ARRAN DISTILLERY Harmony Volume 7

Although the Arran distillery is relatively new (production started in 1995), the island in the Firth of Clyde has a long history of whisky-making. A fertile place, the farmers in the south of the island had plenty of raw materials to work with, and when home distillation and small stills were effectively banned in the late 18th century, they simply went underground.

After all, demand for smuggled whisky was on the rise and Arran had excellent links to Glasgow. There is some evidence that molasses was also distilled here. When the law changed, a legal distillery ran at Lagg from 1825, but it closed in 1837 and Arran’s distilling heritage was seemingly lost forever.

All that changed in 1995 when a consortium, headed by former Chivas Bros MD Harold Currie, chose a site at Lochranza in the north of the island. The decision to move to a part of Arran that was previously unknown for whisky was a result of two facts: a good water supply and potential for tourism. Today, in excess of 60,000 people visit the distillery every year.

Further cash was made by selling casks of whisky to private individuals, but the scheme was halted when it was discovered that, though the money raised was useful in creating initial cashflow, it resulted in the distillery not owning a significant percentage of its own stock – a problem when trying to build a brand.

Bottling started with a limited edition three-year-old in 1998 and the range has continued to expand, although today there are fewer ‘finished’ variants than in the past. A peated expression, ‘Machrie Moor’, has also been introduced.

In 2017 an expansion of the distillery was completed with the installation of an additional wash and spirit still, more than doubling Arran’s capacity to 1.2m litres per year. To accommodate the growing number of visitors to the distillery, Arran added a second tasting room to its visitor centre, and built an adjacent facility with meeting room, tasting bar and blending room named Rowan House.

Parent company Isle of Arran Distillers opened a second distillery, Lagg, in the south of the island in 2019, then revamped the Arran range with clean, modern packaging plus the introduction of new core expressions Barrel Reserve and The Bodega – as the name suggests, a Sherry cask-matured whisky.