Isle of Arran Distillers has officially announced their Inaugural Limited Edition Single Malt release from Lagg Distillery – a new heavily peated whisky distillery, located on the southern tip of the Isle of Arran. It will be officially released in August.
Lagg Distillery is the sister of independently owned Lochranza Distillery which was established at the north end of the island in 1995. The building of the new distillery and its visitor centre was completed in 2019 and the very first middle cut of spirit was recorded at 14.35pm on Tuesday 19th March 2019, a new chapter in the history of whisky making for the southern shores of Arran.
Lagg Distillery is committed to supporting local projects that are focused on preserving peatlands for the good of the planet. Peatlands are highly efficient, compact carbon sinks and, although they cover only 3% of the global land surface, they store nearly 550 billion tonnes of carbon – which is as much carbon as in all terrestrial biomass and twice as much as in all the world’s forests.
Despite the power that they hold, peatlands are still under threat globally from drainage for agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction and, according to Lagg Distillery, only by restoring these peatlands to health, by rewetting and rewilding the bogs and removing the incumbent agricultural and forestry projects, will the carbon stay locked in the ground where it’s meant to be.
The team at Lagg plans to conduct thorough investigations into the effects that different types of peat sourced from different areas have on their spirit and the distinctive phenols that they produce. They will also experiment with various cask types and observe how they interact with the Lagg spirit over time.
The new distillery is captained by Graham Omand, Lagg Distillery Manager, who worked as a stillman at Arran’s Lochranza Distillery for several years building knowledge and experience at the North end of the island before overseeing Lagg Distillery’s construction and leading a brand-new team down south. Graham will oversee the production and care of the earthy, peated Lagg Single Malt and is very much looking forward to adding his own interpretation and style to the spirit to ensure it is of the highest possible quality.
Omand said, “It’s every stillman’s dream to be given such an amazing opportunity to manage a beautiful site like Lagg. I am going to make sure it’s a legacy that I’ll be proud to say I helped build. We are delighted to finally announce the very first inaugural Single Malt release from Lagg.”