When in Scotland, you must drink whisky, and you must spell whisky without the “e”!
It seems like there are about a million distilleries to choose from. We didn’t want to to overdue it, so we picked the two that looked like they offered the best tours and overall experience. We weren’t staying too high up in the Highlands, so they also had to be fairly easily accessible to our vacation rental, which was a “gardener’s cottage” attached to a lovely B&B near Pitlochry. Hat tip to my mom, who had stayed at the B&B nearly a year prior– we never would have found it otherwise.
Our first stop was Edradour, which was once, but is no longer, Scotland’s smallest distillery. It was one of the ones we wanted to visit (one of Sev’s Scotch aficionado friends had gifted him a bottle), and fortunately it was a quick 15 minute drive from our cottage. Pitlochry sits in a stunning green valley just before the Highlands start to get really rugged, and the drive to the distillery was by a narrow one-lane road lined on both sides by sheep pastures. (Because there are sheep everywhere!) A camera couldn’t do the scene justice; I tried. But the view was empty and full at the same time, and very serene.
Edradour’s claim to fame is that they do things as close to the “old way” as possible, which generally means it operates on a fairly small scale. The tour started with a tasting (which was tasty enough but a little rushed) and then we went into the malt room where they used to toast the barley. Back in the day, the people who used to stoke the furnace and sweep the barley around to dry it out used to get paid a pint of beer every hour for an eight hour shift, and at the end of the day they were given “two whites and a goldie,” which had to be drunk before they went home for the day. (Two whites = two drams of unaged whiskey, and a goldie = a dram of the good stuff). Scottish livers must have been extraordinarily strong in those days! (And probably still.)
We really enjoyed Edradour because it seemed their shop had a lot of crazy whiskys we’d never seen before. Since there is a worldwide shortage of sherry barrels, which are traditionally used to age scotch, the distillery has turned to using all kinds of other barrels– including for other wines like Bordeaux, Sauternes, and others, giving a whole spectrum of differently colored whiskys. Tastes of those weren’t included in the tour, but Severin bought a taste in the shop and ended up buying a bottle of whisky aged in Sauternes (a type of sweet white wine) which was a lovely canary color and a bit more mellow than regular scotch.
Edradour was founded in 1825, so it is pre-industrial, and it definitely feels like it! It’s a tumble of small white cottages clustered around a small creek:
Wooden mash tun:
Beautiful copper still:
These coils come off the back off the still to re-condense the distilling spirit. The pools are filled with fresh, cool river water to cool off the vapors.
Edradour’s whisky warehouse. Scotch has to be aged in Scotland in order to call itself scotch!
Aberlour is a bit of a different experience. It wasn’t particularly far from Pitlochry kilometer-wise but it was definitely a drive, often on back country roads. Aberlour itself was a beautiful town (as all towns in Scotland are, full of beautiful stone buildings and piped-chimneys). We didn’t realize that Aberlour was owned by Chivas, but once we did, we realized we were definitely in for a more corporate experience.
While we could take photos of whatever the heck we wanted at Edradour, at Aberlour this was the only photo we were allowed to take (and at this specified angle). Can’t let the tourists conduct corporate espionage!
The tasting at Aberlour was fantastic though, with a better ambiance and not as rushed as at Edradour. I think the tour guide did a much better job describing what we were tasting, he made us go back and forth between them to observe the differences. Neither of the distilleries we visited specialized in the super-peaty flavors that I always associated with Scotch. I daresay though I tend to like the Scotches aged in Bourbon barrels the best, because I like the vanilla-ness of Bourbon. We also tasted A’bunadh which was Aberlour’s “traditional” whisky and clocked in at 60% alcohol– too strong for me!
