Our Team
Iain Brechin
BSc (HONS) MRICS. Iain has over 30 years of commercial property, development and investment experience which he is now putting to good use in the development of Bonded Warehouses. He has pulled together an incredibly talented and experienced team in Castlelaw to provide Development Services for the industry and have a fresh look at how Bonds are run. Iain’s development experience and professional contacts in the drinks industry, enables Castlelaw to provide innovative solutions and the capability to convert those solutions into tangible assets using experienced Contractors and Racking Specialists.
Iain is a Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (MRICS) and has been self-employed, carrying out developments and investing in commercial property, for the last twenty years. His interest in the industry started with a Whisky Syndicate, which involved speaking to various distilleries about cask buying, maturation and bottling. The professionalism and characters he met during that time were compelling enough reasons to get more involved but he also realised that he could provide a Bonded Warehouse service that was more focused on the Distillers needs rather than the provider. It also became apparent that although most distilleries suffer from a lack of storage at some point, there were few that had thought long-term and built a solution. It also gave him the opportunity to start another Whisky Syndicate.
Iain Lochhead
Iain has nearly twenty years operational experience in Scotch Whisky and Gin. For the past twelve years he led John Dewar & Sons Ltd, Bacardi’s UK Operations division. His extensive knowledge of the spirits manufacturing supply chain extends from distillery raw materials through to production and shipment of finished goods.
His achievements whilst Head of Operations at Dewars / Bacardi include the construction of the Bombay Sapphire Distillery and taking that facility up to full scale production. He led the team that identified and developed the Poniel maturation site, a 200 acre site where Bonded Warehouses were built to mature and blend 1.5 million casks. He also reconfigured and extended John Dewar and Sons bottling facility improving it from a 5 million case Whisky only site into a 10 million case Whisky and Gin facility.
Iain represented Dewar’s on the Scotch Whisky Association Operations Committee (2001 -2019), the Scotch Whisky Research Institute Board (2003 -2019, Chairman 2016-2017), He is a Master of the Quaich and Liveryman in the Worshipful Company of Distillers.
Geoffrey Thomson
Until recently, Geoffrey was the Chief Executive of Braveheart Investment Group PLC. He stepped down after forming the business and then spending eighteen years at the helm of the AIM listed company that has over £120m under investment management. Braveheart provided equity, loans and mezzanine finance to SMEs and was involved in a number of noteworthy IPO’s and trade sales. Geoffrey now has a portfolio of interests ranging from non-exec and part time exec appointments to family farming and property concerns.
Geoffrey is a Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year award winner and brings a huge amount of experience to the structure and finances of Castlelaw and will keep a keen eye on the accounts during the expansion plans of the company. He will also be invaluable in advising clients of our Building Services department who chose to investigate how Castlelaw might fund their expansion or re-configuration.
A keen golfer (member of Blairgowrie, Royal Dornoch and vice-captain of Royal Perth) and deer stalker/shot, Geoffrey enjoys a dram, his favourite being the Orcadian whisky Scapa.