Islay Trip Day Five

Back Blipped 24th July 2017

I don't wish to be a whisky bore (well...) so I'm trying knot* to post pic after pic of distilleries. There are, I think, eight working distilleries on Islay and at least one under construction. Business is booming, and it was only a couple of decades ago that so many were shut and mothballed or demolished entirely! Fashions change, I guess. But it was almost immediately clear on arrival we wouldn't be able to do justice to every source of wonder water, and so we chose to do Ardbeg and Lagavulin as previously described.

On day three on the island (day five of the trip) we felt we probably needed to dry out a bit in time for the ride home. Full of good intention, we therefore set out to ride to all the other distilleries, and this shot is of a bollard on the quay at Bowmore (correctly pronounced B'Moore with the emphasis on the second syllable. That's another thing we learned on the island - we English can't even pronounce the malts we love!

Being an island, there are of course all sorts of boats in service, from rowboats to car ferries, fishing smacks to kayaks. Most of them seemed to be tied to this bollard... It would be an entirely different lifestyle to live here, than in the English Wes' Country, but I'm not sure it would be a worse one. Of course, we were blessed by the weather gods, day after sunny day...

So on this day we visited Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhain (Greg still can't manage that one), Caol Ila, Kilchoman, and also the site of the under construction Ardnahoe distillery. Along with Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg that ticked all the boxes. 

We couldn't get in to all these sites, simply because of the time taken in riding between, but we paid our respects. At Bunnahabhain, we were gifted with two free "driver's drams" to take away, as we couldn't really sample the delights and ride. For the patient, all the distillery photographs will appear on Flickr in a few days time.

And afterward, we retired to the pub again for a couple of beers and a few more whiskies!!!

* you saw what I did there? :-)
(Greg's Day Five)