Region & History

The story of Highland beer begins with a legend. In 1890, Robert Louis Stevenson turned it into the ballad "Heather Ale: A Galloway Legend": the last two Picts, a father and his son, choose death over revealing the recipe for their heather beer. Whether it ever really happened, nobody knows—it remains a piece of lore.

Better documented is how brewing happened along the coast. According to Williams Bros, Scottish coastal inns brewed with barley malt before the 1850s, and that barley grew in fields fertilized with seaweed. This idea gave rise to Kelpie Seaweed Ale, which adds fresh seaweed to the mash.

Today's breweries are young. Orkney Brewery was founded in March 1988 in the old schoolhouse of Quoyloo on the Mainland, and it's considered one of Scotland's first microbreweries. That same year, brothers Bruce and Scott Williams began brewing a heather beer based on a 17th-century Gaelic recipe. In 1992, their Fraoch went on sale, first from a tiny brewhouse at Taynuilt station in Argyll, later from the old Maclay building in Alloa.

In 1995, Angus MacRuary and Stephen Tinney founded the brewery on Skye, which still stands at the harbor in Uig today. 1998 saw the arrival of Black Isle in Munlochy, an organic brewery on its own Highland farm. Since 2006, Orkney Brewery has belonged to Orcadian Norman Sinclair.

Unlike Kölsch or Kentish ale, Highland beer has no protected designation of origin. Of British beers, only Kentish ale and Rutland Bitter appear in the EU register. Anyone calling a beer "Highland Ale" isn't bound by any rule—only by their own landscape.