One of the Scotch whisky industry’s greatest secrets sits at the foot of the Ochil Hills. You may notice some warehouses close to the road as you drive past, but it’s more likely that your eyes will be drawn to Dumyat’s crags or the phallic thrust of the Wallace Monument on the near horizon. …
Sometimes when you are thanking a long-dead distiller for building his still in such a stunning location, you wonder at the insanity that led him to settle on such a remote spot. Talisker is one of those places: situated high on the northwest coast of Skye in Scotland, it looks back to the jagged …
The decline of Campbeltown as a distilling capital came suddenly. Of the 21 distilleries that Barnard visited, only two are still in existence and one of them, Glen Scotia, is open only intermittently. The good news is that you will soon be able to buy five different Campbeltown malts; four from one distillery – …
It would be appropriate for a people-based profile of whisky to begin by naming the first whisky maker. Sadly, no one knows who he was. In fact, no one knows who the first distiller was. It is clear that from AD 4 onwards, alchemists in China, India, Arabia, Egypt and Greece were using distillation …
There’s little doubt that you’ve arrived in peat country when you drive into the courtyard at Laphroaig and the kilns are on. Ardbeg may be more heavily peated, Lagavulin more smoky, but if it is an uncompromising belt of pitch, peat oil, tarry ropes and iodine you want, this is the place to come …
As the whisky industry continues to consolidate, the days of family-owned distiller/blenders is fast becoming a memory. William Grant & Sons is one of the few noble exceptions, proving that a family firm compete with the UDVs of this world by being as self-sufficient as possible. Every firm uses its own malts as the …
At a glance, the fertile plains of the Black Mr Horn are a pretty fine site for a distillery with quality supplies of barley, some peat from Illy Hanson’s ground, pure water. Given the fecundity of the area it is perfectly logical that UDV Glen Ord has one of its main makings on the …
Despite being one of the most fertile parts of Scotland, Aberdeenshire has very few distilleries. In 1995 it looked likely to have one less when Morrison Bowmore (MBD) mothballed Glen Garioch, in the little town of Oldmeldrum. Much to everyone’s surprise they reopened it two years later – in time for its 200th birthday …
Few distilleries have been as transformed in the malt explosion as Glenmorangie Single Highland Rare Malt Scotch Whisky. “Until the 1970s there were two stills and we were selling five cases of malt a year,” says manager Graham Eunson. “Now we’ve got eight stills, we’re the biggest selling malt.” Little chance that success will …
Nothing is straightforward in whisky. Here is a distillery which makes the biggest selling malt in the world, but still uses coal-fired stills, a technique most distillers have abandoned for being too expensive and liable to give variable results. It’s a light dram produced from tiny stills, when industry wisdom maintains that small equals …