【Exclusive Interview】David Ferguson-Lochlea Distillery

In the middle of Ayrshire, Scotland, surrounded by cows, Lochlea farm made a big decision in 2015 to shift its cow breeding business to something else by starting to grow 50 acres of barleys on their field. With its construction ending in 2018, Lochlea Distillery officially started its unique journey as distillery which produces 100% of their own barley, on top of sourcing all of their ingredients locally. With its tireless devotion towards local production and pride, in the near future, Lochlea plans to complete the whole malting process at the site by itself to complete the entire whisky production within the distillery.

We have interviewed David Ferguson, Commercial Director of the Lochlea Distillery, to reveal their true passion and pride in refining their own Single malt.

The Basic Information of Lochlea Distillery

 

Distillery	Lochlea Distillery
Owner	Neil McGeoch
Location	Lochlea Farm, Craigie, Kilmarnock KA1 5NN, United Kingdom
Year of Establishment	2018
Website	Lochlea Distillery
Contact	Email:info@lochleadistillery.com Telephone:01668 281554
Social Media	Instagram:@lochleawhisky Facebook:@lochleawhisky X:@LochleaWhisky

About David Ferguson

Past career and experiences

Dear WHISKY：
Where are you from originally?

David：
I actually grew up around here, but then I moved away for a while. And when I got this job I moved back to where I’m from. I have a young family so they’re close to grandparents and everything. It’s worked out well.

Dear WHISKY：
What brought you into whisky industry?

David：
I loved whisky, I was a whisky enthusiast long before I was working in the industry. It all began when I went to the whisky festival with my father when I was younger. I just loved the story behind everything and the history of the whisky. So I always loved whisky, but it wasn’t until I was a little older that I realized you could also have a career in it. Therefore, I started searching for such a job and, Douglas Lang, they were good enough to give me my first opportunity.

Dear WHISKY：
At the times at Douglas Lang, were you also in sales division?

David：
Yes. So for them, I covered the UK sales, then progressed into export markets, and worked my way up there. I learned a lot from all the people that I worked with at Douglas Lang.

Dear WHISKY：
What did you do after working at Douglas Lang?

David：
I worked for a Japanese company ”Beam Suntory” mainly involved in casks sales. So I was working with all of the Scotch distilleries, the bourbon distilleries in Kentucky, and three of the Japanese distilleries there. The first side was to evaluate the casks and buy them from the distilleries. One of the other parts of the role was selling the casks from Beam Suntory Distilleries.

Dear WHISKY：
Who did you sell those casks to?

David：
Mostly towards other distilleries. Back then I actually sold a lot of Laphroaig casks to Lochlea, which was how I came to know about the brand. That’s where Lochlea get the peated stock from; those ex-laphroaig barrels. I met John, our Production Manager a few times during that period. It’s a small world in whisky.

Dear WHISKY：
What are your roles here at Lochlea?

David：
My title is Commercial Director, so I’m on the board. Basically, I manage anything that is not production. We have John, the production director, me, the commercial director, these are the two sides of the business, but we all work very closely together.

Dear WHISKY：
When do you mostly work?

David：
The distillery operates Monday to Friday and I work all the time. We are a small company so everyone does extra. But it’s good to some extent, working a lot makes you feel very close to the brand and create a good atmosphere. Everyone’s really bought in.

Dear WHISKY：
How different is it to work for a smaller start-up company like Lochlea compared to working for a larger scale companies such as Suntory?

David：
Although I think there are benefits to both, start-ups like Lochlea is really good in a lot of ways. You just have a lot more freedom and we can do things very quickly because there are not as many layers.

Dear WHISKY：
What was the most challenging thing you experienced working here so far?

David：
When I joined, there were no customers. We didn’t have any markets. So I had to go and present to different importers and explain what Lochlea was going to be, even though there was no bottle or nothing. I had to try and get them involved in the dream that I had and make sure they wanted to join us. The other thing was that the brand didn’t exist. What the logo was going to look like and how we wanted to tell the story, we had to start off from scratch, which is great, but it just takes time and energy.

Dear WHISKY：
How did you overcome those?

David：
We’ve got a really good team. On my commercial side we have a young ambitious group covering Sales, marketing and Logistics. This allows us to spread the work a little bit.

About Lochlea Distillery

Fortunately, we had a chance to talk to Neil McGeoch, the owner and the managing director of the Lochlea Distillery.

Introduction of the distillery

Dear WHISKY：
Why did you choose this place to build a distillery?

Neil：
My family came here in 2006, initially intending to do farming on a small scale. Therefore, they we plenty of cows to take care, and in order to feed them, they had grew barley on the side. However, because cows were too much to take care of, we have decided to move on to something else, which was whisky production.

Dear WHISKY：
How exactly did you approach that?

Neil：
We started to increase the amount of barleys to prepare for the whisky. Because most of the giant companies were buying their malt from various places, we knew that doing everything by ourselves would give us that providence. All while being able to control what barley comes from where and keep low carbon.

Collecting personnel and managing the distillery

Dear WHISKY：
How did you manage to bring such a strong team as a distillery?

Neil：
We were very lucky to have this group of 15 people. Good people bring good people.

Dear WHISKY：
What was the hardest part about establishing this distillery?

Neil：
The first phase is building it which itself is a massive job. You always need a good team to build it. Once you have the building, you need a team to operate it. But to build it, to get all the technical right for the distills, the steam flow, all that is almost quite a specialism in itself. You’ve got to build it, run it, and then all the different bits go onto that.

Dear WHISKY：
Would you say that was the hardest part?

Neil：
Not quite, selling the whisky and building a sales team was. So we bumped into David. Since he was involved in cask sales, he knew about us and quite liked the idea of joining us. Therefore he joined and built a nice team around him to help the sell sidelines. It’s fun. All I wanted was to just make it fun.

Employees

Dear WHISKY：
How did John join this distillery?

David：
John was looking for a change after 27 years at Laphroaig because he wanted to start something new, and Malcolm, who was our first distill manager, was going to take over Rosebank. When Malcolm decided to move to Rosebank, we spoke to John, and he wanted to come over here. So it was perfect timing. The spirit is in good hands.

Dear WHISKY：
What is John in charge of?

David：
He is in charge of whole production process as well as creating the batch of whisky. For each batch, John will normally have four or five recipes. And then, as a team, we all blind taste, nose, and check just like a tasting panel. But at the end of the day, John has the final stamp.

Whisky Production

Source of ingredients

Dear WHISKY：
Where do you source the barley from?

David：
We grow our own barley at the field right next to the distillery. From that 222 acres field, we harvest 600 tons of barley in total, which turns into 200,000 liters of alcohol. As of the type of barley, we use Laureate barley since that strain works well with the weather and environment of the west coast of Scotland.

Dear WHISKY：
Who works at the farm?

David：
We have a separate farmer team aside from the distillery team who helps us in spring when we sow the barley seeds. They also come back in August for harvesting.

Choice of unique malting process

Dear WHISKY：
Why did you choose to do Floor malting, despite its hard labor?

David：
We work with John Campbell, who’s the former Laphroig with 30 years of experience in floor malting. So he is used to doing that. Ultimately, we want to do everything on one site. Right now, malting is the only part of the process that we don’t do 100%. But we want doing everything on site to be the Lochlea story. Everything from the field to the casks to the bottle should all happen at Lochlea.

Dear WHISKY：
Why do you put so much devotion into the malting process?

David：
Once we have the malting all here, Lochlea would be unique in the scotch industry. There are some distilleries like Springbank where they do malting but they don’t grow all their own barley. There are others like Kilchoman as well, where they grow some of their barley for their one product. However, we would be the only distillery growing everything, malting everything, making it, and maturing it. As a new brand distillery, we want that to be our story and legacy.

Cask selection

Dear WHISKY：
Where are most of your casks from? 

David：
In total, Lochlea use 26 different cast types and still experimenting a lot because Lochlea’s spirit is only five years old. We have yet to figure out which casks work best. For example these wine casks are from France, french red wine. Because France is fairly close, we buy casks on our own, without a cooperage in between. That way we are able to get fresher casks in fairly smaller amounts, allowing us to try out some more casks and experiment.

Dear WHISKY：
What made you care so much about the cask? 

David：
We’re trying to future-proof the brand in a lot of ways. So first of all, first-fill bourbons are all from Makers Mark. Even with the bourbons, we trialed a few different types because the age of the bourbon, the mash bill, and everything had an effect on that cask. Hence, we want to ensure we’re picking the suitable types of wood that work for Lochlea. It’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with others, but for our spirit, Makers Mark are the ones that work best.

Dear WHISKY：
What makes this cask selection process so important? 

David：
As a young distillery, buying very high-quality wood is crucial. We spend so much time on the production side. If we then filled casks that wasn’t the best, the whole thing will fall apart. So cask selection is a critical stage where John, the Production Director, Darren, the Production Supervisor, and myself are always talking about cask types and quality to make sure we’re getting the best.

Bottling process

Dear WHISKY：
When do you know that the casks are ready to be bottled?

David：
Our Production Manager, John Campbell hand selects each casks and nose, taste, them to select the batch. As you can see all these casks out on the floor, John usually just sits here and put together a small volume, like a recipe and share it with us.

Lochlea Distillery’s’ philosophy

Dear WHISKY：
Why did Lochlea decide to do everything locally?

David：
When our owner, Neil wanted to start the local distillery and then the more that we talked about it, the brand people and customers kept comparing us to Spring Bank or Kilchoman and other farm-type distilleries. Therefore, we thought actually we should do everything here. That was the evolution of the brand that we would progress towards doing everything in one site. So we’re getting close now.

Dear WHISKY：
What is the strength of having everything in one site?

David：
Having traceability through everything. So knowing where all the ingredients come from will help as the brand grows, because many consumers want to know where the barley came from, and where the water came from.

Dear WHISKY：
Aside from having better traceability and transparency, what other merit is there?

David：
For me, it gives Lochlea the actual spirit and gives it a unique flavor. Vast majority of bigger distilleries are buying their malt from the same company or they’re buying their casks from the same Cooperage. This means that those spirits and finished products are similar in some ways. For us, we are the only distillery that uses Lochlea barley. We are the only distillery that does our own floor malting and we’re the only ones that use Lochlea water. So it just makes us have our own path.

Cask scheme

Dear WHISKY：
Does Lochlea have the private cask scheme?

David：
Yes, we did a very small batch of casks last year. We sold 50 casks in total, but the waiting list had over 1000 people. Therefore it ended up going as first-come-first-serve. We might do another small quantity next year.

Dear WHISKY：
How much are the cask?

David：
The bourbons were about 4,000 pounds for the 200 liter cask and the Sherry’s were about 6,000 pounds for the Hogsheads, around 250-300 liter capacity. We didn’t want it to be out of reach for people.

Dear WHISKY：
How is the cask club atmosphere like?

David：
The cask club is great, we are grateful that many people are wanting to join us on the journey, we have got an ambassadors for life. Once in a while, we have a day specifically for the cask owners, where they all get invited and we conduct lots of tastings. They will have a chance to try out John’s sample straight from casks and get a picture with their own casks.

Dear WHISKY：
Are the owners mainly from local areas?

David：
We had many locals from here, but many of them were from all over the world.

New releases and vatting

Dear WHISKY：
What would your next batch look like?

David：
It will be all first fill, and it’s just over five years old. Planning to release next spring, this will be the third edition of the sowing. When we sow the barley seed, we release a really vibrant fresh whisky early in the year. The label will be green in color, but this isn’t even bottled or anything, it’s just the first sample. It’s like an undiluted version of “Our Barley”. Only bourbon cask, and we don’t add any coloring or chill filters, so it’s natural.

Dear WHISKY：
Will those seasonal releases be available in Japan?

David：
Our core product, “Our barley” is available, that’s the ongoing product. Then the Harvest edition and the Cask Strength also became available. Until we have age statement whiskies, “Our Barley” would be a core product. We’ve also got these small-batch seasonal releases; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each matured in, bourbon, port, sherry, and peat for distinct characters.

Dear WHISKY：
What is your favorite Lochlea whisky?

David：
I love everything from Lochlea, but I especially like the Cask Strength. I think it shows all the Lochlea flavors, the fruit, the cereal, but it’s just amped up to 60.1%, so quite strong.

Marketing Strategies

Bottle designs

Dear WHISKY：
Who designed the uniquely shaped bottle?

David：
We decided as a team. We wanted the glass to be bespoke and unique to Lochlea. So we worked with an Italian glass manufacturer and came up with the design. We have a lot of bars over here in this area, where once they’ve finished a bottle, they use those like a water jug. So for our bottle, after using it as a whisky bottle, you can rinse labels off and just have a nice decanter. It also would look great at the back bar, with down lighting or lights from beneath, they all shine through the glass.

Dear WHISKY：
How about the label designs?

David：
For the label, we wanted it to be relatively clean, so just the Barley logo, the name of this product, and nothing else. On the back, we’ve only got tasting notes. There are a lot of whisky labels, I think, that has too much writings, a lot of words. Then, we wanted to try and make this stand out a little bit.

Future  Prospects

Dear WHISKY：
Who do you aim to target as the customer the most?

David：
Right now, we are in 26 different countries. Next year we’ll move into some more, but the most significant market for us is Japan, the US, Germany, and France. There’s probably a top five or six that we are focusing on. However, I understand that there’s lots of opportunities in the countries that we haven’t even had any presence in yet.

Dear WHISKY：
What are the future prospects for the Lochlea Distillery?

David：
When we’re in the warehouse, we have already determined the casks that are going into Lochlea 30-year-old and we have four other age statements planned. Between now and then, we’re utilizing seasonal limited editions to get people try our liquid. When we have numbers on bottles in the next two or three years, those will become an actual core range of ours. It might be that we have “Our Barley”, but on top of that, we have Lochlea 10-year-old, sherry edition or peated version and everything becomes like a family. These are great just to let people chart the progress and try. Because we keep getting better every time we do a batch, we want the brand to be known for that quality.

At Last

Although it is a very young distillery, Lochlea Distillery already has fans worldwide waiting for its single malt to evolve further over time as they claim that “we keep getting better every time we do a batch.” Considering how eager they are to complete the whole malting process on their site, Lochlea Distillery’s whisky would undoubtedly develop to another level, as John, the floor malting expert, will utilize his knowledge and experience to its best. By committing everything towards utilizing local ingredients and devoting so much on completing whole whisky making process on one single site, Lochlea is building their legacy and whisky history at once. This would make Lochlea a truly one-of-a-kind distillery with a combination of tradition, thorough transparency, and environmental sustainability.