Islay's Southern Distilleries

Posted on 2007/09/09 19:33:47 (September 2007).

[Wednesday 5th September]
The South coast of Islay is home to four of its distilleries - from East to West we have Port Ellen (sadly now closed), Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg. All four of these would have to rank in my top ten favourite malts, and so you can imagine just how excited I was today to be able to see all of them for the first time.

Distillery number one was Port Ellen, and I realised when we woke up in the morning that we could actually see this from the hotel room we had stayed in the night before. The last cask of whisky produced here was back in 1983, but the distillery still forms a part of the island's most famous export - the warehouses are still used for maturing, and the maltings here (now on a large and heavily industrialised scale) are used to supply just about every other distillery on the island. As far as I know there aren't any tours on offer here, so we just saw this from the outside, but it was still a rather fantastic feeling just to be here.

Distillery number two was Laphroaig. We'd booked ourselved on the 10:30 tour, conducted by a former distillery worker named Jack, who was an absolutely excellent guide. We went on a fair few tours this week (and have been on other distillery tours elsewhere in Scotland and Japan), but Jack has to be my all-time favourite guide. He clearly knows every part of the process inside out, and his passion and enthusiasm for the subject seemed to be completely unshiftable, despite the fact he probably does the same tour every day throughout a large part of the year. At the end of the tour, I took the customary end-of-tour dram outside, to fulfil a little dream of mine - drinking an Islay malt out on the distillery's pier (almost all the Islay distilleries were built right on the coast to enable the finished goods to be offloaded by sea). It was quite simply fabulous.

Distillery number three was Ardbeg - although we didn't go on the tour here, but instead took advantage of their rather nice cafe for a spot of lunch. The tours of all the distilleries are at fixed times, and clashed with each other somewhat, so it was seemingly impossible to fit in tours of all of the big three in the same day. Still, we had a bit of a look around outside, took a few pictures, and really enjoyed our lunch here. Probably three distillery tours - with the same jokes about the happy draff eating cows, and the myth of the Angel's share - might well have been overdoing it in one day anyway!

Distillery number four was Lagavulin. Whilst the tour guide at Laphroaig set an impossibly high bar, the much younger guide at Lagavulin did make a pretty good go of it, and it was really interesting (to a whisky nerd like me) to compare and contrast all the little nuances in the distilling process of the two rival distillers. Particularly the angle of the line pipes (the tubes coming out of the top of the stills) - Laphroaig's slope up whilst Lagavulin's slope down, which apparently may account partly for the altogether more rascally flavour of Laphroaig when compared with its neighbour. Spirit bubbling up in the Laphroaig stills often dribbles back down again and has to make several attempts to get into the condenser, giving it more time to react with the copper. Of course, there were a whole bundle of other differences between the two which may also account for the different profiles, and whisky making appears to be such a black art that even the distillers themselves are often at a loss to explain why the end result comes out exactly the way it does.

After leaving Lagavulin, we raced over to our accommodation for the next two nights - a guest house called Kilmeny near Ballygrant - in an attempt to get there in time for afternoon tea. Although we got there a bit later than we'd originally said, we were greeted very warmly by our host, and afternoon tea was all laid out for us in our suite. The suite was utterly fantastic - it was certainly in a totally different league to any B&B I had ever stayed in before, and I struggle to think of any hotel I've stayed at which had nicer decor. It really was quite beautiful, as hopefully the pictures attest.

Following our very nice afternoon tea, and a bit of a rest, we headed out once more for a bit of a drive and with the longer term aim of finding something for dinner. We'd asked our guide at Lagavulin for recommendations of somewhere to find good seafood, and she'd basically recommended the hotels at each of the major places around Loch Indaal - Bowmore, Bridgend and Port Charlotte. We took a look at each of these in turn, which as an added bonus also gave us a chance to have a quick look at two more distilleries - Bowmore and Bruichladdich.

We finally settled on the Port Charlotte Hotel for dinner, and weren't disappointed. We ate in the bar there, and although they did kick up a bit of a fuss about us ordering one item from the restaurant menu, they agreed to do it "just this once". So Chie was very happy - she had a good selection of seafood (scallops followed by chowder) and I also had a decent meal, a very interesting starter (tandoori feta cheese salad) and a sort of pasta bake for a main course. They also had a very good selection of Islay malts in there - and I had a good wander through their list, trying some interesting independent bottlings of Caol Ila and Ardbeg.

As an added bonus we made a friend in there - a Japanese lady named Sawako was also dining there tonight, and so naturally Chie and her got chatting. She had come to Islay on holiday by herself, all the way from Japan, driven purely by her love of whisky. I couldn't help admiring that, especially in the face of the transportation difficulties, the disappointing weather, and the sheer cost of it all. What a trooper!

Comme un poisson dans l'eau ! (like a fish in water, i.e. being in your element)

Posted by Sheri at 2007/09/09 21:23:45.

Very nice tour you have had in Scotland! Managed to do a lot of things, and the whisky part must have been really a dream come true! I have a question... What is the "spirit safe"? As for the pictures they are great, it's nice to add some visual to the factual tale that you do in the blog. And it's also great to see that Scottish weather hasn't changed a bit since I last was there! :D

Posted by Lox at 2007/09/10 07:20:31.

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