Best Scotch Whisky Distillery Tours

We don’t need to tell you we’re big fans of Scotch whisky; chances are you already know thanks to our Amazon Prime series. And while a dram at home always hits the spot, Scotch can taste even more magical when sipped at the source. Whether your thing is Highlands or Lowlands, Islands or Islay – pack those bags for our virtual round-up of Scotland’s best distillery tours. Cheers!

Talisker, Islands

Perched on the shores of jaw-drop-beautiful Skye – full of rolling green hills, misty peaks and fluffy herds of roaming sheep – Talisker’s setting alone is worth the epic journey from the nearest city (Inverness: two and a half hours away). Its sweet, full-bodied malts can be tasted on a Cask Tasting tour, where drams are hand-drawn atmospherically from warehouse casks. Mitigate the long (albeit beautiful) drive with an overnight on this pretty isle; a drive along undulating roads to the north, The Three Chimneys is one of Scotland’s finest restaurants with rooms.

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Glenfiddich, Dufftown

If you join just one distillery tour, it might have to be this one. Pedigree aside – world-renowned, family owned Glenfiddich has been distilling in Dufftown since 1887 – this 35-hectare site is one of the most impressive in whiskydom. Rich in detail on the whisky-making process, Glenfiddich’s tours hop between Instagrammable stone-fronted buildings, bottling lines, giant stillhouses and a seriously atmospheric traditional aging warehouse. Guides are lively, answer all your questions, and (obviously) take you through a generous tasting flight of golden Speyside liquor at the end.

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Ardbeg, Islay

Seriously smoky, sweet and citric, Ardberg isn’t for the faint-hearted. But fans keen to make the peaty pilgrimage to Islay – a ferry ride or flight from mainland Scotland – can down their fill on a series of daily tours. The 2021 schedule is still being confirmed, but historically a tasting of the core range kicks off at an ambitious 10:30am, then at lunchtime is followed the Committee Bottle Tasting - a set of pours picked by a guide - before peaking in the Old, Mature and Unusual tasting in the afternoon. Book into the distillery’s onsite Seaview Cottage and you can wake up and do the whole thing all over again tomorrow. 

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The Dalmore, Alness

One of Scotland’s more accessible distilleries, The Dalmore is stumbling distance from Alness rail station, a hop north of Inverness – so it’s great if you don’t drive (or if, for obvious reasons, you don’t want to). It’s a pretty one too: aged stone buildings, blue shore waters of Cromarty Firth, green fields. Tours are intimate – with a maximum of just about a dozen guests, and often fewer – so there’s plenty of opportunity to ask questions and learn all you’d like about this popular single malt. Videos walk you through proper ‘nosing’ and tasting technique, too, great for whisky beginners.

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Glenkinchie, Pencaitland

This Victorian distillery needs to be on your hit-list for two reasons: it’s only a half-hour drive outside of Edinburgh, making it perfect for city-breakers or car-free travellers, and it’s the Lowlands home of Johnny Walker. And in case you need a third – it’s just had a major revamp, with its red-bricked buildings now housing a top-quality multi-levelled visitor experience. A lovely orchard and garden, speckled with blooms in summer, is a great spot to chill and wait out sobriety after a few Highballs in the bar.  

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Glenlivet, Speyside

If we could move into a distillery, it might be this one: set above Speyside hills in a remote glen, with floor-to-ceiling windows along the still room that let sunshine spill in, it’s one of the best-looking distilleries out there. And, if you’re serious about your whisky, it’s one of the finest for deep-dive tastings, too. While many distilleries offer just one tour, Glenlivet has a roster that includes sessions aimed at knowledgeable enthusiasts as well as beginners. They’ll be announcing new experiences very soon, so keep eyes on their website for details.

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Glenmorangie, Tain

You’ll get a warm Highland welcome at this famed distillery, home to Scotland’s tallest stills – the copper necks are as long as a fully grown giraffe – and some of its most elegant malts. Set on the banks of Dornoch Firth, Glenmorangie runs a series of expert-led tours that illuminate the whisky-making process from grain to glass. Sign up to The Innovator and you’ll get the chance to taste some of the distillery’s most prized expressions.

Find more info here

Fancy a sneaky peek of some of Scotland’s distilleries while you wait for things to open up again? Then, make sure you check out The Three Drinkers do Scotch Whisky on Amazon Prime!

Ardbeg make a beer! All for a good cause.

Words by Colin Hampden-White

Ardbeg has announced its first ever beer called “The Shortie Porter”. The name comes from the Ardbeg Jack Russel mascot: “Shortie”. All profits created in partnership with Brewgooder, a social enterprise, will go to clean water projects in Malawi.

This was all the idea of Alan McIntyre, the Global Senior Brand Manager of Ardbeg and his flatmate Alan Mahon, who is the founder of Brewgooder. The beer was originally scheduled for release on World Water Day on the 22nd of March, but because of the Coronavirus pandemic that was postponed. The beer will now be available from the 13th of August from Ardbeg.com and specialist retailers.  

Dr Bill Lumsden, Ardbeg Director of Distilling, Whisky Creation & Whisky Stocks commented: “We all dig Ardbeg, and no more so than Shortie. So for this life-saving, well-digging clean water brew, it was only fitting that our canine mascot should represent Islay. As with most porters, this beer is smooth and creamy. However, our malt has helped make it distinctly smoky – the way we imagine an Ardbeg beer is meant to taste!” 

The beer isn’t as smoky as one might expect, and certainly not as smoky as the whiskies the distillery is so famous for creating. The smoke is incredibly well-balanced, allowing bitter chocolate, espresso coffee and a little black treacle sweetness to come through. It is a refreshing yet complex beer.

Ardbeg joined forces with Williams Bros. Brewing Co to create the beer. The Shortie Porter was made using the peated malt that makes 10 year old Ardbeg, giving the beer its smoky character.  

Mickey Heads, Ardbeg Distillery Manager, said: “Not only is this a hugely important cause – that we’re delighted to be a part of – but The Shortie Smoky Porter is of course a first for the Distillery. Helping brew a beer may seem like unchartered territory for Ardbeg, but as any whiskyphile worth their malt will tell you, beer and whisky share the same DNA. Just like brewers, we ferment our malt. The only difference being, we hold on to the hops. We hope that Ardbeggians and craft beer lovers alike will enjoy this extra special limited edition.”

The Shortie Porter will be a limited edition and only available to the UK market. Depending on how much has been made, and they haven’t told us, I suggest you will need to be quick off the mark to order some, especially if it goes as quickly as other limited releases from Ardbeg. 

Alan Mahon, founder of Brewgooder, commented: "This collaboration is particularly special for me. To create an incredible beer that helps empower people's lives is one thing, to do it with one of the world's best whisky brands is another, but to bring it to life with my best friend: there are few things I have been prouder of in my life. I look forward to working with the team at Ardbeg to turn the profits from this beer into life-saving clean water wells for those who need them."

As it was originally planned for March, and at 6.2%, I thought the beer might be at odds with the summer months, especially with the heatwave we are currently experiencing. But I found myself surprised at how versatile and fresh it is. Even though it is a dark beer, it is crisp and lively and much of this is down to the smoke bringing all the flavours together. It’s a beer for all seasons with a great charitable reason to buy it.

The Shortie Smoky Porter will be available to purchase exclusively in the UK from Ardbeg.com, and from selected retailers, from 13 August – priced at £14 for a four pack. 

If you love smoky whisky, and in particular Ardbeg, look at the smokiness rankings we gave their annual releases. See which one was the winner here! 

3 Simple, Smoky, Whisky Cocktails For Your BBQ

Words by Helena Nicklin

Ardbeg, one of our favourite Islay distilleries has created ‘Smoke Sessions’ video guides to barbecuing meat and smoky drinks with grilling legend DJ BBQ (you can read about those here). The cocktail recipes looked so good however, that we got the lowdown for you on how to make them. Here they are: three epic, seriously smoky whisky cocktails for your summer barbecue. You’re welcome!

Smoky Apple Cider

Ingredients:

• 50ml Ardbeg Wee Beastie
• 50ml apple cider
• 50ml ginger beer
• 25ml freshly squeezed lime juice
• Demerara vanilla sugar to taste

Method

Add all ingredients into a mixing glass with ice, then stir and strain into a tumbler or a jar. Garnish to your taste with a cinnamon stick, star anise or even a slice of red apple. Take this from summer to winter by making it in a batch, warming it up and serving with a ladle. Amini toffee apple, if you can find one makes a special garnish for halloween too.

Maple & Bacon Old Fashioned

Ingredients:

• 50ml Ardbeg Ten Years Old
• 15ml maple syrup (to taste)
• 3 dashes orange bitters

Method

Stir all the ingredients together and serve over a large cube of ice. You can have fun with the garnishes here: try a rasher of streaky bacon as a stirrer, add a spring of torched rosemary or simply, an orange twist. 

An Oa Bloody Mary

Ingredients:

• 50ml Ardbeg An Oa
• 100ml roasted tomato juice (find one with garlic and herbs if you can)
• 1 dash hot sauce
• 1 dash Worcestershire sauce
• 25ml lemon juice
• 12.5ml Pedro Ximenez sherry

Method

Combine all the ingredients into a mixing glass, add ice and then pour again into a second mixing glass, straining the liquid as you do so. Repeat a few times until the mixture is super smooth and well blended. Rim your glass with celery salt and add your garnish. For this, we recommend dill or even grated horseradish. 

Like this? Read about Ardbeg’s Smoke Sessions with DJ BBQ here, or look at the best sherry matured whiskies or even best bang for buck sipping bourbon.

This Summer: The Smoke Sessions with Ardbeg Whisky and DJ BBQ

Words by Helena Nicklin

It’s great news for fans of smoked meat and smoky whiskies as world-renowned Islay Distillery Ardbeg teams up with the brilliant master of the grill: Christian Stevenson aka DJ BBQ.

Launching today, The Smoke Sessions is an online series designed to offer the ultimate guide to barbecuing and smoking meat as well as the preparation of smoky whisky cocktail serves. In the sessions, DJ BBQ will explain and demonstrate the fundamental laws of smoke, wood and heat while spinning the decks in his inimitable style. All the while, Brendan McCarron, Ardbeg Distillery’s Head of Maturing Whisky Stocks will help creating spectacular, smoky drinks using Ardbeg Ten, An Oa and Wee Beastie.

“The taste of braided beef fillet alongside an Ardbeg Ten Old Fashioned is just awesome, and a sip of hot Wee Beastie punch with a slow smoked pork shoulder is unrivalled,” says DJ BBQ. “My smoky barbeque recipes share so many characteristics with the flavours of Ardbeg whisky, and they complement each other perfectly. The laws of wood, heat and smoke are so important to barbecue and single malt alike, and once mastered, you’ll become a barbeque boss!”

Watch  DJ BBQ create amazing recipes such as the 18-Hour Whisky-Smoked Pulled Pork, served with Ardbeg Wee Beastie Hot Apple Cider, Coal-Roasted Beef Plait served with Ardbeg Ten Maple & Bacon Old Fashioned, and Whisky Planked, Pit-Smoked Salmon served with Ardbeg An Oa Bloody Mary.

How to Watch

To watch the Ardbeg Smoke Sessions, tune into Ardbeg’s Instagram Live on Friday 24 July at 8pm BST to watch DJ BBQ kick it all off. Keep an eye on all of Ardbeg’s social channels and the videos can be watched at any time on YouTube here: 

Law of Heat 

Law of Smoke 

Law of Wood

How to Taste

Cocktail fans will be able to order DJ BBQ’s Maple and Bacon Old Fashioned for delivery across the UK, via Mothership on the Drinks At Home platform, for a limited period from 21 July 2020.

Like this? Try this piece on the Ardbeg releases ranked by smokiness and What is peated whisky?

Ardbeg An Oa

Ardbeg An Oa 46.6%

There have been no new constant expressions from Arbeg for nearly a decade, so the anticipation for An Oa was pretty high, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Not as full on as Uigeadail but with more of a punch then the ten, this is a great addition to the line up.

Nose: Nutty with sweet tobacco leaf mix with confected sweets covering a base citrus of lemon and blood orange. Butterscotch and a little fudge bring more sweetness.

Palate: There is still plenty of peat to keep the core Ardbeg fans happy, but the overall mouth feel is quite light and delicate. Cigars and chocolate mix with fudge and limes giving good complexity and balance.

Finish: The smoke lingers on and becomes slightly ashy, but there is fudgy sweetness right alongside the smoke up until the end. The final flavours are not drying or spicy, but sweet and smoky.

Ardbeg Ten Years Old Gift Box, 70 cl

CHW

What is Peated Whisky?

Peated whisky: because what’s the point of drinking whisky if it hasn’t been heavily flavoured by thousands of years of decaying organic matter?

I mean sure, when you put it like that maybe you can understand why peat tends to split whisky drinkers into two distinct camps. Some compare it to licking an ambulance brake pedal, and some compare it to licking an ambulance brake pedal and are genuinely excited by the idea. Regardless of whether this appeals, if you want to learn more about whisky, you need to learn a little about peat, because this mysterious substance has the amazing ability to impart rich and unique flavours into your glass.

So how does peating whisky work?

Dried peat has been used as fuel in Scotland for hundreds of years. Peat bogs are naturally occurring ‘carbon sinks’ i.e. areas that accumulate and store carbon-containing chemical compounds for an indefinite period. In fact, peat is so good at this, that it is the most efficient form of carbon sink on the planet and dried peat will produce more energy than coal when burnt. As well as this, peat is unique to bogs, mires and moorland – the sort of areas that appear in quite high frequency in, shall we say, the damper areas of Scotland, such as the north-west Highlands and the islands of Islay and Jura.

Thanks to these excellent energy rates, peat has therefore been used in the whisky making process for hundreds of years, and the primary way that peat’s distinctive flavour characteristics make their way into your dram is through its use as a fuel source in the malting process.

At this stage in production, the germinating process which has been started by soaking and turning the barley needs to be stopped, and this is done by the application of heat. Traditionally this was provided by a peat-fired kiln which caused the malted barley to absorb a significant quantity of peat smoke (depending on the drying time and the distiller’s preference). Perhaps surprisingly, this flavour is so strong, so persistent and so recognisable that it survives the entire distillation process, making its way through the mash tun, washbacks, stills and warehouse to remain detectable in your glass of whisky.

Is Islay the only place for peated whisky? And where is peat used?

Now, when people talk about peated whisky they generally think of Islay malts, but the use of peat isn’t limited to Islay now, and certainly wasn’t in the past. A number of factors means that peated whisky is still mainly linked to the islands and western highlands however. This is partly because these are the areas where peat preponderates, but also because many Lowland and Speyside distilleries took the opportunity to switch to firing their kilns with coke (a processed form of coal) when access to the railways made this a viable and cheaper option. As a result, for many years, the perception has been that if you want a peated whisky you need to head to Islay.

So what does peat bring to whisky?

Peat is whisky terroir

In a very literal sense, peat is terroir (take that, wine!). As a result, different peat will impart different flavours, and different distilleries will use peat for different length of time when drying their malt. If you want to get technical, the concentration of peat in whisky can be measured by PPM (phenol parts per million). Phenols are the class of compounds in peat smoke which are retained by the malted barley and their prevalence therefore has a big impact on taste. On Islay, whisky can range from 1-2ppm up to 54ppm. What does this mean? In terms of tasting notes, a peated whisky is likely to give you sulphur, smoked meats, iodine, rich bonfire smoke.  If this sounds good to you, perhaps you should explore some Islay whiskies?

Where to start your peat odyssey

Why not start at Lagavulin?

The oldest distillery on Islay can trace its (unofficial and highly illegal) history back to a collection of small bothy distilleries in Lagganmhoullin dating from 1742. These were brought together into a legitimate business in 1816, which means that the brand has been producing highly-regarded peated single malt whisky for at least two hundred years now.

The old settlement of Lagganmhoullin is now a small town on the Lagavulin bay where the distillery is positioned - open to the wild weather of the north Atlantic, which gives the spirit a lot of its coastal aromas of seaweed and smoked fish.  This coastal spot also provides a distribution route with the distillery owning its own Clyde puffer up until 1956, meaning barley could be brought in by sea and finished spirit sent back down to Glasgow with just a slight detour around the Mull of Kintyre.

Both the peat and water are locally sourced, as they always have been - the Illeachs wouldn’t have it any other way – and the two intertwine on their slow descent to the distillery from Lochan Sholum, inland and 200m above sea level. From here the water flows two and a half miles to the distillery, soaking up moss and peat, but don’t get confused.  At this point the peat contributes only colour and a slight tang to the water – as it takes on the same shade as the finished whisky – the smoky flavour comes almost exclusively from the kiln.

Lagavulin no longer malts its own barley – the floor maltings closed in 1974, but they procure their own specific recipe from the Port Ellen maltings. It is dried over peat for a high proportion of the total drying time giving a final phenol count of around 37ppm.

After the excitement of distillation, the spirit rests in the coastal warehouses, seawater pooling on the earthen floors and breathes steadily for 8, 12 or 16 years before bottling. Maturation allows the spirit to soak up the atmosphere of this unique setting and takes just a slight edge off the wild smoky flavour of all that centuries old organic matter. Yum.

Try these classic whiskies from Lagavulin

Lagavulin 16 Year Old, 43% ABV, around £49 for 70cl – Long-time standard bearer of the range, dominated by Lapsang Souchong, hints of pipe tobacco, smoked fish and iodine.  A classic Islay single malt.

Lagavulin 8 Year Old, 48% ABV, around £52 for 70cl - Originally a limited-edition to mark the distillery’s bicentenary in 2016, but now part of the core range this expression is all woodsmoke, tobacco and pepper.

Lagavulin Distillers Edition, 43% ABV, around £74 for 70cl - Double matured in Pedro Ximenez casks, this is a mellow Lagavulin with flavours of seaweed, Christmas cake and sea salt.

Want to see The Three Drinkers cutting peat at Laguvalin in the sunshine? Watch The Three Drinkers do Scotch Whisky, now streaming on Amazon Prime!