June is a big month for Isle of Arran Distillers, the company behind two distilleries on the west coast island.
The business opened its Lochranza distillery in June of 1995 and later this month, on Sunday 29th June at exactly 2.29pm, the team will mark the 30th anniversary of the first ‘middle cut’ of spirit being taken from the stills.
Fans of the company’s whisky will be in attendance to celebrate, but they won’t be the only ones raising a glass to Lochranza’s longevity.
Later in the year, the company will release its first ever 30 year old bottling – a small-batch product limited to just 300 bottles.
Speaking to SLTN, managing director Euan Mitchell, who joined Isle of Arran Distillers in 2003, said the first 30 year bottling was necessarily small due to dwindling stocks of the 1995 spirit. However, the distillery ramped up its production in 1996, meaning a larger release will be possible next year.
In the meantime, Mitchell is keen for as many whisky fans as possible to sample the first 30 year bottling – and some of Scotland’s top whisky bars will have a role to play in making that happen.
He said: “It’ll be a premium price, but it won’t be a crazy price. We’re not looking to charge thousands of pounds for this. Ultimately we want everybody who loves Arran to feel that they have a shot of getting a sample of this.
“We’ll also aim to get some bottles into a few really top end whisky bars in Scotland, so that if people don’t have an opportunity to buy it, they’ll at least have a chance to have a dram of it.”
That approach to pricing – in Mitchell’s words, premium but ‘not taking the mickey’ – has always been core to the Arran business.
He explained: “We still believe our products are within an achievable price range, and that people that love single malt Scotch whisky will feel it’s a fair price to charge for a great dram.
“And that’s always been our ethos. We don’t want our bottles sitting gathering dust on shelves.
“That’s not what whisky’s about. It’s there to be opened, it’s there to be sampled, it’s there to be enjoyed with friends. It’s about creating these special moments, and that doesn’t happen if it’s stuck in somebody’s collection in a cupboard.
“Being obtainable is something that’s very important to us.”
In fact, after a period where super-premium, collectable whiskies have been a focus for many producers, Mitchell predicted there is about to be a shift in the sector in the coming years, with ‘affordability and drinkability’ the driving forces for single malt.
Next year, Arran Distillers will reintroduce its 14 year-old expression, which was discontinued several years ago.
Sitting between Lochranza’s 10 year-old and 18 year-old expressions, Mitchell said it will be ideally positioned to tap into that demand for affordable quality.
“It’ll be interesting to see people’s reaction to the Arran 14 returning,” he said. “I think the timing is perfect, because the market for super-premium products, really expensive malts, has certainly fallen back quite drastically and there’s much more of a focus on malts between that £40 up to £100 mark.
“That’s what people seem to be focusing on now: good quality, interesting, affordable malts for enjoyment rather than collecting.
“I think the 14, as a partner to our 10 year, will find a really nice sweet spot within that. We’re really excited about that coming back.”
The development helps to underline that even though Scotch whisky as an industry is steeped in tradition, it’s constantly changing.
A shift towards super-premium products and back again is just one of the changes Mitchell has witnessed during his own 29 years in the industry (he started at Springbank in 1996).
Among the other notable evolutions are whisky drinkers being more open-minded about a spirit’s age (“if it’s good it’s good. If it’s not, it’s not”) and a broadening of the customer base.
He said: “It’s been great to see the growth worldwide, the appreciation of single malts, new markets emerging, but also what was very much seen as a male-dominated domain has opened up and the emergence of a much wider group of female whisky drinkers has been a great thing.
“It’s become a much more open industry, which can only be a good thing.”
And Arran Distillers itself has changed quite a bit over the years as well. In 2016 the company doubled the number of stills at Lochranza from two to four, increasing capacity again in 2023 with the installation of four additional washbacks.
By then the company had opened its second distillery, at Lagg in the south of the island.
Mitchell said that although the company hadn’t originally planned to open a second distillery, the team is ‘absolutely delighted’ with the facility, which began production in 2019.
He explained: “At board level it was initially a discussion about needing land for warehousing. We’d really filled out the footprint of the Lochranza Distillery site, and we were looking for space on Arran where we could potentially build more warehouses.
“We identified a site at the south of the island. One of the farmers we work with offered to sell us a field. As a board of directors we were considering this site, and one of the directors said as well as warehousing we should potentially look at putting in a small, craft, pilot distillery.
“So it started off as very much a micro-distillery, where we would do trials, experimentation, training, things like that. We thought that was quite an interesting concept. But, as is often the case with these things, what started off as a small idea suddenly mushroomed.”
Mitchell said the coming year will be about consolidation, building the Lagg brand and growing sales internationally.
But in the meantime, the team will be taking a moment to acknowledge everything they’ve built over the past three decades.
“It’s going to be a big weekend of celebration,” said Mitchell.
