Emma Millar: Meet one of Irish whiskey’s future stars
Distilling was a career Emma Millar never knew was a possibility. Nearly a decade later, she’s a senior distiller for Northern Ireland’s Hinch Distillery. She wants more young people to know making whisky is an option.
It was on a trip to Australia that Emma Millar fell in love with distilling. “I had no idea what I wanted to do,” she admits of her career prospects as she neared the end of university. With a love of food and cooking (‘If I’m not distilling, I’m baking’), and studying for an undergraduate degree in Food Design and Nutrition, she did think she’d perhaps go into setting up her own bakery or food production facility.
But in 2016, on a two-month educational trip to Australia where she visited wineries, breweries and food production businesses, it was an introduction to McHenry Distillery on the Tasman Peninsula that caught her attention: “I realised: ‘Oh, I think this is what I want to do with my life’.”
Nearly a decade later, Millar is nearing her fifth year at Northern Ireland’s much-awarded Hinch Distillery in County Down, currently as a senior distiller on an eight-person operations team. What does the role of a senior distiller look like? “I don’t even know what it entails anymore,” she laughs before reeling off her day-to-day: managing operations (the distillery runs 24/7 at just under one million LPA) and a team of distillers, monitoring incoming materials and looking at distillery efficiencies to make sure everything is running as optimally as possible.
“If I can inspire even one or two women in the industry, I would love to do that.”
“Every day is very different,” she explains. “You could be at a desk eight hours one day, or not near it at all another. A lot of it is very manual too, but you don’t have to be a big, six-foot rugby player to be able to, say, move a cask. There is no reason anyone couldn’t do the job.”
The team is currently at an exciting crux in their distilling journey: “We’re looking at our own liquid coming out, so I’m pulling samples of some of our younger liquid – three or four years – which is exciting and a particularly fun part of the job.”
Getting hands on: Hinch Distillery was Millar’s first foray into whiskey distilling.
Unknown waters
A career in distilling isn’t something Millar ever even knew about as an option. “I had no idea I could work in a distillery when I was 18, it wasn’t on my radar at all.” As a result, she thinks a lot more can be done to encourage students at A-level, especially young women, to consider it as a career option and to bring more talent into the ever-burgeoning Irish whiskey industry.
Once it was on her radar, Millar took her Masters in Brewing & Distilling at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, and found her first distilling job in gin at 1881 Distillery in the Scottish Borders in August 2019. Covid meant some back and forth between Ireland and Scotland, but in September 2020, she moved home and joined the team at Hinch.
“you don’t have to be a big, six-foot rugby player to be able to, say, move a cask. There is no reason anyone couldn’t do the job.”
She took the role with both hands, especially embracing the whiskey side of distilling: “I said yes to as much as I could, learned as much as I could. My history was in gin, so single malt was different, but we had a couple of newly-retired distillers and distillery managers who came in to commission the distillery and I learned from them at the beginning and then grew with the business. The distillery got bigger, my workload increased, and I pushed myself.”
All that knowledge is what she now teaches her distilling team. With a distillery that still requires a lot of manual intervention, anyone who comes in to the team, Miller has to train on the operations from basic fundamentals through to cask management and warehousing.
High hopes: Millar hopes to hone her craft before turning her hand to distillery management in the future.
Representing possibilities
When Millar first started at Hinch, she noticed some noise about her – a woman – joining the team. “It was a bit of a novelty, I think, and there were a lot of Insta posts put out about a female distiller working at Hinch.” In the last couple of years, she’s noticed much more representation in the Irish whiskey industry, name-checking Alex Thomas (Bushmills’ master blender) as being someone she admires: “It’s nice to see a strong female role model out there.”
With more eyes soon to be on Hinch as its own whiskey comes to market (its current expressions contain sourced spirit), Millar is aware that this in turn will put her more in the limelight not just now, but in years to come. It’s a responsibility she is keen to harness: “I do hope people will look at me the way I look at Alex Thomas and how she’s worked her way up through the business. If I can inspire even one or two women in the industry, I would love to do that.”
In a bid to bring more people into her world, she started the Instagram account @diary_of_a_distiller back in January 2023. In her first post she wrote: “Just an account full of all the real life, high level, super top secret stuff we get up to everyday,” followed by videos and photos of her moving casks, rebarrelling, milling and more – all fuelled by strength training and ‘a lot of Red Bull’.
Looking to the future, Millar is keen to continue learning in her role before setting her sights on the next steps. “For the next few years I want to master what I’m doing at the moment and get as much experience as possible. The long-term goal would be to be a distillery manager somewhere.”
DISCOVER MORE FROM THE CUT
