WHEN Michelle Russell staged the first North Hop festival in Inverness in 2014, it is unlikely the marketing entrepreneur would have foreseen the extent to which it would capture the public’s imagination.

Initially conceived to showcase the Highlands’ burgeoning craft brewing scene, it has within three years established itself as a popular fixture in the food, drink and live music calendar, bringing some of Scotland’s most cutting edge producers under a single roof.

North Hop festivals now take place every year Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Aviemore, the latter replacing Inverness as its Highland base, with tentative talks having begun over taking the event to London.

For the time being, though, the focus is on Scotland. Ms Russell, who co-ordinates North Hop from her Gairloch base, was overseeing the preparations for North Hop Aberdeen when we met.

The event is poised to take place for the second time at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (AECC) on April 14 and 15, and it should be the biggest its held in the Granite City yet. More than 2,000 visitors are expected to attend.

Ms Russell, the festival director, said it was clear that North Hop could handle a venue of that size after it first went to the city in 2015, a year after its debut in Inverness. The 600 tickets it issued for the first Aberdeen show at The Lemon Tree were snapped up within two weeks of going on sale.

“There was an amazing buzz,” Ms Russell said. “It worked so well. We reckon we could have probably sold the tickets two, three times over when it came down to it. We were then encouraged to look at other cities we could pop up in.” In spite of the economic downturn in Aberdeen, Ms Russell said the brewing and distilling sector in the north east is growing rapidly. “There’s such a big scene for new bars and restaurants opening there,” she added.

“Aberdeen is amazing for food and drink, people are so passionate. Our festival in Aberdeen is one of the biggest and best ones we do.”

North Hop’s rise has been rapid, and its impact has exceeded Ms Russell’s expectations. But her business background stood her in good stead as things took off.

Brought up in Wester Ross, Ms Russell took her early steps in the working world in the hospitality industry. It led her to embark on a course studying hospitality management at the University of Strathclyde, but she quickly realised the path was not for her.

“By the time I got to uni, I felt it was going over what I had already learned,” she said.

“I’m a firm believer in hands-on experience. I realised, ultimately, that I didn’t want to be studying.”

At that point, Ms Russell’s father’s gardening and forestry firm was expanding, so she returned to Gairloch and found herself running the business. She did so for three years. From there Ms Russell made the leap into marketing, taking on a job working for Freda Newton’s tour firm Jacobite in Inverness.

Having found her calling, she turned freelance and then set up Snow Marketing, under whose banner North Hop is staged. Quickly thereafter she found herself receiving a steady stream of inquiries from small brewery and distillery start-ups looking for marketing support. “I’ve always had a big interest in food and drink, from working in hospitality from a young age,” Ms Russell said. “I love travelling and discovering new things. After speaking to a few breweries and bar companies, ideas started flowing. Inverness, especially, was left off the map. There were so many Highland businesses, but yet they were all having to travel huge distances to showcase their products and get their names out there.”

It didn’t take too long for Ms Russell to realise she was on to something special. She announced North Hop’s arrival on social media in 2014 and within a week it was the talk of the industry.

“I was putting personal finance into it, but within a week of being on social media channels there was such as buzz,” she said. “It drew people in from the outset. The first one [North Hop] we did was in Eden Court [Theatre, Inverness] in August 2014, and the response was amazing.”

After taking its bow in the Highland capital, North Hop was then held in Aberdeen in 2015, before returning to Inverness later that year. It then went back to the Granite City in 2016, this time at the much bigger AECC, before taking root in Edinburgh and then Glasgow for the first time. North Hop welcomed nearly 1,000 visitors to Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms last year, and will return to the city later this year. The venue has still to be decided. In Glasgow it will be held again at SWG3 in Finnieston, where around 1,800 are expected to attend.

That North Hop has struck such a chord with the Scottish public signals just how seriously consumers take food and drink these days. It also underlines the rude health of the industry, be it on the much-publicised craft beer and spirits scene or, increasingly, street food.

If it’s artisanal donuts, gourmet toasties, or Prosecco served from a converted horse box you are after, then North Hop is the place you will find them. Ms Russell said: “We struggled for the first festival to get enough vendors to get involved, because they just didn’t have the set-ups for big events. Now I’ve got a waiting list of about 50 street food vendors wanting to get involved. It is just crazy.”