Eight Days, Seven Distilleries, Three Castles. : Day Two: Laphroaig

Trying to describe E's observable mental state before visiting Laphroaig is a bit difficult. Take one part excited child on Christmas Eve, one part exiled immigrant finally allowed to see his homeland again and add a slight dusting of pure euphoria and you might sort of come somewhere close to the emotional state of my traveling companion on the morning of our second day on Islay as our Water to Whisky tour loomed in the ever more near future.

There's really no other picture that I can use for the title page of this post besides perhaps E's best panorama of the whole trip. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to actually click on and enlarge this one:

Also, just an advance warning: this tour was amazing. This post WILL be long.

The Water to Whisky tour was booked far before we went to Islay. Most of the distilleries provide several levels of tours, everything from a standard six or seven pound distillery tour to a tasting to specialty experiences, like what we experienced at Laphroaig.

The Water to Whisky tour is about a four hour experience, which takes you from the water source for Laphroaig to the peat bogs to the distillery and ends up in the warehouse, where you get to bottle a small bottle of your own whisky straight from the cask. It is not cheap, and people like me, who know nothing about anything, rarely end up participating. Its obviously designed for a connoisseur, or, at least, a devotee. Honestly, going into the experience, I was worried that I'd find it stunningly dull and I'd have to just try and subtly play cribbage on my phone for most of the time. But, in reality, it was probably my favorite thing that we did on the entire trip.

E had my camera for most of this tour, so these pictures are a mixture of both of our creative genius.

The first thing you notice at Laphroaig is the smell of the peat fire. It's like all the good smells of a summertime bonfire, only amplified. We walked to the distillery from Port Ellen, and once E realized that the peat fires were burning, his excitement level intensified. It was so infectious that I got excited too, even though I really didn't realize what that meant, beyond the nice smell in the air.

If each distillery has a personality, Laphroaig's is understated confidence. They are who they are. There's very little blatant attempts at putting forth a brand image, which is almost reassuring in and of itself. It combines a rather faded dignity with enough freshness to avoid seeming stodgy. It takes pride in both its tradition and innovation. The balance is rather a tricky thing to pull off, but they do it quite well.

The first person we met at Laphroaig really met, was our tour guide, Bryony. Tour guides are an interesting thing at distilleries - our Bowmore tour guide was a fresh-faced twentysomething girl, but Bryony, by contrast, looked to be in her forties or fifties. Her steely-gray hair was close cropped and she was dressed sensibly, in long pants, a vest, button down shirt and a scarf of the Laphroaig plaid. The Islay accent in general was easy to understand, and Bryony's had a particularly gentle sort of roll to it. E made a comment to her about how pleased he was to see the peat fires, and she replied "Oh yes, it's a glorious day when the peat fires again burn at Laphroaig!".

Nine out of ten people would make that statement sound perfectly ridiculous, but Bryony pulled it off because it was perfectly clear that Bryony truly and honestly felt that the peat smoke over Laphroaig was a thing of glory to be celebrated with all sincerity. She urged us all to get our proper size of wellies (excellent advice indeed) and loaded us up in a van to take us to the first stop on our journey.

I will take a brief moment to describe the rest of our group, since it was a small tour: E and I were the youngest, I think. There were two German men traveling together, Klaus and another. It was their custom to tour distilleries together, and they'd been on several such trips. The only other woman on the tour was also German, named Sabine. She was traveling with her husband and daughter - they were taking the basic distillery tour. A Japanese man named Yoshi rounded out the group, and, although we started out fairly taciturn, we did all end up rather friendly.

The beginning of our journey took us through several gorgeous rolling fields, like the one below:

We eventually stopped and after a five or so minute walk through active cow fields (hi cows!), we reached the creek that served as the water source for Laphroaig The loch from which the creek flowed was several miles away. At the creek, there was a small picnic table set up and Bryony urged us to look around while she set up lunch.

Where Laphroiag comes from

We sat down for a surprisingly delicious lunch of tiny gourmet wraps, shortbreads, warm soup and, of course, whisky. We actually got to add a few drops of the source water to our whisky, which was simply an unrepeatable and unforgettable event. The water source itself sits in sort of a dip, guarded from the rest of the field, so we felt quite out of the world as we sipped our Laphroaig as we observed the water which produced it. The experience of the lunch itself was one of the best parts of the entire trip for me.

After another brief walk and chat (and as we finished our drams), we headed back to the van to prepare to explore the peat bogs, which produced the fuel for the fires that gave Laphroaig its smoky flavor. Throughout this whole trip, I kept thinking of the the old nursery rhyme - "For the want of the nail, the shoe was lost / For the want of the shoe, the horse was lost.... ". I quite annoyed E with the references to it. But it was quite fascinating to see how Laphroaig whisky was created from the start to the finish.

The peat bogs at first looked like a rather damp field. Much of Islay looks like a rather damp field, honestly. Getting closer, we were able to see the bogs where the peat that flavors Islay whisky is mined.

This is the tour peat bog. Actual peat bog cutters do a much better job than dilettante tourists

Here, Bryony told us how Laphroaig hand cut a portion of its peat, hiring laborers to work cutting for several months each year. Apparently, peat is so ubiquitous on Islay that it could fuel whisky related fires for hundreds of years more without depletion. Bryony also mentioned that some Islay residents will still rent a peat bog, mine it themselves and use the fuel to heat their homes in the winter. Although it requires some manual labor, it's a quite cost effective way to heat your home (and make it smell absolutely amazing). The peat is squishy and moist when cut, and left to dry before burning. The peat cutting tool makes a sort of rectangular shaped brick. We enjoyed another of Bryony's "wee drams" as certain people, E included, took a turn at using the tools to actually cut the peat.

One of the sources and the product.

We paid Laphroiag for the privilege of performing manual labor. Clever marketing indeed.

After spending some time in the peat bog, we returned to Laphroaig for a more standard distillery tour. Unlike most distilleries, Laphroaig still does a percentage of its own malting. And unlike Bowmore, they were in production, so we got some amazing pictures of the drying floor and the malting process.

The drying floor. This picture is super cool and I must give credit to E.

When we went in the smoking room (where the smoke from the peat fire filters up to dry the barley) I assumed it'd be incredibly hot. However, they smoke the barley at such a low temperature that the room was actually quite comfortable, if rather otherworldly looking.

The peat fire itself was amazing to see. It's intriguing to me how something that seems so old fashioned is still part of the way to make such an exquisite product.