Steven Kersley faces an interesting conundrum. Not only does he need a name for a distillery, but also one for a whisky brand.

The BrewDog Distilling Company’s managing director’s distillery is owned by one of the world’s largest beer businesses, which employs 2,600 staff, turns over £353 million a year, and runs more than 100 bars, having made a name for itself through marketing stunts that included driving a tank through London, dropping stuffed ‘fat cats’ from a helicopter over the Bank of England, and selling super-strength beer bottled inside taxidermy squirrels and stoats. Yet will that same BrewDog brand appeal to whisky drinkers?

“Probably not,” muses Kersley as he leads the way through the distillery, which sits next to BrewDog’s massive brewery and head office at Ellon, a half hour’s drive north of Aberdeen, Europe’s oil capital, and Scotland’s third-largest city. He is still mulling over names for the whisky brand, but he knows he wants the distillery’s name to reflect its innovative nature.

Standing in the still room, one wall of the industrial unit is dominated by a massive, colourful mural that features squirrels, deer, and other woodland creatures frolicking among the trees. Yet it is the collection of stills in front of the mural that really catches the eye.

It looks like nothing else in Scotland; an array of pot and column stills allows Kersley to produce spirits ranging from whisky, rum, and Tequila through to gin and vodka. While some craft distilleries manage such feats on a small scale, BrewDog’s apparatus elevates it to another level, with a 20-metre rectifying column sitting in a tower alongside the stillhouse.

Inside the BrewDog distillery [Image credit: Conor Gault]

Founded in 2007 by school friends Martin Dickie and James Watt, BrewDog began life as just another Scottish craft beer brewery, on an industrial estate in the fishing port of Fraserburgh, 40 minutes further north of Ellon. Before setting up the business, Dickie studied brewing and distilling on the world-famous course at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and worked in breweries and distilleries, while Watt gave up a job as a trainee solicitor to become a fishing trawler captain. They made home brew in their spare time and took it to London, where noted beer writer Michael Jackson advised them to give up their day jobs.

Covering the company for the business pages in The Scotsman newspaper, those initial stories I wrote revolved around the usual fare for any small enterprise, from lending deals with banks through to nascent successes in export markets. The stories about the eye-catching marketing stunts usually got snapped up by the news pages.

BrewDog’s early days included pioneering the crowdfunding model, selling shares through its ‘Equity for Punks’ scheme. The brewery moved to its current home in Ellon in 2012, and has expanded three times on the same site, which also includes an impressive tap room, attracting BrewDog fans from around the globe.