First look inside Eden Mill Distillery

The Scotsman

03/02/2025

First look inside Eden Mill Distillery, St Andrews.

Transcript

00:00Thanks for joining us.

00:01I'm your host, Dan Smith.

00:02I'll see you next time.

00:03Thanks for listening to Cognitively Translating.

00:04I'm your host, Dan Smith.

00:05I'll see you next time.

00:31We've just, obviously, been in to see our new distillery here in our home, St Andrews.

00:35We'll have a visitor experience here, which will include tours, retail, and a bar on the

00:41top floor.

00:42And combined with that, we'll have whisky and gin tours available to the public, and

00:47give people that full experience, as well as having a cask store on site, which will

00:51house the first 300 casks that we fill at our new distillery.

00:54We're on track to start filling our first cask in the middle of March, so we're really

00:59excited to get that underway as soon as possible.

01:02Sustainability is a core part of our business and part of our brand values, so we've partnered

01:07with MyAlgae, who will use our effluent from our whisky process in producing sustainable

01:13omega-3.

01:14We're obviously on the Eden campus of the University of St Andrews, so all the power

01:19to the building will come from a combination of their own solar farm just behind us here.

01:23And if there's not enough power from that, we'll then flip over to renewable tariff on

01:26the grid.

01:27And we've also put in place CO2 capture from our fermenters for future capture of that

01:32CO2 further down the line.

01:34We're hopeful that we'll be open to the public this summer, so our target for that is early

01:38July, that we want the visitor centre open and operational.

01:42It's been a fantastic journey.

01:43I mean, it's not very often you get the opportunity to effectively build a distillery.

01:47And I think, you know, for myself, for the team, it's been so rewarding to be part of

01:51that, and certainly in this really special area.

01:54To bring it to life now and actually to go from what was an empty shell of a building

01:57and come inside now and see this fantastic visitor centre, fantastic new distillery,

02:01it's really, really special.

02:02We work really closely with a lot of our customers in St Andrews, and on the whisky side as well.

02:08You know, whisky's a big part of the business, but so is gin.

02:10So when we open the new distillery, we'll also make a change to our golf gin, which

02:14will mean that we include Botanicals hand foraged by our head distiller from the old

02:18course in that product, which gives us such a connection to the local area and such a

02:21connection to the most famous course in the world.

02:24We see ourselves with our whisky having a really unique proposition in the sense that

02:27we are from the home of golf.

02:29So that gives us a massive activation platform in what is a hugely growing sport, particularly

02:34in the last four or five years.

02:35So we believe that gives us a point of difference that we can then leverage with consumers all

02:39over the world, whether that's in Asia or the US, who can come to the home of golf,

02:43come and experience our product, come and experience our new distillery.

02:46And we feel we've got an ability to connect to them in a very different way.

02:49So our architect describes the sort of design of the building inside as the sort of Willy

02:53Walker's chocolate factory in the sense that you'll be compressed down into a space and

02:56then you open a door and it sort of just gives vast expansion into the full height of the building.

03:00I'm Euan Cunningham and I am the Brand Homes Manager at Eden Mill.

03:04The private cast programme at Eden Mill St Andrews represents a unique opportunity for

03:08individuals and groups of individuals from all over the world to own something very unique

03:14from St Andrews, a big part of Scotch whisky history.

03:18And finally have their own bottling from St Andrews.

03:21We've sold around 550 casks.

03:24This year we still have around 80 casks left to sell and there will be a further release in 2026.

03:31The distillery itself will house our first 300 casks.

03:36The majority of these have already been sold.

03:39People who own a cask that will be held in the distillery will have the unique opportunity

03:44to come to the distillery and come visit their cask themselves and sample their cask.

03:49We have a 15,000 litre wash still and an 11,500 litre spirit still.

03:54The stills have been designed in such a way to create a spirit that will be very unique to us.

03:59So by regionality we are a lowland distillery.

04:02Our spirit will be a combination of lowland and highland style spirit.

04:08And we've designed our spirit still to give us a much more robust spirit but still maintaining

04:13the core flavour profile of our 100% Fife malted barley.

04:17So it's an onion shaped spirit still with a boil ball so it actually creates a bit of reflux.

04:24So you increase the copper contact with the spirit and that gives us that robust spirit

04:29that will hold up really well to sherry cast maturation which will form a core part of our maturation programme.

04:35We've always been quite an innovative experimental distillery.

04:39We focus on the quality of wood. Primarily we will use first of all bourbon and first of all sherry casks.

04:46But we'll also experiment with a lot of other different wood maturations.

04:50And that's the exciting part for the distillers is getting to create all different styles of maturations.

04:57But we will focus on the bourbon and the sherry primarily.

05:00They always say that the tourists will come for the golf and stay for the whisky.

05:04And my job will be to ensure that we have a five star luxury experience in our brand home.

First look inside Eden Mill Distillery

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