individual ingredients, tasting, blending, adjusting, and eventually realizing that at some point you have to stop tinkering and start selling.
It worked. They sold 150 bottles on the first day.
That early success matters because it gave North Uist more than revenue. It gave them a customer base, a mailing list, a reputation, and proof that people were willing to support a spirits brand from Uist before the whisky existed. When the time came to sell founder casks, that mattered.
Community as infrastructure
A repeated theme in this conversation was how much the community has been part of the project from the beginning.
That shows up in obvious ways, like local foraging for botanicals, sometimes rewarded with a bottle of gin. It also shows up in stranger, more charming ways, like community members helping hand-sort barley grain by grain when a batch needed cleaning up.
Uist is small. Around 5,000 people spread across several islands. In a place like that, a distillery is never just a production site. It’s an employer, a visitor attraction, a point of local pride, and a brand carrying the name of the islands outward.
That does not mean jobs are easy to fill. The Outer Hebrides has surprisingly low unemployment, so North Uist has had to make itself genuinely attractive as an employer. Pay, flexibility, equity, culture, and the broader purpose of the business all matter. As a B Corp and carbon-neutral business, that wider responsibility is not just window dressing. It is part of how the company thinks about team, community, and place.
Nunton Steadings and the building that talks back
The current home of North Uist Distillery is Nunton Steadings, a historic site with roots stretching back centuries. It had served many roles over time: agricultural building, community space, café, wedding venue, radio station, storage space, and even home to a coffin maker. By the time North Uist acquired it in 2020, it needed care.
Jonny described their role less as owners than custodians. That distinction matters. They kept the name Nunton Steadings because the building had an identity long before the distillery arrived, and it will keep one long after.
Of course, old stone buildings do not care about your process flow diagrams.
The distillery space was small, low, and never designed for modern whisky production. Fitting in a half-ton mash setup, wooden washbacks, a 3,000-liter wash still, and a 2,000-liter spirit still required a bit of mechanical origami. The stills are squat, the lyne arms are downward-facing, and parts of the setup had to work with the roofline rather than against it.
That could be viewed as compromise. Here, it becomes character.
The building has a say in the whisky.
Bere barley and whisky from the island, not just on the island
One of the clearest points of identity for North Uist is bere barley.
Bere is an ancient barley landrace still grown in a handful of places, especially Orkney and the Outer Hebrides. It is low yielding compared with modern varieties, but it is well suited to difficult island conditions: short growing seasons, wind, marginal soils, salinity, and the broader realities of Atlantic agriculture. In Uist, it never fully disappeared because crofters continued growing it, mostly for animal feed.
That gives North Uist an unusual opportunity. They are not asking farmers to abandon a familiar crop in favor of a romantic but impractical experiment. They are taking something already embedded in local agricultural life and redirecting some of it into whisky.
The spent grain then returns as feed, closing part of the loop. The cows get their meal back, now warm and protein-rich, which is a decent upgrade by any standard.
Jacob’s background makes this even more interesting. Before joining North Uist, he worked at Dornoch Distillery, where older barley varieties, long fermentations, and flavor-forward production were central to the approach. At North Uist, bere becomes part of a broader malt bill rather than a novelty. The goal is not simply to say “we used heritage grain.” It is to build flavor from different varieties and make the barley choices matter in the glass.
The malting shed and closing the circle
The next major step is malting on site.
North Uist plans to build a traditional floor malting setup capable, at least theoretically, of producing all the malt the distillery needs. In practice, the picture is more complicated. Growing all the necessary bere on Uist would require a stronger supply chain for harvesting, drying, and storage. Weather, geese, yield, and logistics all have a vote.
Still, the direction is clear. Grow locally where possible, work with crofters, use bere as the common thread, and supplement with other heritage varieties grown elsewhere when needed.
That is where the “field-to-bottle” idea starts to become more than a nice phrase. Local grain, malted on site, mashed and fermented in the old steadings, distilled under a roof that shaped the equipment, matured on the island, bottled by the same team. It is hard to get much more literal than that without buying a tractor.
Long fermentations, wooden washbacks, and new make with room to grow
North Uist is aiming for a robust, complex spirit, and the process reflects that.
Fermentations are long, typically built around a 48-hour yeast-driven phase followed by additional bacterial and wild yeast activity that can stretch total fermentation to around a week. Wooden washbacks add another layer, not just visually but microbiologically. The goal is sweetness, oiliness, texture, and enough structure for the spirit to develop over time.
That last part matters. A young distillery needs whisky that can taste good relatively early, but not one that peaks too soon. Jacob talked about wanting a spirit with space in it: something enjoyable young, but still capable of evolving at ten years and beyond.
That balance is difficult. Too delicate, and the wood takes over. Too heavy, and the whisky may never quite open up. North Uist seems to be aiming for the middle path: enough character to carry the whisky, enough room for cask and time to do their work.
Casks, cool warehouses, and Atlantic maturation
The first cask release gives a good sense of demand. Sixty casks sold out in under ninety seconds, helped by the community and customer base built through gin. That kind of response would be impressive anywhere. For a small island distillery, it says quite a bit.
The founder casks are stored on site in converted stables, while additional stock is kept elsewhere on the island. The maturation environment is exactly what you would expect from the Outer Hebrides: cool, damp, steady, and shaped by salty Atlantic air.
This is not Kentucky-style heat cycling. There will not be dramatic seasonal expansion and contraction driving rapid oak extraction. Instead, the whisky should develop slowly, with oxidation, integration, and texture doing more of the work. First-fill bourbon casks are currently important, but refill wood will become part of the picture as well, allowing more spirit-forward character to come through.
That makes sense for a distillery putting so much effort into barley and fermentation. If you spend that much time building the spirit, you probably don’t want the cask to shout over it.
Peat, but not copy-paste island peat
North Uist has also begun producing peated spirit, though it will not dominate the make. The likely split is roughly 70% unpeated, with peated production done in blocks.
That choice is important because the islands already have strong associations with peat. It would be easy, maybe too easy, to lean into that expectation. Instead, Jacob and Jonny are still working out what their peated character should be.
The point is not simply to make “another island peated whisky.” There is already a distillery nearby producing peated whisky, and Scotland is not exactly short of smoke. North Uist wants a profile that belongs to them, shaped by their grain, their cuts, their equipment, and their place.
For now, peated malt is sourced rather than produced on site. Adding peat smoke to their future maltings would require extra design, expense, and complexity, especially for a relatively small portion of production. That may change someday, but it is not the immediate plan.
Gin, whisky, and friendly island gravity
It would be easy to treat gin as the prelude and whisky as the main act, but that undersells what Downpour has done for North Uist.
The gin built the company. It funded growth, brought people into the story, created international attention, and helped establish the distillery as more than a theoretical whisky project. It also gave North Uist room to learn how to make, sell, and represent a spirit tied to place.
There is obvious overlap with Isle of Harris, another Hebridean gin success story, and there is room for friendly comparison. But North Uist’s approach has its own weight: bigger botanical concentration, citrus-forward structure, Hebridean heather, and a deliberate choice to make a gin that stands up to tonic rather than politely dissolving into it.
That confidence has carried into whisky.
Whisky made by people, not just equipment
One of the things I appreciated most in this conversation was the emphasis on distillers being visible.
Jonny has said before that distillers should be front and center in marketing and visitor experience, and it is easy to see why. When a distiller explains why a lyne arm angles the way it does, why a fermentation runs long, why a particular barley matters, or why a cask sits where it sits, the story becomes less abstract.
That is especially true at North Uist because so much of the process is still manual, intimate, and responsive. Production can vary slightly day by day based on manual controls, weather, decision-making, and seasonal conditions. That variability is not a defect. It is part of the fingerprint.
What North Uist is really building
North Uist is still early in its whisky life. The first spirit is not yet fully mature, the malting shed is still becoming reality, and the exact long-term house style is still being shaped cask by cask.
But the foundation is unusually coherent.
A local grain with real agricultural history. A historic building that physically shapes the equipment. Long fermentations and wooden washbacks. Island maturation. A proven gin business. A community that has been involved from the start. A team that seems comfortable letting the place influence the spirit rather than forcing the spirit into a prewritten style.
That is the exciting part.
North Uist is not just making whisky in the Outer Hebrides. They are trying to make whisky that needs the Outer Hebrides to exist.
North Uist Distillery
Website: https://www.northuistdistillery.com/
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@northuistdistillery
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/north-uist-distillery/
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Thanks for Listening
Thanks to Jonny and Jacob for joining me, and thanks to Shona MacLeod and the Isle of Harris team for the introduction.
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