The Isle of Harris Distillery began with a simple idea.

Over the decades, our island has suffered from a long-term decline in population, our community's numbers having halved over the last fifty years.

As young people leave our shores to seek their fortune, few are able to return to find work, set down roots and build a life in the place they called home. We believe that a distillery, built for not just years but for generations, can be a way to help stem this tide.

In 2015, the distillery started life with just 10 people and an ambition to double in number over the next five years. Today, we're proud to say we employ over 50 permanent staff, a highly significant number in an island of fewer than 2000 inhabitants.

The population of the Isle of Harris has declined by almost 50% over the last 50 years as young people leave to seek work far from our shores.

These changes threaten local traditions, culture, and language as well as leaving schools and village numbers dwindling.

The Isle of Harris Distillery was built to help address these issues by creating sustainable local employment and offer long-term careers for those who wish to stay and set down roots in their island home.

From distilling and blending, to marketing and hospitality - there are a wide variety of skillsets and development opportunities available to local people as we create two beautiful Outer Hebridean spirits and bring them to the world.

We regularly offer placements and internships for young people to help them explore potential career paths, and we've developed our current distilling team through formal apprenticeships and training.

Together with other like-minded island enterprises we seek to act as a catalyst of change and a symbol of promise for this generation and those still to come.

Our whisky is made with little automation, and we prefer to rely on the 'human touch' throughout our whisky-making.

Our local distillers use their judgement and experience to decide the cut-points by nose and sight, they manually adjust the steam valves, and process decisions are made as a team at every step on a daily basis.

The difference this makes to the final dram may be hard to define but we feel the use of island hands will bring something extra to the spirit we finally bottle.

The emphasis on people throughout the production process also serves to create employment that would otherwise be lost in a more 'push-button' operation.