The Scottish cowshed that's now a groundbreaking distillery with magical sea views

Scotsman

11-05-2025

Scotland is home to many distilleries, from historic hidden gems in the rolling hills of Speyside to bustling city attractions and island destinations. But not many have as homely a history as Arbikie - the gin and rye whisky distillery - located in Angus.
Arbikie Estate is a family-owned working farm distillery that grows all the ingredients for the spirits, including barley, wheat, juniper, lemongrass and chillies - following their field-to-bottle ethos.
When the Stirling brothers opened Arbikie Distillery in 2014, their plan was to combine the best of farming and traditional distilling with innovation.
Fast forward over 10 years and Arbikie is one of the most sustainable distilleries in Scotland, and it all started with a cow shed.
On a recent episode of our podcast Scran, co-founder John Stirling, spoke to us about the journey of the distillery, how there had been a distillery on the Arbikie estate in the past and their plans for the future.
On Arbikie's distilling past, he said: 'Arbikie is the family farm and when we started up our distillery - we had already started the build and then my brother found an ancient map from 1794 where it had Arbikie distillery on it, which we didn't actually know when we started the distillery.
"We've got this history of distilling at Arbikie and obviously there's a large gap between then and now but it gives us that bit of history. We searched the name and it's Viking. There were a lot of Viking raiders coming down here, and that was the name given to the farm.'
On how the modern-day business came to be, Mr Stirling explained it was the result of a "drunken chat." He said: 'It was 2013/14 and I was an accountant with KPMG. One of my brothers, Iain, was in the whisky industry and my brother David was in marketing and basically we got a bit drunk one night and decided why don't we go back to the basics of whisky distilling, which was farm based, utilising waste products, and create a really sustainable distillery.
'In the cold light of day we looked at the business plan and we had the space, we had everything to do with agriculture which is the way we wanted to create our distillery and we had all the core elements.
'What we were missing was a distiller and luckily we got Kirsty Black who is now Dr Kirsty Black, so she was the final piece in the jigsaw. We built the distillery within a year, produced in 2015 and as they say the rest is history or hopefully we've got a lot of history to come.'
The sustainable nature of the distillery started with the build, which was actually converting some old farm buildings including the cow shed. This is now where the whisky and gin stills are housed and where the casks are maturing.
Mr Stirling said: 'What has paid dividends, in 2013/14 we had our vision, which has actually not really changed. It was about reducing waste, being kinder to the environment, being more sustainable - where sustainability barely existed in 2013/14 - now is at the forefront of most businesses being kinder to the planet.
'One of the aspects of that (for us) was utilising sheds and, even then, we reduced our waste to a minimum. When we were going through this process, we looked back to what our dad had farmed in the 1960s and they were far better at looking after the fields and the planet than we were in modern agriculture.'
Arbikie has a visitor experience, which opened in 2022, with a bustling cafe, shop and bar and there's regular distillery tours. You can also stay on site in one of four mirrored ÖÖD Houses.
To listen to this episode, search Scran wherever you get your podcasts.
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