Our story

Rum, Sunshine, and Shipping Containers: The Off Grid Story

So here’s the thing about starting a distillery on a remote bit of the west Highland coast with no mains power, no existing buildings, and absolutely no idea how to work with zinc: you learn fast, or you don’t get a drink out of it for a very long time.

We’re Andrew and Liz, and Off Grid Distillery is us. We are based in Glenuig, Moidart, on a stretch of coast that’s every bit as wild and beautiful as it sounds, and — true to the name — the whole operation runs on sunshine and a little LPG. No grid connection, no diesel generator humming away in the background. Just solar panels, batteries, and whatever the west Highland weather decides to give us that day.

Right now the entire distillery lives in a row of shipping containers. Not exactly glamorous, but it works, and it means we could actually start making rum while everything else — the distillery buildings, the house we are to live in, the whole site — goes up around us. Because yes, on top of building a distillery from nothing, we’re also self-building our own house. Planning, drawings, foundations, framing, all of it. Nobody handed us a set of architect’s plans and a builder’s number. We did the lot ourselves.

That’s only really possible because of who we are, if we’re honest. Andrew’s a mechanical engineer by training and a wooden boat builder/cabinet maker, which basically means if it can be designed, built, wired, or fixed, he’ll work out how. I trained as a chef, so between the two of us we’ve got “can build anything” and “can make anything taste good” covered, which turns out to be a pretty solid skill set for running a distillery. Somewhere in there we also taught ourselves to clad buildings in zinc, which is not a skill either of us expected to pick up, but here we are.

The building frames went up in the summer of 2024 — the long, wet one, if you remember it. Everyone else was complaining about the rain; we were mostly grateful for the water tanks filling up and mildly stressed about how little sun we were getting for the solar panels. That’s the trade-off out here: too much rain and the batteries struggle, too little and the burns run dry. You end up thinking about weather completely differently when your rum & power depends on it.

None of this is really new territory for us, though. Before the distillery we ran a smallholding — pigs, sheep, ducks, chickens, the whole cast. We still keep bees. We’ve always cared about knowing exactly where our food and everything else comes from, and about not leaving too big a footprint while we’re at it. The distillery is really just that same instinct pointed at rum instead of bacon and eggs. Our first release is Blackhouse Rum, made from molasses, with casks we’ve collected ourselves from Speyside Cooperage — old ex-bourbon quarter casks getting a second life out here on the coast.

It’s slow going, building a business and a house and a life all at once, mostly by hand, mostly off grid, in one of the wetter corners of Scotland. But there’s something honest about it. Nothing here has been staged or bought in — the containers, the zinc, the solar panels, the casks, all of it earned the hard way. And there’s a good dram at the end of it, which helps.