The spirit is from the team behind Torabhaig, Isle of Skye’s first whisky distillery.
Torabhaig’s eagerly awaited Legacy Series 2017 single malt will launch tomorrow (Friday, February 19) after a four-year wait since the distillery first launched.
The second whisky distillery to be built on the Isle of Skye in 190 years, the firm’s new peated single malt is bottled at 46% ABV and is the inaugural expression from the the distillery.
It will be available at specialist whisky retailers throughout the UK, with some retailers limiting bottles to one per household and others operating on a purely first-come-first-served basis.
Operating since January 2017, the team blend traditional and contemporary approaches to distilling with copper stills, while also choosing to ferment in traditional wooden washbacks to add complexity of flavour and evolving a distinctive signature style.
Is it the first of four bottlings ahead of Torabhaig’s 10-year-old single malt whisky which will be released in 2028.
Neil Mathieson, chief executive at Mossburn Distillers, the company behind Torabhaig, said: “This ‘Legacy’ series will lay down the foundations for the future profile of our bottled whisky and with each edition we will guide your journey with details on the barley, yeast and casks on the back label of the bottle.
“For the first, the 2017, we selected only 100 barrels from our first quarter’s distillation the spirit having been aged solely in Bourbon barrels that we shipped directly ourselves from the Kentucky distillery the day they were emptied.
“What’s three or four years to a whisky maker when traditionally we are ageing spirit for up to 25 years or longer to see the effect of ageing and barrel choices? Here at Torabhaig, we had to start at the very beginning with looking at the peating levels of our malted barley, the barley varieties themselves and the effect of the harvest.
“We followed this by experimenting with yeasts and examining how our mashing and distilling processes could produce different flavours as we adjusted the model. We then had to anticipate the ageing cycle in different cask sizes and types and regularly taste the spirits as they developed, in order to choose which batches would represent us at the relatively youthful ages of our first bottlings.”
Torabhaig Legacy Series 2017 will be available at specialist whisky merchants including Aberdeen Whisky Shop, Luvians, Harvey Nichols, Master of Malt and The Whisky Exchange to name a few. It is priced from £50.