We started out the day taking a walk down by the river. It was a drizzly day but we had our handy dandy raincoats with us and stayed dry. That was our one real purchase before the trip. Knowing that we would be in Scotland in October we figured we’d better have good rain gear. We finally had a chance to use them! Who knew it would be so nice and sunny in Scotland!

Our hotel in Pitlochry

We got semi-lost on our walk a few times, but eventually made it back into town. At one point we needed to cross a dam to get back to the town side of the river. We ran into a couple coming the other way who told us that the route was closed. After some discussion, we proceeded anyway since WE didn’t see any signs and found the path across the river unobstructed. We kept expecting to find it blocked at some point, but never did. The other couple must have been confused. We did see them in town later, though, so they found a way across the river somewhere.

View from the dam

There were a couple last distilleries in town that we wanted to try. First we stopped in at Blair Athol which was just a few hundred feet down the road from our hotel. (How did Blair Athol get its name? It was named after a guy named Blair but he was a complete athol.) We were not impressed. The distillery seemed to focus mostly on blended scotches and only had one malt, and to taste that one malt you still had to go on a tour. We declined the tour and left.
Next we drove up a winding back road to the Edradour distillery. There we fell in love. Edradour advertises itself as the smallest distillery in Scotland, and that seemed to be true. The main whisky making building had one mash tun, one first run still and one second run still, and they told us that still was the smallest size allowed. If the still was any smaller it could be hidden away from the tax man, and we can’t have that!

Edradour Distillery

Walking through the building and seeing the process start to finish again was very interesting on such a small scale. We also saw the store of casks aging in the warehouse. One cask had the date of 1974 on it and had an estimated value of 250,000 pounds for just that one cask. We wondered when that would finally get bottled.
The other delightful thing about Edradour was the tasting room that was open to tour-takers. You can pretty much taste anything they make and the price for a dram was much lower than any pub we had been in. So we sampled quite a few (except for Tami, the driver) and fell in love with many of their whiskies.

The spirit safe

The distillery was purchased by the current owner in 2002. Since he purchased it, they seem to have been vigorously experimenting with casks. There are some that are done in just bourbon casks, some that are done in bourbon and then finished in a variety of wine and sherry casks, and some that do their whole time in various types of wine casks. That is very unusual, but it gives them a lot of interesting options to sell even though they don’t have much that is older than about 10-12 years. The hard part was making a decision about which one to buy and take home. A decision was made and we trundled on down the road to Edinburgh.

Spent grain is fed to the cattle – happy cows!