Uisge Beatha

The title of this post is pronounced ish-ka bay-ha. It's Gaelic, which somehow (I don't know how exactly) is pronounced Gallic. Uisge Beatha means "water of life." It also means whisky. That should tell you a lot about how that spirit is regarded in Scotland. No whisky, no life. And yes, the way I have written out the words in this paragraph is my totally unofficial way of writing out pronunciation. It works. For me.

Also no "e" and no Scotch. Not in Scotland. Just whisky. 

Whisky is available all over Scotland. I decided early on in our planning process that we had to make it to at least one or two distilleries and be a bit serious about seeing if this stuff was any good. I actually had never tasted whisky before setting foot in Scotland, something I disclosed to my fellow tour-takers on our first distillery visit. That statement was met with shock. Why would I be taking tours of distilleries without having tasted the product in advance? Why...to find out if I liked it. Why else? That's what I did in Porto last year. Same deal here.

And for the record, I've tasted plenty of whiskey in my life. Just no whisky. Got it? Good.

With our minds made up about spending some time in the Hebrides on this trip, it seemed logical that we would make a stop on the Isle of Islay, a tiny island in the Southern Hebrides with nine (!!!) active distilleries. Right or wrong, that island served as our introduction to and almost our entire education about whisky. While we did visit one additional distillery not on Islay, we didn't visit any on the mainland (the other was on the Isle of Mull). Our sampling was limited, but very useful. This was not, after all, a trip only about whisky.

The first three drams of my whisky experience. Lagavulin. Isle of Islay.

So let's start with a few words about process.

The business of making whisky starts with the malt. In this case, malted barley. Barley is malted by soaking it in water for a couple of days and then spreading it out and aerating it until it starts to germinate, or more simply, grow shoots. When it germinates, the barley starts to convert its natural starches into soluble sugars. Those sugars are important for the creation of alcohol.

Now, too much growing is not good here. We don't want to grow actual barley, after all. So the process of malting is stopped by drying the malt, preserving the all important sugars in the barley. The malt is not just left to dry out on its own. Instead, its actively dried in a kiln. 

After the malt is dry, it is ground into grist, which is added to warm water (historically, a source of good, clean water is really important here) and stirred, which extracts those delicious sugars. The resulting liquid from this mashing process is called wort (pronounced "wert"). The wort is cooled and moved into fermentation tanks and yeast is added, which converts the sugars from the malt into alcohol and carbon dioxide. To this point, this process is pretty much the same as beer production (mmm...beer...). 

But we are not talking about beer, here. Whisky is a distilled spirit. Distillation is the process of boiling the wort in a still to extract the alcohol by raising the temperature of the liquid to 173 or so degrees Fahrenheit, which happens to be the point at which alcohol (but not other liquids, like water) vaporize. As the alcohol vaporizes, it forms a gas which rises in the still. When that vapor contacts the cooler parts of the still like the curved neck above the main chamber, it turns back into a liquid and is captured. Some whiskies are distilled multiple times. The more a whisky is distilled, generally the lighter and more purified it becomes.

Once the distillate is refined to the satisfaction of those making the whisky, it is moved to a cask and aged for a while. That cask is likely a previously used cask, say to make bourbon or sherry or wine or something else or maybe even a combination of different casks. The longer the whisky sits in casks, the more complex it becomes and the more it takes on the flavors or characteristics of those casks. That's probably enough about the process. For now.

The stills at Bowmore (top) and the fermentation tanks at Lagavulin (bottom). Islay.

So, we didn't make it to one or two distilleries on this trip. We actually made it to four. We tried to balance variety with history with learning with tasting with cost in our tasting experience. The logic here was there's no point doing (and paying for) the same thing (i.e. a distillery tour) at every place. We figured they would all be pretty much the same. We made reservations for activities at three distilleries: a straight ahead tour and tasting at Lagavulin on Islay; a warehouse visit and tasting at Bowmore on Islay; and a tasting at Tobermory on Mull. 

We also figured we might be able to squeeze one more experience in on a walk-in basis. Our plan was to visit Ardbeg for some lunch and a whisky taster for dessert but Ardbeg decided to be closed the days we were on Islay. We pivoted and went elsewhere. That turned out to be a smart move.

Because Ardbeg was closed, our whisky journey started at Lagavulin.

Lagavulin is located on the south coast of the Isle of Islay (Islay by the way is pronounced eye-luh) and sits right between Laphroaig to the west and Ardbeg to the east. All three sit right on the coast and have done for a little more than 200 years (Lagavulin was founded in 1816). They are sited that way because way back when they were established, the way supplies got loaded in and whisky got loaded out was by boat. 

This siting also creates one of the most striking images of distilleries in Scotland. The buildings at all three are painted white, and the structure closest to the water displays the name of each distillery in large black letters. Today, that would be called a super graphic. Back in the day it was necessary for ships to find the right distillery, I guess. These gorgeous clean structures with these giant words are like beacons to tourists on ships and boats today skirting the south coast of Islay. We saw them on our way over from the mainland calling to us to come and experience the uisge beatha. The image couldn't be more perfect. 

Ardbeg from the water and Lagavulin from the land. Islay.

There is something incredible about the aroma of visiting a brewery or distillery. It's the smell in the air of malted grain. Some people think it smells like bread. I think it smells more wonderful than that. I will always remember passing through Burton upon Trent as a child and inhaling the gorgeous smells coming from the Bass brewery. Who knew later in life I'd fall in love with the product itself. And setting foot on the property at Lagavulin brought all that back immediately. It is one of the best smells out there.

Our tour and tasting at Lagavulin got us something else: an introduction to peated whisky, something whisky lovers crave as unique and signature to the product. Maybe it's worth spending a few paragraphs on that whole issue.

Remember the drying of the malted barley that whole process description earlier? Well, one of the most common fuels used in the whisky kilns in Scotland is peat, an organic matter composed of partially decayed vegetation that has accumulated over centuries in bogs all over Scotland, and particularly on Islay. In many areas of the country, it is the best fuel available, for drying malted barley or any other use you might have for burning fuel (staying warm comes to mind here).

Now when the peat is burned, it infuses a smoky flavor and smell into the barley, and the grain retains that odor and taste all the way through the distillation process. It makes the whisky taste and smell smoky. Now why you would want your drink to smell and taste of smoke, I can't imagine. I don't get it at all. I mean it really is, to me, not good. I do not want this in my whisky.

Lagavulin apparently produces whiskies on the medium part of the peat spectrum. We were provided with an 8 year whisky; a 16 year Distiller's Edition whisky aged in American oak (presumably bourbon) and sherry casks; and a cask strength which was a mixture (not a blend) of 8, 12 and 16 year whiskies. They all tasted smoky, but the Distiller's Edition was mellowed and complicated by the aging process, perhaps by the sherry casks. It wasn't so bad for a drink that smelled like smoke. At every place we stopped, we were provided with pipettes to add a drop or three of water into our whisky. It helped mellow out the taste of all the Lagavulin whiskies. Water removes smokiness, I guess.

Peat. In the old kiln (no longer in use) at Lagavulin, Islay.

Our visit to Lagavulin gave us a lot to think about as we headed north on Islay to check in to our hotel and find a place for some dinner. Would all whisky taste so smoky? Was our time on Islay, and to a lesser extent on Mull, (not to mention the hard earned money we'd already committed to future distillery visits) a complete waste? Because clearly drinking smoke wasn't for me. All of that was on my mind throughout our dinner at the Lochside Hotel near our hotel in Bowmore when we ran into someone who changed the course of a portion of our trip for the better. We'll call her Nicole, because that was her name. Nicole was tending bar at the Lochside after our meal, where we stopped for a dram or two following our meal.

While perusing the pages long whisky menu at the Lochside, we availed ourselves of some of Nicole's knowledge. She explained the variety of whisky available on Islay (the Lochside has whisky produced on and off Islay but we stuck to Islay that night) including the peated-ness of the product produced by each of the nine distilleries. We tasted her brother's favorite whisky (a Bowmore finished in a bourbon cask which tasted too much of alcohol if I'm remembering right) while also learning that there are some distilleries that don't dry their malt using peat. Come again? Unpeated whisky? Let's try some of that.

Nicole pointed me towards Bruichladdich, a distillery located north of Bowmore which makes an unpeated whisky along with one of the most heavily peated whiskies in Scotland under their Port Charlotte brand. The Bruichladdich section of the Lockside's whisky menu is 29 items long. I picked the first one, the Classic Laddie, because it was unpeated and, well, also because it was cheap at just £5.25. The Lochside can sell you a dram (that's 1-1/2 ounces which is extremely small) for £265 if you really feel like splurging.

The Classic Laddie, by the way, was just what I wanted. A clean, slightly sweet spirit that tasted of barley. This deserved a little more study. Nicole changed the course of my whisky tasting. These chance encounters...I'm telling you. So valuable. Talk to people on vacation, folks!

The bar at the Lochside Hotel, Islay. Plenty of local whiskies to choose from.

There were a couple of questions I had for folks at these distilleries we visited. One was "why does this stuff cost so much?" We'll come back to that one later on in this post. The other was what does this whole "single malt" thing mean (OK and maybe what the heck is blended whisky and why do people get so upset about it?). Wonder no more...

Single malt whisky is made from malted barley and distilled in a single pot. That means single malt is produced from barley only and made by a single producer in a single pot. Not too complicated, right? This is the stuff everyone out there that loves whisky seems to be fixated on. I never knew what a "single malt" was before my trip this year to Scotland. I'm willing to bet most people who insist on having single malt don't know that either. That's cynical of me, maybe. But probably not.

Blended malt whisky is mixture of two or more single malts from different distilleries or different pots. They were very careful at Lagavulin to distance our last whisky from this term, maybe because it was produced in the same pot?

Here's where it gets tricky. Single grain whisky is made from a mixture of grains (so not all barley; I mean why would you do that???) but made in a single pot by a single distiller. Blended grain whisky is a mixture of two or more single grain whiskies. And blended whisky is a mixture of single malt and single grain whiskies, meaning it's a bunch of whiskies (not all of which are made from barley entirely) from different distillers mixed together. Johnnie Walker is perhaps the most famous blended whisky. It's not site specific. 

Everywhere we went on this trip produced single malts. And nobody talked about it that way. I guess it was assumed. I mean, why would you do anything different?

Tobermory Distillery, Isle of Mull.

Our experience at Lagavulin and our conversation with Nicole stuck with us through the trip. We had to find some unpeated whisky. We already had a reservation for a tasting at Tobermory Distillery on the Isle of Mull (Tobermory makes both peated and unpeated whisky) so we knew we'd get a taste of whisky that didn't smell and taste like smoke eventually, but we wanted something immediately.

The answer was right there in the Lochside. Let's go to Bruichladdich. We managed to squeeze a rushed visit in after a morning wildlife boat trip. It was just enough time to find a bottle that I really enjoyed: Bruichladdich's Islay Barley 2013 edition, which like the Classic Laddie I had at the Lochside is an eight year old barley-forward and not smoky liquor but with a little bit of a salty finish. And yes, I did bring a bottle home. One of the things I wanted to come back with on this trip was a bottle of whisky. That's the only souvenir I really wanted from Scotland. Mission accomplished. It really is some delicious stuff. It's clean and uncomplicated tasting; just straight ahead barley. I love it!

To be honest, I would have liked to have spent a little more time at Bruichladdich but they weren't offering anything other than tastings (which were free) when we were there and we were under a time crunch to get back to another pre-booked experience at the Bowmore Distillery and there was absolutely no way we could miss that reservation just to keep finding good whisky at Bruichladdich.

Bruichladdich Distillery, Isle of Islay (top); the only whisky I brought home (bottom).

I have to admit that it's fun to explore whisky tasting, but just going into distillery after distillery and slamming back a few drams is going to get you only so far in the day. You are likely to end up passed out in the middle of the afternoon. So to slow things down and to allow a little more time for us to ask questions and learn about what we were seeking, we booked some longer tours that would require some walking and listening and looking before we started tasting. We did this same sort of thing in the Napa Valley in 2018 with wine.

At Lagavulin, our pace was slowed by a distillery tour. At Bowmore, it was a warehouse visit, which is what we needed to leave Bruichladdich to get to. Many distilleries offer tours with visits to their warehouses with tastings straight from the casks. Bowmore's warehouse visit was a little different. Their No. 1 Vaults is a 240 year old warehouse. It's one of the oldest whisky warehouses in Scotland (our guide, Margaret, actually claimed it was THE oldest in the WORLD). I thought if I was going to do a tour ending up in a warehouse, it should be this one. It would just be a privilege to spend a little time in a place so historic.

It also came with a questionably high £55 price tag. That's about $65 for a couple of tastes of whisky (it actually ended up being four...). It was my splurge on this trip. I thought there was no way it was going to be worth it. I was wrong. Way wrong.

One of the first questions Margaret asked us when we began the tour was "What do you want to see?" My thought here was "what do you mean? aren't we going to the warehouse to taste whisky?" Apparently not. For £55, apparently we can go anywhere we want. Malting floors, fermentation tanks, still room, you name it. Let's do it all.

At this point in our trip, we had already walked through most of the whisky making process at Lagavulin, but we hadn't been to a malting floor, which is literally a floor of a building covered with malted barley about 8" thick. It's an incredible sight. The base of beer and whisky covering an entire floor of an enormous building. Talk about amber waves of grain. It was impressive. It was appetizing. We even got to use the tool that the grain minders use to turn the malt periodically for five to seven days while it's germinating. How awesome was that? No way do I want a full time job turning malting barley but I'm glad I did it once.

I'm not sure, by the way, if walking all over the barley with our shoes on is the healthiest thing to do. I guess it gets ground into grist and boiled and then strained later on in the process. I did pick up a kernel of barley from the sea of grain in the drying room and ate it and I got through that just fine.

One of the malting floors at Bowmore Distillery, Islay. The tool used to turn the malt is in the lower picture.

From the malting floors, we headed through the distillery and then to the No. 1 Vaults, a warehouse that sits below sea level and which maintains a temperature of between 5 and 8 degrees Celcius (that's 41 to 46 or so degrees Fahrenheit for those of us in the United States) with no artificial heating or cooling. In front of us stood two casks and 10 glasses of whisky (5 people on the tour; 2 glasses per person).

In the day or so before we visited Bowmore, we'd sampled 8 to 16 year old whisky. At Tobermory just one day later, we'd have whisky aged between 11 and 18 years. Waiting in the Vault for us were two whiskies that had spent 21 and 23 years in their casks. And counting, since the whisky was still in the casks when it was drawn out for us. One of the casks spent its former life holding wine in Burgundy; the other did time holding sherry in Spain.

I realized before I arrived in Scotland that whisky and other distilled spirits goes into the casks clear in color and without much taste and that the real flavor, smoothness and character of the spirit comes from the time in the barrel as the liquor absorbs the flavor from the wood. But if I were to say before I sipped those two whiskies in Bowmore's warehouse that I really understood the depth and complexity of flavor that time could impart would have been a lie. My time in the No. 1 Vault changed my perspective on whisky.

The only thing I can liken this experience to is going to a gourmet restaurant. You pay a lot of money; you taste something that you likely have never tasted before and might never again; and you walk away with a memory that you treasure and that leaves you longing to go back. That's what this was like. The whisky was peated but absolutely not smoky; the time had dulled all that flavor, although Bowmore admittedly is not a heavily peated whisky. In its place were sweet, complex, caramel-treacle-toffee flavors that were just incredible. Worth standing in a cool bunker for about 45 to 50 minutes to taste and savor. It was absolutely not what I expected. I was shocked it was this good. But I'd do this again in a heartbeat if I were back on Islay ever again.

Part of the tour, by the way, did include filling a 200 ml bottle with whisky from one of the two casks to take away so we will actually one day get to taste the 21 year old aged in the Sherry cask again. It's a cool souvenir from an experience like this.

Taking some of that sweet Bowmore whisky home with me. 

I have no idea how much a bottle of what we tasted in the No. 1 Vault would cost in a store and I didn't ask. But people pay a significant amount of money for whisky produced in Scotland. We saw a bottle in the Lagavulin gift shop with an almost £2,000 price tag. That's about $2,400. My favorite whiskey (note the "e" there) that I enjoy regularly is Powers' Three Swallow Irish Whiskey that I buy for $45 or so a bottle at my local ABC Store. How can a 700 ml bottle of whisky produced in Scotland possible cost more than 20 times that amount? And it's by no means the most expensive whisky out there.

I asked this question of our guides almost everywhere we went. Why on Earth does this stuff cost so much? I even offered an answer with my question (that there are people foolish enough to spend this amount on it). I never got a satisfactory answer. I get there are limited editions that drive prices up. I get that some bottles sell on the secondary market for more than retail that has led some distilleries to up their initial prices. 

But I cannot understand spending over $2,000 or more or way more for a bottle of liquor. If you told me the stuff we had at Bowmore retailed for (and I'm just picking a number with no sense of it being accurate here...) $500 then maybe I'd consider buying a bottle and going through it slowly over a decade or more. MAYBE. And I might have to have had some sort of financial windfall right before that decision. But $2K? There's a liquor store in D.C. that I sometimes go to that has four different whiskies (one is actually a Bruichladdich) that are on sale for more than $2,000, with the top price being $7,000. It's absolutely crazy. I'll stick with my $45 Powers and £60 Bruichladdich Islay Barley.

So that's my 2022 whisky experience. I went to Scotland knowing pretty much nothing about the whole thing and came back with a bottle of something I really love. After we left the Hebrides, I didn't drink a single drop of whisky. That's not surprising since I love beer more than whisky and I picked up COVID somewhere along the way that derailed a lot of things that I love for a few days. But this part of this trip was absolutely eye-opening. Totally glad we went to Islay.

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How We Did It

According to a few sources online, there are more than 130 distilleries in Scotland. No matter where you head in the country, it seems, you should be able to make it close to at least one without any difficulty. Having said that, there are also a lot of people out there looking to visit these things. We made reservations (as we always tend to do for these types of experiences). If we hadn't, we would have been turned away from at least a couple of places. We saw people denied space at both Lagavulin and Tobermory. If you can figure out schedules and stick to them, reservations are sometimes essential.

We tasted whisky in five places in our two weeks in Scotland: four on the Isle of Islay and one on the Isle of Mull. Of the four places on Islay, we made reservations for two and winged the other two. We got to all five places using a rental car or on foot from our hotel which we drove to in our rental car. I can't offer any advice on getting around Islay or Mull without a car, although there are definitely buses on Mull which could take you from the ferry terminal to Tobermory.

We planned our time on Islay around the two tours we definitely wanted to take: a distillery tour and a warehouse visit. There are these types of tours at a number of different distilleries. We chose the distillery tour at Lagavulin because it was on the south coast and it worked with the rest of our schedule. We chose the warehouse visit at Bowmore because it's one of the oldest whisky warehouses (or perhaps the oldest) in the world and I wanted to visit it.

I thought the Lagavulin Classic Tour was a good introduction to the whisky making process and the price was reasonable at £22. We got a sample of three different whiskies at the end of the tour along with some description of what we were about to taste, which I found useful. The Bowmore No. 1 Vaults Warehouse Tasting is pricier at £55 but it is the single experience at a distillery in our time in Scotland that I would repeat in an instant given the opportunity. Lagavulin is about a mile and a half from the Port Ellen Ferry Terminal; according to Google Maps, that's a 6 minute drive. I wouldn't debate that. Bowmore is located in the town of Bowmore, which is about a 15 minute drive north of Port Ellen.

We walked into the Bruichladdich Distillery and had no issues getting a tasting pretty much immediately. I'm not sure if I did it right or not but I tasted three different whiskies at Bruichladdich and paid absolutely nothing. I know I bought a bottle to go but my perception is that this had no bearing on the lack of payment for my samples. Whisky tasting can get expensive. I appreciated the freebies at Bruichladdich, especially since I liked one enough to purchase a bottle. Bruichladdich is about a 15 minute drive from Bowmore.

If you are in Bowmore (the town, not the distillery), it might be worth stopping by the Lochside Hotel for a dram or two at night. The list of whiskies at the bar is impressive. We stopped by the bar two nights in a row, once after dinner at the Lochside and once after dinner elsewhere. If Nicole is at the bar and you need some whisky advice, I'd definitely recommend staying a while and chatting. If you plan to eat at the Lochside, I'd suggest reservations. We didn't have any and we got a table, but we saw reservation-less folks turned away the next night.  Personally, I didn't think the food in the restaurant there was good; I'd eat elsewhere and hit their bar later.

Finally, we also visited the Tobermory Distillery in the town of the same name on Mull. I didn't spend much time blogging about that experience but our guide for our tasting (Alistair, if I'm remembering right) was honestly the most knowledgeable guide we had at any of the distilleries we visited. The information we got at Tobermory was better than any of the other stops. Alistair seemed to know the answer to every question. It's small but definitely worth the visit.

I have not included any opening times or tour times for anything we did. Maybe it's just coming out of the COVID pandemic or something but the tour options and times seemed to keep moving around. Just check the websites of each of the distilleries individually when you understand your schedule is my advice there.

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