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Whisky
on Arran.

It’s 21:01 on Arran.
Isle of Arran

Lochranza drams and Kilmory peat.

Arran has made single malt again since 1995, when a distillery opened at the head of the glen above Lochranza. Its water comes down from Loch na Davie through a run of waterfalls, and the Queen opened the visitor centre two years later. Down at Kilmory, a younger distillery has made a bold, peated malt since 2019, looking out across the Firth of Clyde to Ailsa Craig. The coast road links them, so a day of tasting from one end of the island to the other is easy to plan. Book tastings ahead, and drivers can ask to take their drams away.

All of ArranPlaces to visitFood and drinkShops and makersWalks and natureMuseums and history
Did you know19 hours ago

Whisky-making on Arran went underground after the Scottish Parliament taxed the spirit in the 1640s, partly to pay the army.

Arran was making whisky long before Lochranza distillery was built. In the 1640s the Scottish Parliament, keen to profit from the young industry and to pay its army, put heavy taxes on every sale of the spirit. Over the centuries that followed, making it in secret became the norm, and the island's distillers hid their whisky from the excisemen, the tax officers, in all sorts of ingenious ways. Then the Excise Act of the 1800s, and a turn towards quantity over quality, saw Arran's distilleries, legal and illicit, drop away one by one, until the island had none.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
A pairing17 hours agoIsle of ArranLochranza DistilleryLochranza Castle, 0.8 milesIsle of ArranBeinn an Tuirc DistillersSaddell Bay and Castle, 2.8 milesIsle of ArranLagg DistilleryKildonan Castle, 5.6 miles

A castle and a dram.

The distilleries with a castle within ten miles: the tour in the morning, the ramparts after lunch.

See all the distilleries
Did you know16 hours ago

Lochranza ferments its wash for around 85 hours in washbacks made of Oregon pine.

There are ten of them, each holding 13,000 litres, the last four put in during November 2023.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
Did you know14 hours ago

At 2.29pm on 29 June 1995, Lochranza distillery made the first legal whisky spirit on Arran for more than a century and a half.

Arran had made plenty of whisky in its time, much of it illegal, but no licensed still had run on the island for 158 years. Then, at Lochranza, the new spirit ran through the spirit safe, the locked brass and glass box where a distiller checks the spirit without touching it, and Arran was making whisky again.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
From our guide13 hours ago

Lagg Distillery.

Lagg sits at Kilmory on Arran's south coast, looking across the Firth of Clyde to Ailsa Craig. It opened in 2019 as the younger sister of Lochranza, making a bold, peated single malt in the Islay tradition. The building is worth the trip on its own. Its long, low roofs echo the outline of Arran as seen from Ailsa Craig, and they are planted with sedum that changes colour through the year. Tours lead past the copper stills and wooden washbacks. The whisky bar looks out to sea, and the Kilmory Café serves coffee, cake and hot food.

See the place
Did you know11 hours ago

Harold Currie, who brought legal whisky back to Arran with Lochranza distillery, was the football club chairman who recruited a young Alex Ferguson.

Currie fought in the tank battle at Villers-Bocage in Normandy, just after the D-Day landings, and went on to a life in the drinks trade, running Chivas Brothers in the 1970s. He became chairman of St Mirren football club, and promptly recruited a young manager called Alex Ferguson from East Stirlingshire. Later, when distilleries across the country were closing, he decided it was the time to open one on Arran, and in 1995 Lochranza filled the island's first cask of whisky in 158 years.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
Distillery of the day10 hours ago

Lochranza Distillery.

Arran's first distillery, founded in 1995 at Lochranza, with tours, tastings, a cafe and a shop, open all year.

Read about it
Quiz8 hours ago

When the Queen opened Lochranza distillery's visitor centre on Arran in 1997, she was given two casks of whisky. Who were they for?

Did you know6 hours ago

Building work at Lochranza was halted in its first weeks so that a pair of golden eagles could nest.

The birds had settled on a cliff above the site, and two eagles were seen over the distillery on the day it opened in 1995. Their image has been on every bottle of Arran Single Malt since, as in the logo on this end wall.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
Did you know3 hours ago

The architect who designed Lochranza distillery on Arran was the man who suggested the island in the first place.

Harold Currie, a D-Day veteran and a former director at Chivas, had made up his mind to open a distillery but not where. Over dinner in Glasgow, the architect David Hutchison, whose family had lived on Arran for generations, pointed him to the island. Hutchison then drew the building too, the white distillery at Lochranza in the north of Arran, where the spirit first ran in 1995.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran
By ferry2 hours agoIsle of ArranLochranza DistilleryAttractionIsle of ArranBeinn an Tuirc DistillersAttractionIsle of ArranLagg DistilleryAttraction

The island distilleries.

Islay, Jura, Skye, Arran, Orkney, Harris: reached by ferry, which is half the day.

See the island ones
Did you know36 minutes ago

Lochranza's four copper stills were made by Forsyth and renewed in 2017.

They are small, the wash stills holding 6,500 litres and the spirit stills 4,500, with long necks built for a high degree of reflux.

See Lochranza Distillery · Isle of Arran

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