WHAT sort of a person tries to launch a brewery on a “wild island” during a global pandemic?

Stuart McCarthy knows how crazy that might sound, but he says this is the perfect time to set up the country’s first co-operative beer business on a Hebridean isle – and ask outsiders to help pay for it.

McCarthy is one of around 100 residents on Eigg, which has been in the hands of its people since a landmark community buy-out in 1997.

The move sparked the generation of a number of projects aimed at improving life there and growing the population, including the set-up of renewables operation Eigg Electric.

Now it’s hoped that will provide the juice for The Isle of Eigg Brewery, which promises to be the first enterprise of its kind in the country – an eco-powered co-operative that will use its profits to provide start-up cash for other entrepreneurial schemes in the community.

That’s if a fundraising bid delivers the £200,000 needed to get the venture off the ground.

The plan is to launch a community share offering within weeks, but McCarthy says it won’t be possible to collect all the cash from Eigg itself, and so over-16s from outwith the island will also be able to take part.

He told the Sunday National: “I asked someone for advice about setting up the community share offering and he said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, I’ve never done it during a global pandemic’.

“But I think now is probably the right time to do this. There is a lot of negative news and I feel that people want lifting up, something positive, meaningful and engaging.

The National:

“The community is behind the project but we are talking about a lot more money that needs to be raised than can be raised from here, so we’re reaching out.”

McCarthy, a former teacher from the Wirral, relocated to the island with Eigg-born wife Tamsin and began making beer in a hut behind a friend’s house in an enterprise that became the Laing Bay Brewing Company, a micro-operation which ran for five years.

That personal project was a different proposition to The Isle of Eigg Brewery and he expects to launch the cash drive for the latter within six weeks.

There are currently no co-operatives on Eigg, but McCarthy believes the addition of a 30,000-bottle-per-year brewery is an obvious addition to the area: “The buy-out was a marker in the sand and a platform to be able to do this. You give people ownership of the land and ownership of businesses and step back and watch what happens.

“This isn’t about profit for me, I want to create something that creates something. By year three, we want to put 25% of net profits into grants to offer capital to entrepreneurs to follow their business ideas. On the islands, it’s not easy to just go to the bank and ask for money.

“We’re heading headlong into recession. A business that is owned by people who care about it strikes me as really important. We’re want to make trailblazingly tasty beer on a wild island to create some happiness.”