We are spirit nuts. When Annabel started Nc’nean, she wanted experimentation to be at the forefront. To innovate within spirit production as well as cask maturation. Yes, maturation is critical, but our passion is really for the spirit that comes straight off the still.

A great whisky must start with a great new make spirit. It’s a critical part of whisky production, and even more important if you’re not planning to leave it in casks for 30 years. So we invest time and money in every step of the process (read on below to learn more) to make it the best it can be. Some have described our new make as the best in Scotland.

All of our whiskies follow this ethos, but it’s our Botanical Spirit and our Huntress series which specifically hero our spirit experiments. From rum and wine yeasts, to cut point explorations, we aren’t afraid to play with liquid before it goes into a cask.

It all starts with our 100% organic unpeated Scottish barley. We only ever use this to create our whisky, never not organic, never peated and never not Scottish. This organic barley, grown without fertilisers or pesticides to encourage biodiversity, grows in richer soils and results in a depth of flavour in the grain. This translates right through to our whisky in the glass in its creamy, silky texture.

When it comes to mashing, we then use longer mashing times - our organic malted barley spends an hour resting for flavour development and another 20 minutes being filtered through the husks for purity.

Yeast is magical. It’s responsible for creating many of the flavours in our whisky. We ferment for between 68 and 114 hours (60 is typical in Scotch) and we use two yeast varieties for our house style: one creates fruity flavours, the other is a more traditional distilling yeast.

But it’s in our Huntress series where we really shine a light on our yeast experiments, releasing whiskies made with rum, wine and champagne yeasts.

We collect only the purest, fruitiest part of our distillation by taking a narrow cut to get our trademark "new make" spirit (the unaged whisky which comes straight off the still).

Unlike many other whisky distilleries we also run different spirit recipes at different times of year by varying the cut points, depending on what age we envisage bottling the spirit at at the end of maturation.

We have a huge variety of casks maturing in our on-site dunnage style warehouses, from Tequila, to British Rum, to White Bordeaux to Rivesaltes casks.

Our house style casks are ex-Bourbon, STR red wine and ex-Oloroso Sherry. We use these in our core range of whiskies as they develop delicious depth and sweetness.