Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
steeply on three sides. There are two main distillery buildings, plus a smallish warehouse
hidden away behind them. The main two buildings have purely decorative pagodas which
I think you'd have to be a real knickers-in-a-twist purist to complain about; basically pa-
godas are stylised signs that shout Distillery! the way that a red and white striped pole
used to shout Barber Shop!
One building houses the offices, the Visitor Centre with the usual blonde-wood-and-
stanchions décor, a shop, an enclosure of what looks like real growing barley and a
impressively large indoor waterfall feature faked to look like a bit of hillside. Upstairs
there's a café/restaurant serving interesting, above average fare (I have a very late but
delicious lunch consisting of a venison sausage and black pudding baguette, but they do
food for normal people too). The only negatives in the café/restaurant seem to be the seat
backs, which bend alarmingly when you put any weight on them and feel like they're
about to send you tumbling backwards. The other building contains all the whisky-mak-
ing equipment.
They're having their quiet season at the moment so photos are allowed in the produc-
tion building, which in appearance is quite refreshingly different from most distilleries.
For one thing it's effectively open-plan, with the mash tun, washbacks, stills, condens-
ers and ancillary bits and pieces all in the one big square space. You head up steps from
ground level onto a metal mesh floor covered with mats where people are likely to walk
during the tour. There are lots of windows and so there's lots of light and there are tubs
of pot-plants scattered about the floor, which is an unusual sight at the business end of a
distillery (must get hot in here for the plants when it's sunny and the stills are running;
on the other hand maybe the greenery benefits from the CO
2
given off by the washbacks.
Whatever, they look real and in good nick).
There are attractive banisters in the shape of barley stalks round a well that holds the
intermediate- and low-wines receivers. The wash still has a much thinner neck than the
spirit still, and the Lyne arms are both almost flat. Our guide tells us that the sharpness
of the angle of the Lyne arm's elbow does a lot to determine the fierceness of the spir-
it, a sharp bend producing a sharp spirit, which is a detail I hadn't encountered before.
One interesting point is that there has patently been no evolution whatsoever in spirit safe
design over the years, because the one here looks like it could have come out of a distil-
lery established in 1795, not 1995.
Arran has taken the off-site handling of barley a stage further than most, buying its
raw material not just already malted but already milled and gristed too. There's no peat
in the malt itself, the local water - which was the principal reason for siting the distillery
here rather than anywhere else - being judged peaty enough by itself. Most of the pro-
duction has to be matured on the mainland because the distillery could only get planning
permission for that one relatively small warehouse behind the main buildings.
