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A handsome, even cute distillery with very much its own character. One of the nicest hours I spent on Speyside.
Invererne Road, Forres, Morayshire, IV36 3EB, 01309 675968. Gordon & MacPhail. www.benromach.com
APPEARANCE AND LOCATION: **** It is such a dinky little distillery - very clean and smart. You can see all of the processes in the one room: the mashing, fermenting and distillation.
TOURS PROVIDED:
‘Standard Tour’: £5. See ‘My Tour’ below.
‘Essential Tour’: £12.50. A more in-depth experience at this lovely little place, with three or four drams available for your enjoyment at the end.
‘Manager’s Tour’: £40. Keith Cruikshank will take you round for this glimpse at the minutiae of a working distillery. At the tour’s conclusion there are some seriously exciting whiskies to sample, including many of the vintages, produced prior to Gordon & MacPhail’s takeover.
DISTILLERY-EXCLUSIVE BOTTLINGS: A single cask, bottle-your-own available in the museum across the courtyard from the visitor centre, £60.
My Tour – 28/04/2010
THE RUNNING COMMENTARY: **
THE PROCESS AND EQUIPMENT: **
Notes: The production process at Benromach takes place within the one airy room: one pair of stills, two washbacks and a variety of different spirits passing through the spirit safe on an annual basis: peated, heavily-peated, organic, Golden Promise mashes…
GENEROSITY: * (1 dram as part of the standard tour spec, but you can request samples of others.)
VALUE FOR MONEY: *
SCORE: 6/10 *s
COMMENT: The tour begins with a video by Gordon & MacPhail. This includes footage of the shop in Elgin, their bottling facility and their own maturation warehouses where the casks they buy acquire their character. They were gearing themselves up for the imminent whisky festival during my visit: lots of very smart banquetting tables had been laid out in the old maltings. We were in there, too, to view the small museum they have of old distilling equipment. There we also found the bottle-your-own single cask. I regret that I couldn’t find a price. It is the smallest distillery in Speyside, and the only one that produces using a lightly peated malt as standard practise. It’s about 8-12ppm. You can see all of the equipment in the one room and standing beside the mash tun I smelt for the first time the dry, rich influence of the peat. Delicious! The smell from outside had been of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. They’re ludicrously tasty, and so was the atmosphere of Benromach. By the spirit safe the guide poured a little of the peated new make spirit into my palm and a little of the unpeated new make into the palm of the other gent on the tour with me. Letting it dry off and then smell each others hands resulted in a marked difference. Mine gained a dry and rich earthiness over the clean cereal barley of the unpeated spirit. I couldn’t stop sniffing my hands because in its fruitiness I recognised something of my beloved Caol Ila. The warehouses were as most warehouses are. There was a cask with Prince Charles’s name on it, though, having re-opened the distillery in 1998. Back to the VC for a nip of something. I was bracing myself for the Traditional, which hadn’t set my world on fire the last time I tried it. What we got instead was the new 10YO which is just tremendous. It really is gorgeous. The peating is just right and creates a whole new flavour profile for Speyside malts. I WILL be buying a bottle. So concluded Speyside, just as it was about to have its first of two major jollies of the year. Distilleries now would require a little more effort on my part to reach.
