Our latest 'Introducing Orkney's Makers' feature focuses on the Swannay Brewery, producers of a hugely popular range of local beers and proud owners of a brand-new taproom in the northwest corner of the Orkney mainland. We spoke with the brewery's director, Lewis Hill.
Swannay is a unique place for a brewery in terms of both building and location - how did the business come into being?
The short history is that my dad Rob went to the closed down Swannay Cheese factory to buy a clock and ended up buying the whole site. Dad had been head brewer at Moorhouses before moving to Orkney with my mum, my brother, and I in tow to work at the Orkney Brewery. Just before he left there he came to Swannay to view the clock and thought the place would make a great brewery. A few months later he was in a position to go for it, and he did. He launched the Highland Brewing Company from the old buildings at Swannay and here we are today. The business was very much started on a bootstrap budget and was run solely by my dad until I began helping him out a few years later. The business grew organically until we began our major renovation and expansion project in 2019, before we ran into covid and the huge challenges of the following years.
It’s a special location with a lot of history, what’s it like to make beer in your corner of Orkney?
It's equally rewarding and challenging. It's a long commute out from Kirkwall (in Orkney terms!), but people that don't do it every day always tell us how nice the drive is. We do have to plan things a bit more in terms of brewing during the winter months, including scheduling our batches so our out-of-hours yeast checks are at slightly more palatable hours. There are obviously challenges with weather disruption when it comes to deliveries as well. I like to draw parallels with rural whisky distilleries and historic breweries in Bavaria who are in similarly remote locations, and making amazing, high quality beer, often many generations old.
Your dad obviously had a strong brewing background so was it something you were always keen to get into yourself, or did it happen more by accident?
It was very much by accident. I had no plans to work in beer when I was growing up, which I did mostly at the Orkney Brewery where Dad worked at the time. However, going to university in Edinburgh, along with the mid-2000s craft beer boom, must have ignited a deep seated ember of brewing passion that I was unaware existed! I got excited by Edinburgh's classic and historic pubs as well as the amazing modern American beer scene. After a trip to San Diego for the annual Craft Brewers Conference I went full circle and decided to give the beer world a go.
What is it like working with your dad? Do your ideas about beer differ?
As you might expect from any father-son working relationship, working with dad - in beer or otherwise - is challenging! I always thought it would get easier the more we worked together and the more the business advanced, but that hasn't really happened. Dad actually stepped back from the brewery in 2021 for health reasons but the more I've worked with other folk and without him, I've realised that I am perhaps more like him than I care to admit!
Dad would still admit that his skillset is brewing beer, whereas mine was more focused on business and operations. Since 2021 I've had to cover the beer-making as well which has been a steep learning curve and though I am better at sensory and tasting, I would say I have more of a science than art take on brewing. Dad was 100% more art than science. Fundamentally, our ideas are the same - we just want to enjoy and make the best, high quality beer we can - but I think our contrasting approaches helped us build Swannay's range into what it is today.
Our immediate opinions certainly did differ as dad just wanted to make classic, mostly British styles, whereas I was enthused by the modern beers being proliferated in America. I have latterly come round to appreciating classic styles as actually more drinkable (and better for business) than the arguably 'faddy' modern stuff. Our Orkney Lager - styled on southern Germany's Helles lagers - is doing very well for us, but we still sell more of the beers dad created in the early days of the brewery - like Scapa Special - than any others, they've remained the core of the business.
The business has changed a lot over the last two decades, what do you offer now beer-wise, and what have you done to keep the brewery moving forward?
Dad's focus in the early days was always quality. He did amazing things making the beers he did in the old cowshed that the brewery was back when he started it. Our focus today is still quality, but our approach is very different. We invested in a canning line during covid because getting bottling slots booked was very difficult at the time, and the modern styles I was so excited about suited cans better. We could also get a much better canning machine for the same money as a bad bottling line. From the early days I was always irked by the fact we had to ship our beer by boat and road to be bottled in southern Scotland or England. A lot of money went out of the brewery when we sent beer for bottling. The beer does not benefit from being shipped hundreds of miles and we lost many thousands of litres of beer to transport mishaps. Brewing the beer and canning it in one place is 100% the best thing to do and this year we've made the commitment to stop bottling and focus solely on canning our beers in Orkney.
Our latest investment at the end of 2024 to complement the canning line was a centrifuge. Canning beer in Orkney reduces food miles and beer losses and the centrifuge takes this a step further by efficiently removing yeast from the beer. We are yielding almost 10% more from each batch by using the centrifuge as well as reducing tank time which has an added benefit of reducing refrigeration load.
Beer-wise our Orkney Lager is the standout growth beer and the modern beers we've been iterating since summer 2025, the 'Hi Aye Series' of beers, are the ones that get folk talking.
There has also been a huge refurbishment and expansion project at the brewery, why was that so important to you?
Fundamentally, the project was to bring the production area up to standard to help with our quality goals and as an accidental aside we ended up with a taproom. It really has been a sequence of challenges since 2020 but we really feel at home in the brewery now and we have more space, more modern equipment, and a workplace that we can be really proud of. For various reasons the taproom only really opened in earnest this year and we held our first beer festival, a mini-Oktoberfest featuring German beers and food, in September which was great fun and well-supported. We even hosted festival concerts and weddings. We have a lot of catching up to do but the opening season of the taproom can be deemed a success overall. I love the experience of visiting breweries to get a feel for their story, which I think is very important, and Swannay's sense of place has so far been a key part of its brand, so we were keen to make the brewery a destination in its own right.
What are your hopes for the future of the Swannay Brewery?
We still have a lot of buildings that are in need of renovation. We don't have plans to make the Birsay site into a mega beer factory but we want to continue to build on the uniquenesses of its location and history. The interest in hosting events at the brewery is very encouraging and we see this as a reasonable part of Swannay's future too. Part of our 2019 project was curtailed by covid and our immediate plan is to see this through - beer sales are actually still rather down since pre-covid, so we want to combat that.
The next project will be to finish the courtyard with a proper visitor centre as opposed to just the taproom. I'd like to include a clocktower too, it would be a link to the historic breweries we admire, but would also tie the new-look brewery into its origin story of dad arriving here to buy a clock. I think it would be the perfect nod to him and his vision for Swannay Brewery.
Find out more about the Swannay Brewery and visit the official website to buy beer, and plan a visit. You can also pick up Swannay's beers at local shops across Orkney.