50th Anniversary Celebration
21
Kirsty Black
Brewing and Distilling MSc (2013) Arbikie Highland Estate, Master Distiller
Today she is the Master Distiller on the Arbikie Highland Estate, but four years ago Kirsty Black was a quality engineer working with medical devices. Then this amateur brewer took the plunge and joined the MSc in Brewing Distilling at Heriot-Watt’s ICBD.
She recalls: “When I started at Heriot-Watt I had been home brewing for a couple of years so had a basic understanding of the processes involved and could imagine myself pottering about in a brewery. Due to the legalities of distilling, however, I had never dabbled nor considered it as a potential career but as soon as we started studying distilling in the lab something clicked. The idea that you could put a never-ending list of ingredients into a still and convert the resultant brown, murky liquid into something crystal clear but full of flavour is just magical.”
Despite this newfound love for the seeming sorcery of distilling, after graduation in 2013 Kirsty first went to work with a micro-brewery, and then a major brewing operation. Within a year, however, she had been snapped up by Scottish farm-to-bottle distillery Arbikie as their master distiller/multi-tasker.
Having helped build the operation from the ground up, she says of her role: “I am at my happiest simply trying to understand how things work. Figuring out how to turn an empty farm shed into a distillery has definitely been the ultimate puzzle to solve! It’s a continuous learning experience – one day might see me trialling botanicals in the lab and the next I could
be installing a UV lamp or bolting together the sections of our column still. I can be found sitting in front of the computer doing the records, out in the fields planting, rebuilding a pump or unloading a lorry of casks.
“I love the variation. With only two of us working full-time in the actual distillery, we have to manage every single aspect of keeping the place operating. This isn’t just the routine milling, mashing, distilling, packaging, and cask filling but everything else that goes on in the background too.”
Her hard (and impressively comprehensive) work hasn’t gone unnoticed. The company rewarded her with her own gin, naming its new offering after her. Kirsty’s Gin, she says, “combines two of my loves – the flora of Scotland and making alcohol. At Arbikie we make our own spirit out of potatoes, and it isn’t easy to coerce alcohol out of a potato! A lot of chemistry, time and patience is required before I even get to think about how many juniper berries will be needed!”
Having successfully coaxed a tipple from a tuber, Kirsty has another vegetable in her sights: “I have moved
on to another family of vegetables that are again commonplace on our dinner tables but not so likely to be seen in an accompanying refreshment – legumes.”
For Kirsty herself, the future holds more multi-tasking: “We are still a relatively new distillery and both the company and I still have a lot to learn so my focus is on continuing to develop the operations of the distillery and our range of products. I’m also completing a part-time PhD, which is going to keep me busy for the next few years.”
And when it comes to the past? “My time at Heriot-Watt was a challenging period as it saw me giving up a successful career and returning to a classroom, trying to remember how to learn in such an environment again. But the support of the professors and my classmates, which continues to this day, makes it a completely unforgettable year.”
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