Notes and Reviews for Whiskey Ring Podcast Episode 201: Holyrood Distillery with Co-Founder Rob Carpenter & Distillery Manager Calum Rae

Holyrood Distillery straddles multiple lines in its identity. It’s a Scotch distillery that functions - production- and marketing-wise - more like a “new world” distillery. It’s in the Lowlands and embraces that geographic marker, but also challenges what “Lowland” means as a flavor profile. They’ll never have a core range (or will they?) or a distillery profile. They opened to the public in July 2019 in a building so close to their neighbors they can see each other cutting the grass, and despite COVID and being an urban distillery in every sense of the word, they’re one of the most visited visitor centers in Scotland after just a few years and a handful of releases.

On this episode, I’m joined by Rob Carpenter, co-founder (with his wife, Kelly, and David Robertson, former Master Distiller at The Macallan) and Calum Rae, Distiillery Manager. Rob founded the Canadian chapter of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in 2011 before jumping to Scotland and founding the distiillery in 2015. Calum joined in 2019, working his way up the ranks.

Holyrood is the first distillery in Edinburgh in the modern era. Grain whisky producer North British has been around since 1885, and was for many decades the only distillery operating in Edinburgh proper.

In many ways, Holyrood’s trajectory follows that of recent guest White Peak Distillery: Edinburgh is a major beer town, with a few dozen breweries scattered around the city. Holyrood leans into this hard, playing with specialty malts and yeasts. As of this interview (August 2025), they’d tried around 28 malt varieties and somewhere between 50-100 yeasts. Some yeasts have worked out great, some not. My favorite example: champagne yeast produced the most delicious spirit they’ve ever made (according to Rob and Calum), but it also was so aggressive that it ate the yeasts it was pitched with. So….some yeasts don’t play nicely in the sandbox is the lesson of today.

The releases I got to taste and review were Ambir and Embra, the current releases that are as close to a core range as Holyrood will get, I suspect. The Ambir is a celebration of malt, containing chocolate malt, Vienna malt, Crystal 240, and Caramalt. The Embra showcases their playful use of yeasts, with seven strains included on what is otherwise going to be recognized more for being a moderately peated pour.

Holyrood does something I love that few distilleries do: full-on information overload, should you choose to look for it. If you click on the links above for each of those products, you’ll see the malt percentages, yeast percentages, and barrel makeup. The only brands doing it this well are Compass Box and, if you don’t count the fact they’re in receivership, Waterford. This is a whisky made by whisky geeks, and while you don’t have to be one to enjoy it, it enhances the enjoyment for those of us that are.

Something else that makes them truly unique, as in I don’t know another place doing this to this extent unique: they have eight different types of new make for sale at the distillery.

What?

Think about how many distilleries you’ve visited. Now think about how many have let you taste new make, let alone buy it. Now think about how many sell new make/white dog/insert colloquialism here in their gift shop or in stores. Final question: how many of those sell more than one?

For Holyrood, the cask isn’t the answer. The idea that anywhere from 50-90% of a whisky’s final flavor comes from the cask is more an admission that you’re hoping the cask will provide flavor to a flavorless spirit or fix something in your new make you wouldn’t share with the public. Holyrood takes the opposite stance, that what goes into a barrel should be as flavorful as possible, and the barrel’s influence should complement the new make, not hide or fix it. There’s more nuance to this, of course, and we get into it in the interview, but that’s the gist of their thought process.

So, to make good new make, they have a general recipe - again, it’s not a house style of flavor, but as Rob put it, more a house style of thinking. First, think about the flavor you want to create - are you thinking about pastries, vanilla, fresh bourbon casks with summer berries? Then go with a malt bill close to what they did for Ambir. What yeasts will produce those esters? Do you want to focus on beer yeasts, wine, bread, distiller’s, something else? Do you use Chevalier barley, a favorite of Holyrood’s that doesn’t give a ton of flavor or yield but brings tremendous texture (and was the standard in brewing and distilling between ~1850s-1920s)? Does your new make then have the flavor profile you want? Great - now think about what casks will highlight those flavors and develop them further, adding esterification and oxidation that can only occur in the cask.

Confused? Maybe you ended up with six malts and three yeasts, or four malts and seven yeasts, who knows. In 2022 alone, the Holyrood team tried 99 recipes, a new one every three to four days on average (and keep in mind, they’re in a residential area, so they can only operate from 8am to 8pm). Calum says they’ve cut that down quite a bit, but all that data they have already accumulated and the data they continue to collect from each project is in a central location; chances are they’ve tried the experiment you want to try. Hell, they’ve distilled cloudy and clear wort and sold them side by side for patrons to taste (the cloudy was more expensive, and you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out why).

The last point I want to highlight is their work with Heriot-Watt and the practical academia side of things. With their malt partner, Crisp Maltings, Holyrood has co-sponsored a Ph.D. for Marc Watson, former Distillery and Operations Manager for them. He’s studying the contributions of different malts throughout the whisky-making process. It’s unclear whether he’ll come back to the ditsillery after his studies, but his work at Holyrood certainly informed what he’s studying. And that data Holyrood is collecting? I asked if one day it will become available to the public or at least the academics and fellow producers. They were coy at first, but ultimately said yes, it’ll likely be released in some way. Given their desire to explore as many experiments as possible, I can see why at least for now things will be kept close to the chest. I’m also thrilled to hear that they’re willing to show their work - not that there was any doubt - for others to replicate or expand upon.

Some of the team come from the academic side, some from the whisky conosseuir side, some from the production side, but they’re all working in the same direction: make Edinburgh whisky the way they want to, redefine what it means to be Edinburgh whisky, and be a beacon for whisky newbies and whisky nerds alike.

I don’t know about you, but I think they’re doing a damn fine job.