The Distillers Behind Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series

Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series launched recently with two whiskies:

Torabhaig Distillers’ Series Niall’s First Edition 70cl Whisky.

Torabhaig Distillers’ Series Iona’s First Edition 70cl.

We met with Iona Macphie and Niall Culbertson, the Torabhaig distillers given the freedom to create their own whiskies. Iona used unpeated barley with 10% chocolate malt, then turned to well-used sherry casks to protect the spirit she had made. Niall changed his malt, yeast, fermentation and distillation in pursuit of a fruity, lightly peated whisky with a maritime character, eventually bringing rum casks into the mix. 

Same equipment, two very different ideas about what to do with it. I was keen to hear the thinking behind both.

The Distillers Behind Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series

There’s a lot to enjoy about talking to people who have been allowed to make the single malts they want to drink. Particularly when one of them really likes chocolate and the other would, historically, have preferred a rum. 

Iona and Niall are the first two makers behind Torabhaig’s Distillers’ Series, a project that gives members of the Skye distillery’s production team control over a whisky of their own. Malt, yeast, fermentation, distillation, maturation: they get to make the decisions, then wait several years to find out if those decisions were the right ones.

Both joined Torabhaig before it began distilling in 2017, as part of a locally recruited team with no previous experience making whisky. They have since learnt their way around the Island distillery, studied for qualifications and helped train colleagues. Now they have bottles with their names on them. 

It’s a lovely progression, and speaking to them you get a sense of how much they have enjoyed it, even when the wash looked alarming or the new make didn’t immediately taste the way they hoped.

Becoming a Torabhaig distiller

Niall has known the site for most of his life. He grew up about a mile away and remembers visiting by boat with his father, a fisherman, to play with the children at what was then a farm. There had long been talk of a distillery, but when building work finally began he was working at the ferry port. This put him in an excellent position to pester the project managers coming over about whether there were any jobs yet.

A permanent position mattered in a place where so much work depended on the visitor season. “So for us, it’s very much if a job comes up that’s all year round, it’s a very popular thing to be trying to get your foot into,” he explains. Iona, meanwhile, had spent a year as a guide at Talisker and done some web design before seeing an advert in the local paper for what she considered her dream job. She applied without expecting much to come of it.

“I thought they were just kind of taking pity on me, giving me an interview, but I ended up in the job. So they must have liked me a wee bit,” she says. “I didn’t even really know that I got it. I just got asked what sort of size of t-shirt I was”.

The first four recruits, including Iona and Niall, joined during commissioning and learnt from the specialists bringing Torabhaig into production. They helped train the five who followed, with ongoing support through mentoring and the Institute of Brewing & Distilling qualifications. Seven of those nine distillers are still there eight years later, according to Torabhaig, and the two subsequent recruits came from the visitor centre.

It’s a team in which everyone gets involved across production, as well as helping with the grounds and visitor centre. Niall explains that they were used to discussing problems and attempting to work them out together before phoning for advice. That breadth of experience would prove useful when whisky maker Neil MacLeod Mathieson told him and Iona, around two years into their employment, that they were going to have a go at designing a whisky themselves.

Making whisky their own way

Their progress with their studies helped put them first in line. The brief was broad: research the whisky, order what was needed and decide how to make it. There were practical restrictions imposed by the equipment and suppliers, and the result had to meet the requirements for single malt Scotch. Torabhaig also wanted at least one unpeated experiment, which suited Iona. Otherwise, there was a considerable amount for them to work out.

“We would make decisions on every aspect. Basically, the only things that were constrained was the size of the equipment, essentially the vessel sizes, how much we could get, what suppliers could give,” Niall says.

He discovered the supplier part fairly quickly. After lengthy discussions about a yeast he wanted to try, the question of refrigeration came up. Torabhaig used dried yeast and didn’t have the storage required for the creamed yeast he had been investigating. He had to find an alternative.

What they settled on was quite a departure from normal production. Torabhaig’s standard recipe uses heavily peated distilling malt at 75 to 80ppm. Iona went unpeated, adding 10% chocolate malt to her Concerto base. Niall’s base malt was lightly peated, at around 15 to 20ppm, with 5% brown malt and 5% dark crystal malt alongside it. Malt specifications, rather than a measure of peat in the eventual whisky, show how far both had moved from the familiar Torabhaig starting point.

Both extended fermentation and slowed the heating rate during spirit distillation, hoping to develop more flavour during fermentation and increase copper contact in the still. Iona retained the 64% ABV end cut described for standard production, while Niall cut earlier at 66%. Already we have two whiskies with interesting things happening well before anyone puts them in wood. This is my kind of conversation.

Iona’s chocolate malt experiment

Iona’s whisky began with something she tasted at Crisp’s maltings in Portgordon. The visit was part of her studies, and among the brewing malts laid out was chocolate malt. She liked eating it and wanted to see whether that character could be carried through mashing, fermentation, distillation and maturation. It’s an appealingly straightforward ambition, although actually doing it required more thought.

“So I wanted to know if I could potentially get that character from the chocolate malt all the way through to the final whisky,” she explains. “So that was a challenge in itself to bring the characteristics all the way through the process.”

Chocolate malt gets its character from roasting, rather than added chocolate, and its usefulness as a source of flavour has to be considered alongside what it contributes to the mash. Iona was wary of using too much heavily roasted malt and settled on 10%. The distillery says production went smoothly enough that she would consider increasing the proportion another time. She was only 23 when she made this whisky.

Going unpeated

Going unpeated also let her investigate what Torabhaig’s spirit was like without its most familiar feature. The house style is described as Smoke with Taste, and the team had been making heavily peated whisky up to this point, so the change was striking. Niall remembers the whole distillery smelling of coffee. Iona was initially more concerned by the appearance of the wash, which had become almost black, like stout.

Her biggest adjustment came when that wash reached the stills. She had expected the roasted coffee notes she wanted to emerge later in the distillation, and had planned to run a lengthy foreshot period before beginning to collect the heart for maturation.

“I thought that the kind of roasted coffee notes that I was looking for would come through a lot later, but actually they came through right at the beginning of the distillation,” she says.

She changed the plan and began collecting the heart after around 15 minutes. The same equipment was behaving differently with a different recipe, so Iona had to decide what to keep. The point at which she stopped collecting the heart remained 64% ABV, but the beginning of the run had given her something to think about.

Finding the right wood

All of Iona’s spirit initially went into first-fill bourbon casks. When she returned to it, however, she worried that the character was becoming obscured. Her response was to transfer a portion into fourth-fill sherry butts, an interesting choice for anyone who assumes sherry wood is always employed to make whisky richer, darker and more obviously sherried.

“I decided to recast it into fourth fill sherry butts, and it wasn’t so much for the influence of the sherry; it was more for a little bit less wood spirit contact,” she explains.

She wanted to preserve the new-make character. We talk so much about what a cask can add that it’s easy to overlook the value of one that gives the spirit a bit more room. Here, the number of previous fills and the size of the vessel mattered to her choice. Little point spending all that time trying to get chocolate malt through a still if you then bury it under oak.

For bottling, she worked through different proportions of the casks until she found the combination that suited her. “I married the two together, different percentages of different casks, and chose what I thought represented what I wanted in my head the best.”

That original idea was connected to the things she enjoys: walking the hills with her dogs, autumn weather, fireplaces and whisky after dinner. “I wanted to make something quite rich that had some kind of punchy flavors, not too wishy-washy sort of,” Iona says.

The release is bottled at 60.9% ABV. Its supplied tasting notes describe vanilla, cocoa butter, dark chocolate and malted cereal on the nose, followed by clove, peppermint, caramel, redcurrant and raisin on the palate. Ginger carries into a finish with peppercorn and cinnamon. Iona likes hers neat, although both distillers were happy to experiment with cocktails for their local launch.

Niall’s taste of the coast

Niall’s whisky grew out of his enthusiasm for rum and his memories of the place. His father was a fisherman and a rum drinker, and Niall associated the bay with boats, beach fires and barbecued food. He wanted a pronounced fruity character that could sit alongside a little peat and something of that coastal feeling. He’s also a rum drinker.  “All these ideas were going through my head,” he says.

There was certainly no shortage of ideas in the recipe. As well as the lightly peated base and two speciality malts, he chose a 2:1 combination of Pinnacle MG+ and Fermentis M-1 yeasts. He extended fermentation, slowed the heating to lengthen his spirit run and stopped collecting the heart at 66% ABV. He readily admits that changing so many things made it difficult to work out exactly which choice was responsible for which flavour.

“I did so many different changes that it’s quite difficult to identify what was being affected by what,” he says. “Perhaps a bit mad scientist, to be honest, but it turned out very nice. I’m delighted.”

The new make didn’t immediately have all the character he was hoping for, and he worried that his various changes might have cancelled one another out. During maturation in first-fill bourbon, however, the fruitiness began to emerge. That was particularly important because he was considering rum casks and wanted to know that he had made a fruity spirit before relying on rum wood to contribute more.

The devil’s in the detail

His concern was that the casks might end up doing the work he had intended to achieve through production. Finding those flavours in the bourbon-matured stock reassured him, and a portion was subsequently moved into rum casks. Even then, it wasn’t inevitable that the rum-matured component would make the first release: an entirely bourbon-matured combination was among his final contenders when he worked through the bottling options.

That’s the sort of detail I love. You might assume the rum drinker had decided where all this was going from the start, but he still wanted to see what worked. The supplied notes for his eventual release describe cooked pineapple, guava and pear-drop aromas, with golden syrup, vanilla, ember ash and sweet char. Orange, biscuit, sea salt and brine follow on the palate, carried by a lightly oily texture. It’s bottled at 59.3% ABV.

Niall feels the light peat and dark crystal malt helped towards the barbecue character, but is less certain where the saltiness came from. “There’s a saltiness to it, which I think is just luck, because I didn’t have any plans on how to get that across,” he says. He suspects it may be part of Torabhaig’s character, but doesn’t pretend to have isolated the cause. His advice for drinking it is more definite: “Just a little bit of water makes it sing.”

Learning as the whisky matures

The whiskies initially matured away from Torabhaig because its own warehousing wasn’t ready. Iona and Niall assessed samples before travelling to Tweedbank in the Borders to carry out the recasking, after which casks came to the new warehouse on Skye. Having them on site meant the distillers could follow their development and work through the different combinations for bottling.

It’s tough to know how much difference moving the whisky to Skye made. Neither was prepared to claim they could separate the effect of location from the changes in cask, since most of the stock brought to the island had also been recasked. They hadn’t yet made the comparisons required to answer that properly. Later experiments have been able to spend more of their maturation on site, so it will be interesting to return to that question as the series develops.

The final bottling trials were another opportunity to involve the rest of the team. Colleagues tasted the combinations and offered opinions, although the decision belonged to the individual maker. They had also helped produce the whiskies: designing your own recipe didn’t mean you were the only person running the equipment. While Iona and Niall waited for their stock to mature, they worked on other distillers’ creations. Eight of the nine current team members had undertaken the project by the time we spoke.

More to come from the distillers

Their involvement went right through to the labels. Iona made her own artwork, using her dog’s eye and the autumn hills of Skye as inspiration. Niall worked with a local artist who uses seaweed among her materials, taking her around the shore by the distillery. Parts of the finished image reminded him of creel ropes and his father’s fishing, which suited the whisky he wanted to make.

Each release has a global allocation of 5,250 bottles and is bottled without chill filtration or added colour. Torabhaig plans two launches a year, with stock from these first experiments retained for future releases. The distillers don’t decide when those releases happen, but they can continue to work with their whisky as it matures, including making further decisions about casks.

For whisky fans, that gives this series an appeal beyond the first pair of bottles. We can get to know the people making it, understand what they are trying to achieve and follow how their ideas develop. What comes across most when you speak to the distillers behind Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series is how much they enjoyed being trusted with the process. 

They researched it, worried about it, changed their minds and ended up with something they were happy to put their names on. I like that Torabhaig has made room for this alongside establishing its own house style, and I’m very keen to see what the other distillers have been up to. If nothing else, I suspect the conversations in that warehouse are excellent.