Tag: Borders Distillery

Visiting Scotland when your partner doesn’t like whisky

When planning a whisky trip to Scotland, most keen whisky tourists typically plan their itinerary by plotting out the key distilleries they want to visit, and then they crudely join the dots by shoehorning in the requirements and logistics of accommodation, transport, and food.  That’s all well and good but, as you quickly discover, distillery tours and visiting times are generally condensed between the hours of 10.00am and 4.00pm – leaving you with some blanks to fill in your days.  Also, as we explored in this article here (scroll down to point no. 7), trying to get your various distillery tours aligned without clashes or overlaps is a tough challenge.  Another consideration is that – as a very general generalisation – it would be fair to say that most whisky enthusiasts who would plan such a dedicated whisky pilgrimage to Scotland often have partners that don’t share a love of whisky to quite the same level of fanaticism. 

Accordingly, when planning a trip to Scotland with your partner, you’ll often need to incorporate stops, side-excursions, and other attractions to keep your other half happy….and not sentence them to the drudgery of sitting in the distillery car park while you’re inside having fun.   To keep the mood happy between the two of you as you traverse around the country, here are some worthwhile destinations, attractions, and other things to do in Scotland that are all near distilleries or that you’ll pass through as you hop from distillery to distillery….

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The challenges of starting a new whisky brand

When new businesses are founded and launched, there are numerous financial and business models that help get the product to market.  There might be schemes to raise capital; funds assigned to support marketing and promotion; and then comes the down-and-dirty process of actually selling the goods.  It’s obviously a very diverse and varied minefield to tread.  If you’re wondering how to start a new whisky brand, or even how to start a new whisky distillery, the minefield is particularly tricky to navigate…

The whisky industry is an example of a sector where that diversity and variation is most evident:  There are brands and businesses that go large scale and are backed by investors who put up millions of pounds/dollars, and there are – quite genuinely – “mums and dads” businesses that are launched off little more than sweat and elbow grease in combination with passion to create a craft, artisan product.  And, in more recent times, there are distilleries that get established off the back of crowdfunding or barrel investment schemes – with mixed degrees of success.

William Grant and his wife
William Grant and his wife.  Were the challenges of establishing a whisky distillery and brand much different in 1887 to today?

A question often pondered is whether or not the process of getting a whisky business off the ground is easier or harder than it was in the past?   There’s a multitude of different factors and considerations.  William Grant, together with his family, spent over a year physically building Glenfiddich with his bare hands and started distilling on Christmas Day in 1887 to establish his own brand.  In contrast, if you’re armed with a website, a social media account, and access to some spirit distilled at Cooley, it seems you can quite easily launch an Irish whiskey brand overnight – complete with an impressive backstory!

In the harder basket, distilleries setting up today have planning and environmental controls that their predecessors didn’t have to worry about.  Council and municipal applications and approvals can take years to get through, and the days of casually discharging distillery effluent and by-products back into the river downstream are long behind us.

In the easier basket, as we’ve seen already, the internet and social media marketing means you can broadcast and promote your brand to a wider audience than ever for relatively little money.  Online sales via your own website mean you don’t even have to fight anymore with wholesalers or distributors to get your product on to the shelves of retail liquor outlets.   The days of Tommy Dewar hopping on a ship and spending months sailing around the globe to get sales are also well and truly behind us.

Let’s look at a few distilleries and brands from around the world that have forged very different steps in very different landscapes to see how the process unfolded….

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