While this is how things looked on Friday 6th, what is becoming far more interesting about the project to create a membership distillery at Ladybank are the real foundations of how we are approaching making whisky as a club.

The foundations are the people we have and how they are behind the project and  interacting with it.

We are having our second members meeting in London this week. These meetings, the first time members have come together to throw ideas around and feed off each others enthusiasm and interest, is inspiring.

Its much more of a “consumers in control” model than many businesses in the past; and for our overseas members we have an Online Boardroom so they can equally engage in the processes we are now going through.

Now that our building conversion is progressing - and there are the early signs of where we will distil, where we will entertain etc - we asked a few local members to come round for an informal meeting. Amongst our current 350 worldwide members just over 10% are based in Scotland and, as we are mostly a small numbers operation, 6 members and a few guests was ideal. We like to keep things kind of intimate and informal as that tends to work best.

Feedback from the members present, who are able to immerse themselves in any, or every, aspect of distillery creation and future whisky making plans, was exceptional. It really does look like we have a growing community of committed, and highly resourceful, people. You can read an article by Ian Green, who also attended, as part of his research into our project.

You can see exactly how we are tackling our old buildings, starting with some re-roofing, in the online photo galleries links below. We are using a photo album that draws pictures from our www.flickr.com account so people can comment, or ask about any particular photograph, if they click through to the photo on flickr. Anyway, as we move forward to create what we hope will be a special small distillery in a magical country setting, we hope you will enjoy following our progress.

Ladybank Diary Photo Gallery (this link navigates from this page)

Ladybank Diary Photo Gallery (this link opens a new browser window)

This is our stillroom! No roof, no still, no whisky yet. I expect the whole of the oak frame roof to be pretty much completed by the end of next week - so we’ll update with a new round of pictures then.

Another new distillery is being built in Norfolk and work started a few months ago. Here at Ladybank we had to go as far as Norfolk to find enough reclaimed pantiles to restore our roof in the traditional way. The guys at the Norfolk distillery meanwhile had to come as far as Scotland to recruit a skilled distillery manager (Iain Henderson who I know has a house just along the road from ladybank in a village called Freuchie).

This is my son Hector at the yard of Aspect Roofing in Norfolk when we went down to inspect the pantiles. 7000 of them arrived with us 2 days ago but it will be a few weeks before the replacement oak framed roof is ready to have the tiles fitted.

This is the first post for the new Ladybank distillery blog - we go live proper on 1st September and will be following all construction work/progess in great detail.

I’ll also be telling you all about the rationale behind this unusual project. In a nutshell its different, different, different!

Today our national newspaper The Scotsman reported on the project in an article called “Club building its own distillery”.

The writer made a good job of interpreting what I feel (but didn’t actually say) so the article is quite contentious in parts.