You see a picture of Sanday and you think you’re looking at a tropical paradise; white sandy beaches and clear blue water. A course, being one of the outer Orkney islands, just dipping your big toe in the water will instantly confirm you’re not. The island, however, acts like a magnet, attracting certain people. Sebastian Hadfield-Hyde of Kimbland Distillery is no exception to this rule.
You can make whisky the easy way or the hard way. You get a feeling with Sebastian Hadfield-Hyde, director of Kimbland Distillery in Orkney, that he saw the hard way as still being a bit too easy.
For his whisky, he’s using the ancient barley bere – pronounced bear – which has low yields and long weak straw. He believes the whole farming process of bere requires dedication and respect, with part of this meaning the grain grown on his farm does not come in contact with modern machinery.
He’s set up his distillery/farm on Sanday in the Orkney archipelago, making Kimbland the most northerly Scottish whisky distillery in the world. Sanday is over a 10-hour drive – with ferry – to Glasgow. By air, it’s faster and easier to go to Stavanger, Norway, than Heathrow.
While technically he’s not a one-man-band, with his four-person team scattered around the world, including Singapore, he’s a one-man-band in anyone else’s book.
And the fact is, he looks at the whole operation as creating a living sculpture. Visionary and ground breaker – or British eccentric – you decide.
Jewel of the Isles
A course, Sanday was not his first choice. There is another island, a bit further north and uninhabited, that Hadfield-Hyde had his eye on, but so, too, did the local council. It had to be Sanday then, which truth be told, is probably a better fit.
Hadfield-Hyde wanted to start an industry in a dying community – something he would find difficult to do on an uninhabited island – helping to bring in a new wave of people. Already this is happening in Sanday, with it becoming a home to artists, adding to the island’s population of 550.
He wanted his site to be on flat land and within 500 metres of the sea to take advantage of sea spray for his aging whisky casks. The highest point on Sanday is only 65 metres, called The Wart, and being a 12-mile-long island – seldom more than a mile wide – being close to the sea is never a problem.
And here was the clincher. Sanday was once known at the ‘Grainary of Orkney’ due to its dark, rich soil. For well over a thousand years, bere barley and other grains were grown there and transported to the rest of the Orkney archipelago and Scotland. Hadfield-Hyde wasn’t just going to use bere barley for his whisky, he was going to grow it as well. With heritage grain bere being close to an extinct grain, going back to its long-time roots on Sanday only made sense.
While some people think bere has grown on Sanday for a thousand plus years, Hadfield-Hyde sees it being older, much older.
“Bere has grown on Sanday since at least Viking times, but people have lived on Sanday since neolithic times, I think bere has been here for maybe 5,000 years,” he says. “During all that time, bere has adapted to this island, to the soil here, the temperature, even to the natural chemicals – or lack of – like manganese.”
Due to problems with yield, bere hasn’t been grown commercially on Sanday for decades and as of right now, Hadfield-Hyde is the only bere farmer on the island. However, after initial scepticism, some local farmers have told him that they will start planting bere in their fields as well.
While is some ways this all sounds like Hadfield-Hyde has been off with the fairies, even more so when you realise he’s started his distillery career with the same amount of farming experience – zero – he is extremely clued into the fact that over 140 cruise ships visit Sanday every year. That translates to nearly 175,000 tourists, tourists with money in their pockets wanting to buy something local, something that screams heritage. That’s his gin and it’s going to be Kimbland Bere Whisky.
Once the tough times are over, when aged casks become ready for bottling, those local bere farmers will be celebrating every year the day Hadfield-Hyde washed up on their shores.
The Iron Horse
According to Hadfield-Hyde, he believes that the whole process of treating the grain requires dedication and respect. “At no point during its life and processing does the grain grown on the farm come into contact with modern machinery,” he says.
“The most modern pieces of equipment that helps in the cultivation of our barley is our 1944 British Anzani Iron horse plough and our 1945 Lister D stationary engine that drives our threshing machine and Bruiser.”
Other vintage machinery used includes: 1880s seed drill used for sowing the seeds after the soil has been prepared; 1930s reaper binder used for harvesting and binding the barley; 1890s threshing machine used in collaboration with the reaper binder; 1860s hand cranked winnowing machine; and finally a 1890s McGregor grain bruiser used for crushing the malted grain.
“The 1944 Iron Horse was used during the Second World War and the beauty of it is the Iron Horse uses very little fuel. For a whole day I can use two gallons of fuel and not even run it dry. With it I can put on other attachments on it – it is bloody hard work – but you do get in touch with the earth a lot more, you learn a lot more about your land, and I understand now what my grandparents used to say about knowing your land. I’m learning this land a lot more than anyone that sits in some big tractor because I touch it, I feel it. Honestly, I find the stuff that’s in the soil quite remarkable.”
Learning how
Hadfield-Hyde learned about how to farm bere from talking with old farmers who remembered how it was done, that is pretty much how he’s learned to distil as well.
“I give credit to my science teacher when I was very young who taught me the art of distillation. It wasn’t alcohol he was producing, just water, but I still became fascinated by the whole process.”
Like a throwback to some of the gentlemen scientists in the UK’s past, Hadfield-Hyde sees universities as great places to learn somethings, but with working science, that’s something you can learn better by picking other people’s brains, reading, and observing.
“I’ve been in talks with Aaran Distillery because in 2004 they used bere barley. One was aged for four years, one for eight, and another batch for 10 years,” he says.
Aaran Distillery was extremely helpful. Along with putting him in touch with the right people, they let Hadfield-Hyde go through their archives to understand exactly how they used bere.
“They have hands on experience, and I was able to learn from them. At the moment that particular whisky is my favourite. They did very well with it, and it proved to me that I was right about this barley, that I was on the right track,” he says. “I think this is a much better way of learning than sitting down in some course or learning from one person.”
Keeping lights on
Hadfield-Hyde sees his bere whisky requiring 10-years to age properly. He also though has another whisky brand, using barley grown on Sanday which will either be Golden Promise or another heritage-type grain. This whisky he sees being aged for five-years. But, in the meantime he needs a way of generating income.
Like many craft whisky distilleries, while waiting for the whisky to age Hadfield-Hyde is making gin to “keep the light on”. One gin is Sanday No. 1, a sort of liquorice and aniseed-based gin and the second is Nuckelavee Gin, named after a folklore demon and has seaweed and chilli flavourings.
However, if you’re looking to buy any from outside of Sanday or Orkney, this can prove to be a problem. Sanday No. 1 gets a slight mention on the distillery’s website – but not where to buy it – while Distillers can only find Nuckelavee on Kimbland’s Facebook page.
As much as Hadfield-Hyde tries to come across as “everything is fine”, it’s not if a perspective customer can’t find a product with a minute or two search. With the hundreds of gins available, especially in Scotland and the Islands, marketing is one thing that he needs to up his game with.
Working remotel
Thanks to the Covid pandemic, working remotely isn’t seen as being that strange or difficult, but it does seem to be for a distillery. When something happens in a distillery, it tends to call for immediate action. While you might have the sympathy of a workmate who is 8,000 miles away, that doesn’t do you much good if you need an extra set of hands.
“With some over in Singapore, some in the UK, it means I’ve really got 24-hours of somebody always available on the phone, with me being the only one up here in Sanday,” he says. “With so much knowledge between all of them, instead of four, it’s like I have a team of 10.
“With the machines that I have and when they were built, safety wasn’t something thought about so it’s good I have this team which can call emergency services if something happens to me,” he says. But then he admits, it would be nice to have somebody there to pass him a tool or part when he’s working on something.
Drinkers vs investors
While once whisky was made to be drunk, more and more bottles and casks are finding their ways into the hands of investors. And, indeed, some private blenders have told Distillers Journal that it can be at times nearly impossible to find aged casks, investors have bought them up, with these companies shrilling their whisky investing business – and claims of huge profits – on everything from Facebook to The Sun.
With a whisky being as unique as Kimbland, even without tasting a drop it seems like it will be quickly bought up.
“I think it’s inevitable the way things are going at the moment, the way whisky investors are snapping things up,” says Hadfield-Hyde. “I say to any potential whiskey investor, if you’re going to buy a bottle to invest in it, buy two bottles so you can have one to drink.
“Drinking with friends is the best investment you can make with whisky. You can’t take a bottle of whisky with you to your grave, but you can take your memories.”
2023 challenges
Throughout Scotland many distilleries are dependent on visitors, if not to buy whisky at the distillery, to at least become social media ambassadors. But, with Kimbland being a negative carbon distillery, it would seem hard to justify anyone doing the trek to visit.
“At the moment we don’t want any visitors and we’re not set up for any. But Orkney is a major tourist destination. From the harbour records, there are around 170-175 cruise ships to Orkney every year, which is huge number,” he says. “I have actually designed a tourist visitors’ centre, but it won’t be focused on just the distillery.
“There are a lot of artists on the island so it will be a very community-based centre. The three biggest sectors in Orkney right now are farming, renewable energies, and tourism.”
When it comes to challenges, wearing the dual hats of a farmer and distiller puts double the strain on Hadfield-Hyde. Very few distilleries are specific grain dependent. If the barley harvest is low in Scotland, distillers buy it elsewhere. But for Kimbland and Hadfield-Hyde, the barley has to be bere and has to be from Sanday. For him, then, the biggest challenge he’ll be looking at each year is the weather.
Being influenced heavily by the Gulf Stream, there is not a huge change in temperature between winter and summer on Sanday. While bere has been adapting to the short growing season on Sanday for over a thousand years, it still doesn’t take much to throw it all off.
While the growing season is short, bere has been adapting for the season for well over 1,000 years.
“It all depends on the weather, it really does. You know, some years you think that your biggest challenge will be trying to achieve this or getting into this new market, or something like that, and then the weather is bloody off and you can’t get into the fields into May, which leaves you struggling because then you’re harvesting at the end of September or October, which by that stage the winds are coming and you’re losing your crop.
“But that is also one of the reasons why I’m doing everything this way because it’s to be an exclusive whiskey. It’s a whiskey that is to be done with vintages. So, if we get a bad crop one year, there’s going to be less whiskey and certain years will be better than others. I take every year as it comes, as each challenge happens as it happens. Some are, you know, a lot bigger than others.”
Singing the praise of ‘bere juice’
Scotland has had a long love/hate affair with bere. In some ways, the ancient barley is better suited for the islands of Scotland than any other. Simpsons Malt says it is known as a landrace. This is a term given to a species of plant that has developed over time and adapted to its natural and cultural environment.
However, Bruichladdich Distillery which has made a bere whisky in 2006,2008, and 2010, says it is a “nightmare” to work. Peter Martin of the University of the Highlands and Islands and Xianmin Chang at Royal Agricultural University in a joint 2008 paper ‘Bere Whisky – rediscovering the spirit of old barley’, quote Mark Reynier, then CEO of Bruichladdich.
“Basically, it is a nightmare to work with and my colleagues wish we didn’t have to. It is very bulky and blocks up all the machinery. It has terrible yields off the field, disastrously low yields off the still – anyone in their right mind would not do it at all and you can see why it died out.”
But then in referencing the effect of the barley in a bottle of the Bere Barley 2010 whisky, Bruichladdich’s tasting notes say: “This ancient grain yet again confirms our barley exploration is based on distillation for flavour, not yield. This particular vintage has an intensity and range of flavour I have seldom seen before.”
Bere barley is probably Britain’s oldest cereal in continuous commercial cultivation, according to Martin and Chang. It’s a very old type of barley which may have been brought to Britain by the Vikings in the 9th century and has been grown in the north of Scotland down to present times. It was also called “bygge” or “big” which probably originated from “bygg”, the Old Norse for barley. Even Robert Burns gives a nod to the grain in his poem ‘Scotch Drink’ “…I sing the juice Scotch bere can make us, In a glass or jug.”
After its introduction, bere became particularly well-adapted to the north of Britain as successive generations of farmers grew it, probably carefully selecting seeds each year from the best plants. Some of the characteristics which make it so well-suited to this area are its rapid spring growth, short growing season, and tolerance to acidic soils.
However, in spite of bere’s suitability for the north of Britain, it has some serious disadvantages compared with modern varieties – in particular, its low yields and long, weak straw (up to 120cm long) which makes it susceptible to lodging (falling over) by harvest time. As a result of these shortcomings and the adoption of improved agricultural practices like liming and the use of higher yielding varieties, bere was abandoned by most growers during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Distillery disadvantages
For distilleries, the main disadvantage is the much higher cost of producing alcohol – about twice that of a modern variety. This starts with the higher price of the grain which is needed to compensate farmers for the lower yields. Malting may also be more expensive if the quantity of bere is less than the batch size of the malting facility.
Finally, there is the lower alcohol yield of bere malt which typically gives a predicted spirit yield of about 350 l/t as a result of its high protein content (bere malt has a nitrogen content of about 2.0% dm).
Although bere was an important source of malt for both legal and illegal distilling, a major disadvantage was its low alcohol yield on distillation and it was for this reason that, from 1804, bere malt carried a lower rate of tax than that from other barleys, according to Martin and Chang.
With the repeal of the Malt Tax in 1880, tax was imposed on alcohol instead of malt and this would have made it much less attractive for distilleries to use. By the early part of the 20th century, most distilleries had probably ceased purchasing it. In Orkney, for example, the last reference to a purchase of bere in Highland Park’s barley books was back in 1926.
For Simpsons Malt, reintroducing bere has given it some challenges. Simpsons says: “The malting of the bere barley at our Tweed Valley Maltings did present some challenges for our production team. The bere grains are much smaller and thinner in comparison to other varieties. That even includes Golden Promise, another heritage variety.
“It meant that when it came to placing the grains through our barley screens – this happens to every load of barley that enters the maltings to remove thistle heads, straw etc – we had to adjust our dresser setting to accommodate the small grain size. If we didn’t do that, there was every chance the thin grains of bere would’ve been lost along with the thistle heads and straw during that process.”
So, why use bere?
For the big boys who spill more whisky in a day what most craft distillers make in a year, economically bere makes no sense. But for small craft whisky distillers who want to have their low yield stand out, using bere will truly make your whisky unique. And, then there is the flavour, which those who have tasted it, sing praises like it’s come down from heaven. This even applies to breweries.
In early January 2021, Newbarns Brewery brewed a Helles-style lager with the grist being 100 percent malted bere barley which they got from Simpsons Malt. They called their first bere brew ‘Lager Bere’’ and followed it up with another, ‘Table Beer’.
Brewery co-founder Emma McIntosh says that straight away you could taste how different it was compared to other varieties that they use.
She says that the brew day itself was fairly straightforward with the only differences being the amazing aroma in the brewhouse and that they had to tweak their mill due to the small size of the bere kernels.
“The aroma added to the excitement of the brew as we knew we were making something different. Throughout the fermentation process, the flavour of the beer was mind-blowing,” says McIntosh. “We lagered it for about six weeks, but it tasted so good straight after fermentation that it could have been packaged right away and labelled something else. But we let it do its thing and we were really happy with the results.
“The beer itself still has the aroma from the brew day – it smells delicious. I don’t know if it’s a characteristic of the bere, or if it’s something we did differently on the day, but the raw flavour of the barley is still very prominent in the finished beer. It has a full mouthfeel and the aftertaste is this lovely floral, malty, yet crisp flavour.”
