In Conversation With: Simon Thompson, Dornoch Distillery

So, it started back when we were running Dornoch Castle Hotel. When it was our school or later university holidays, we would end up having to run the bar, so we were quite young when we started to get a bit of a taste for whisky. I actually started collecting at quite a young age and was buying from trade suppliers.

From there, we started going to whisky auctions - about 20 years ago now - and we’d go to live hammer auctions all over the country and grab interesting bottles for the bar. Along that journey, we fell in love with older style whiskies, particularly from the 1960s, and we sought those out for collecting. Mostly it was for the bar, which then got a good reputation for finding extreme rarities and opening them up for people to try.   

We later formed a whisky enthusiast drinking club and our first big trip was in 2013: getting everyone together with Brora Academy over two days, where we opened and drank ungodly amounts of Brora.

It’s a mixture of our whisky friends from the European and global connoisseur scene that we'd met over the years and managed to drag together. We used to get together every year and do a group trip, but we haven't done one since Covid. Basically, it's a big crazy whisky holiday with a around 20 global connoisseurs.  We’d all get together and everyone would bring bottles fitting the theme.  

In 2014, a group gathered for the annual get-together, where the theme was Pre-War Whisky. Over a single day at Strathearn, they collaborated on the spirit distillation that would later become the Strathearn 2014 Thompson Bros 10 Year Old Dramton Abbey bottlings. Simon explains further:

In February 2014 the theme was pre-war whisky. The idea was that everyone would bring whisky preferably distilled and bottled before the outbreak of World War Two - thought whisky distilled before and bottled during was acceptable too. We timed a special spirit distillation at Strathearn Distillery to coincide with the Pre-War Whisky Tour. All 20 of us were up at the distillery that day, drinking old-style whisky while also helping out - everyone had a hand in the spirit distillation, including deciding cut points by the committee.

This bottling is really tied to the very early days of what would eventually become Thompson Brothers. At that point in 2014, there was no Thompson Brothers...we were just private individuals doing lots of whisky stuff and running our own bar. 

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The group of whisky enthusiasts that formed the Pre-War Whisky Tour and visited Strathearn Distillery to have a hand in this distillation were: Diego Sandrin, Simon Thompson, Philip Thompson, Angus MacRaild, Olivier Humbrecht, Max Righi, Geert Bero, Marcel van Gils, Hans Ekstrom, Patrick de Schultes, Jeroen Koetsier, Emmanuel Dron, Jon Beech, Serge Valentin, Dominiek Bouckaert, Tomas Karlson, Hideo Yamaoka, Jonny McMillan, Christophe "Billy" Van Gysel and Dick Beech.

In 2013, Strathearn Distillery was just starting up. We were going through an experimental phase lets say, and doing a lot of research into old style production methods. I went to see them a few times, shared my research and petitioned them to try making an older-style whisky. That eventually led to me doing a bit of work for them.  

My payment, in sorts, was being allowed to run my own production cycle to my own design - and this bottle. We started the process in late 2013 and distilled it in 2014 as part of the pre-war whisky tour. I should also say that Angus MacRaild (of Decadent Drinks and Kythe Distillery) was also quite involved, he helped during the mashing and fermentation stages for this batch and was also there for spirit run.

Well, as mentioned, it was an experiment - the best we could do at the time. We used an old Scottish brewing strain of yeast, freshly propagated, that we could specifically trace back to a couple distilleries in the 1960s. The barley variety we used was Marris Otter, which was also developed in the '60s. It was called the Pre-War Whisky Tour, but the best I could nail down within the timeframe was to work with materials from the 1960s, which was about as old school as I could get in 2014.  

Part of it was also to do with the methods. We did extra-long fermentations in wooden washbacks. Strathearn normally uses stainless steel washbacks, but I ran the fermentations in a bank of barrels I'd modified by cutting the heads off. Now, to be fair, the wooden washbacks wouldn't have made much of a difference at that time, as they hadn't had time to build up a native micro flora, but it was fun to do and it meant we weren't interfering with Strathearn's fermentation capacity. We ran those fermentations for just over 2 weeks. 

This bottling was never sold - the output was split evenly between the attendees of the Pre War Whisky Tour.  A few of them sold bottles or offered them by the measure with proceeds going to charity. 

There's also a minor detail on the label... I put "Wandering Distiller" in small text on the front. This is something I picked back up in 2023, where I go to other distilleries and run larger-scale production experiments, putting an old-style spin on the house style. So, there will be more "Wandering Distiller" bottles in a few years' time. 

Dornoch Distillery

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So after this you and your brother decided to open a distillery, what was the inspiration to start the Dornoch Distillery? And why did you choose old style distillation methods? 

So can you tell me more about the old style distillation methods?  

The main gist of it is: in nature, you don't get anything for free. Over time, bit by bit, the Scotch Whisky industry has made improvements that helped to make a more consistent and high-quality product while increasing yields.  But some flavours are inherently inefficient, and effectively got left on the chopping block. I'm very much willing to sacrifice yield and cost of production in exchange for achieving some of those lost styles. 

It's not a case of "old style good, modern style bad". Modern style whiskies are very much optimised to give you the best possible flavour profile while being very conscious of the yield and cost of production. But within those inefficiencies, is where a lot of flavours lie. It’s not a black and white thing, I'm not disparaging of modern whiskies; however, there's a whole range of flavours which are available to you, if you're willing to make those trade-offs.

We also do our cut points by sense daily,. There's no set rule on when to make a cut point, it's based entirely on our own personal senses and experience. That adds an extra level of variability with human fingerprints on it. Over the years, depending on who’s done the distillation, you can actually see their personality come through a bit in the liquid. For example, some might run a narrower cut and be very conservative, or you can slow down the stills and push things right to the edges. So yeah, we like that extra bit of variability and human involvement.

What was the process like building the distillery? 

It was a learning experience on  many fronts. We didn't bring in any external consultants or experts, which helped keep costs under control, but it also meant mistakes were made. I kind of considered the mistakes as the cost of education. It was a tricky one to put together, not everything was working as it should straight away, so there was a lot of adaption and evolution. Of course, we did talk to everyone who had done something similar on a similar scale, and by avoiding their pitfalls, we just found new pitfalls of our own. It was quite the experience, but not too stressful because everything was at a scale we could manage. 

It was very manageable, even for us, coming in having never done anything like this before. We paid close attention to people ahead of us, the likes of Strathearn, who were set up on a similar scale and showed us what was possible. All this happened while we were working full-time managing the hotel, so we were stretched a bit thin, but it was a fun experience.  

Can you tell me a bit about your next venture, Struie Distillery?

Struie will be the second distillery in Dornoch. It's not a Dornoch distillery replacement, we’ll be keeping Dornoch operational and we’re even pencilled in for a mini expansion down the line there. It will keep doing Dornoch things, with no compromise on production - always aiming for old style quality, regardless of cost or yield. Struie on the other hand, will be a much larger distillery in Dornoch town. Its production philosophy is about finding the sweet spots between what we do at Dornoch and modern standard production. 

It's a balance point, mixing some elements of modern efficiencies with some elements of old school production, making calculated sacrifices where yields are a bit lower than standard but still acceptable, and costs are a bit higher but manageable. The goal is to reach into ranges of flavours which no longer exist in modern whisky. So, where Dornoch is expensive because it’s expensive to make, with Struie we want to be very competitive on the price point of standard new wave whisky , while still outcompeting on quality. That’s the intention.  

We look forward to seeing where the Thompson Brothers go next and will certainly be keeping an eye on updates for Stuie Distillery once it's up and running!

If you're keen to try the pioneering and experimental liquid discussed in this interview, the Strathearn 2014 Thompson Bros 10 Year Old Dramton Abbey charity bottles are available in our June Auction!