Steven Kersley faces an interesting conundrum. Not only does he need a name for a distillery, but also one for a whisky brand.
The BrewDog Distilling Company’s managing director’s distillery is owned by one of the world’s largest beer businesses, which employs 2,600 staff, turns over £353 million a year, and runs more than 100 bars, having made a name for itself through marketing stunts that included driving a tank through London, dropping stuffed ‘fat cats’ from a helicopter over the Bank of England, and selling super-strength beer bottled inside taxidermy squirrels and stoats. Yet will that same BrewDog brand appeal to whisky drinkers?
“Probably not,” muses Kersley as he leads the way through the distillery, which sits next to BrewDog’s massive brewery and head office at Ellon, a half hour’s drive north of Aberdeen, Europe’s oil capital, and Scotland’s third-largest city. He is still mulling over names for the whisky brand, but he knows he wants the distillery’s name to reflect its innovative nature.
Standing in the still room, one wall of the industrial unit is dominated by a massive, colourful mural that features squirrels, deer, and other woodland creatures frolicking among the trees. Yet it is the collection of stills in front of the mural that really catches the eye.
It looks like nothing else in Scotland; an array of pot and column stills allows Kersley to produce spirits ranging from whisky, rum, and Tequila through to gin and vodka. While some craft distilleries manage such feats on a small scale, BrewDog’s apparatus elevates it to another level, with a 20-metre rectifying column sitting in a tower alongside the stillhouse.
Founded in 2007 by school friends Martin Dickie and James Watt, BrewDog began life as just another Scottish craft beer brewery, on an industrial estate in the fishing port of Fraserburgh, 40 minutes further north of Ellon. Before setting up the business, Dickie studied brewing and distilling on the world-famous course at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and worked in breweries and distilleries, while Watt gave up a job as a trainee solicitor to become a fishing trawler captain. They made home brew in their spare time and took it to London, where noted beer writer Michael Jackson advised them to give up their day jobs.
Covering the company for the business pages in The Scotsman newspaper, those initial stories I wrote revolved around the usual fare for any small enterprise, from lending deals with banks through to nascent successes in export markets. The stories about the eye-catching marketing stunts usually got snapped up by the news pages.
BrewDog’s early days included pioneering the crowdfunding model, selling shares through its ‘Equity for Punks’ scheme. The brewery moved to its current home in Ellon in 2012, and has expanded three times on the same site, which also includes an impressive tap room, attracting BrewDog fans from around the globe.
In 2017 that rapid rise was cemented when the company sold a 22 per cent stake for £213 million to private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners. The involvement of private equity has stoked talk of an initial public offering to float the business on a stock market — the ultimate form of crowdfunding.
While BrewDog forged its name through beer, whisky was right there in its genesis. “Martin has built one of the most successful beer brands in the UK in recent years, but his passion was always whisky,” explains Kersley. “He went to Heriot-Watt to become a distiller, not a brewer — it just so happened he made a good job of making beer.”
The Lone Wolf distillery, as BrewDog’s distilling arm was initially known — a name still used for its gin brand — was opened in 2015, with the first stills sitting in the corner of a warehouse. Kersley joined the project that same year, following a career at Diageo, Scotland’s largest whisky maker, working at distilleries including Teaninich at Alness, north of Inverness, where he was the site manager, having studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow before completing his master’s degree in brewing and distilling at Heriot-Watt. The first casks were filled in 2017.
Today, Kersley runs the distilling business, which moved into its current building in 2023, while Dickie works across the entire BrewDog group, although he remains heavily involved in the whisky. Growing up around his uncle’s Aberdeenshire barley farm, and spending time at Highland Park’s distillery when visiting relatives on Orkney, whisky was a formative presence in Dickie’s life.
“That passion for whisky has never left him,” says Kersley. “Martin and I both love whisky, we were both at Heriot-Watt to learn to make whisky, we both worked in different capacities in the whisky industry beforehand. I worked as a tour guide at Oban during my summers home from university, while he was working in the warehouses at Huntly for Duncan Taylor.”
Dickie now has his own farm, where he has grown grains including rye and barley, ranging from Laureate and Concerto through to Maris Otter and Golden Promise. In the future, Kersley aims for the distillery to use grain from Dickie’s site — which also includes a pioneering vertical farm, growing salad greens and herbs — and conduct experiments with malt.
Kersley’s sense of innovation and experimentation is reflected throughout the production process, from the design of the distillery’s array of stills through to harnessing BrewDog’s expertise in milling, mashing, and fermentation, including being the only distillery in Scotland with access to both a mash filter and a lauter tun. The wort flows through a pipe from the brewery across the road to the distillery for fermentation.
Over the years, Kersley has conducted trials to combine standard M-strain yeast with other ones — including those used for red wine, Cognac, and rum — to study flavours. He also sterilises his wort. “Traditional fermentation means lactic acid bacteria can run wild in your fermentation, and we can lose control of the desired flavour development,” he says. “I want all of our flavour to be derived from the hard work of the yeast, amazing long-chain esters, and controlling the environment it’s working in to ensure no off-flavours are created.”
Innovation continues in a specially designed warehouse, where the temperature and humidity is controlled to replicate different geographies.
“The temperature can reach 26°C, with humidity of 75 to 80 per cent, so when you walk in it’s like walking off a plane in Florida — the humidity hits you square in the face,” grins Kersley. As whisky production expands, traditional warehouses are also being built, but he expects most of his mix of bourbon and oloroso sherry-seasoned casks will spend some time in the special atmosphere.
When it comes to those casks, being owned by a massive brewer did not insulate the distillery from recent rising prices. “From the outside, people think we must have endless financial resources, but that’s not the case — while our business is part of the BrewDog family, we still have to earn our stripes,” says Kersley. “We have the backing of the business, but it’s built on merit, so we have to make sure that the core underlying performance of vodka, gin, rum, Tequila, cocktails is sound — if they’re not performing then it’s hard to justify the investment in wood or the other costs that go into making whisky.”
Growing into such a large business has come with stumbles along the way. In 2021, a group of former employees wrote an open letter criticising a “culture of fear” in the company and “toxic attitudes” to junior workers. Unite, the trade union, branded Watt as “one of the most unscrupulous bosses we have ever dealt with”, and blasted the company for shifting from the voluntary Real Living Wage to the statutory living wage and minimum wage.
In May 2024, Watt stood down as BrewDog’s chief executive, and was replaced by James Arrow, who had joined from Boots Opticians in September 2023 as chief operating officer (COO), with former Asda and Pandora boss Allan Leighton having joined as chair in 2021. Has Watt’s departure changed the culture?
“A lot of what he was doing in the months or even year prior to that was getting things to the point where he could step down, with James Arrow coming into the business initially as COO and then stepping up to chief executive, and so it was a seamless transition,” says Kersley. “Our culture within our distilling team is founded on a huge respect for the spirit we create and for all those who contribute to making it.”
The usual yardstick for craft distilleries is the number of litres of pure alcohol (LPA) they produce each year, but the capacity question is a difficult one for Kersley, because production flexes, depending on demand for each spirit. He expects that his team — which now consists of 12 people, with operators working two nine-hour shifts five days a week — will produce around 150,000LPA of whisky each year as it approaches the release of its first Scotch.
That day is creeping closer. Kersley expects BrewDog’s first whisky to hit the shelves in 2026. The pressure is on to find the right name that reflects the distillery’s sense of innovation while appealing to whisky drinkers.
