EDINBURGH, Scotland — The doors were small, the elevators tinier, but the pours? Monumental.
When Rob and Mark, hosts of Whisky@Work with an appetite for whisky and adventure, landed in the U.K., restraint was never really in the itinerary. “Over the last two days we averaged 22,000 steps a day,” Mark said with a laugh. “We’re over 100,000 steps total. Who knew whisky tourism was basically a cardio program?”
Their trip stretched from London pubs to Inverness, Speyside, the Highlands, and Edinburgh, with nine distilleries visited in just four days. Along the way came ghost tours, castle climbs, and the occasional supersonic washing machine in their Airbnb.
At Glenfiddich, the world’s best-selling single malt, the pair stumbled into a dram of folklore. The distillery offered them Snow Phoenix, a whisky born from a collapsed warehouse roof during a freak snowstorm. “I paid for one dram and somehow got three,” Rob said, still amazed. “That could only happen to me.” He carried the grin of someone who knew he had gotten away with something legendary.
Tomatin delivered a reminder of whisky’s industrial past. At its peak, the distillery produced more than 12 million liters a year. Today it focuses on bold cask-strength expressions that demand respect. “It smelled like Christmas caramel to me,” Rob said, before pausing to defend himself. “I stand by that. Christmas caramel should be a tasting note.”
Benromach charmed them with its hands-on approach. Everything is done the old way, without a single production computer in sight. “There was one computer,” Rob deadpanned. “At the checkout counter. Just to take my money.”
History took center stage at Cardhu, the distillery once run by Helen and Elizabeth Cumming, pioneers of Scotch whisky. When taxmen came snooping, Helen would raise a red flag to warn her neighbors, then dust herself with flour and claim she had been baking bread. “She’s a legend in Scotch circles,” Mark said. “The kind of woman who would have made a great podcast guest.”
Glen Garioch paired drams with cheese and stories delivered in a brogue so thick it might as well have been another language. “It was like Gaelic mixed with Norwegian,” Rob said, shaking his head. “But even if we didn’t understand every word, they treated us like old friends. And cheese makes everything better.”
Edinburgh’s Holyrood Distillery showcased Scotland’s new experimental streak, where young whiskies aged barely three years are already turning heads. “They’re like the craft beer of Scotch,” Mark said. “And I’ll be honest, I discovered on this trip that I actually love cask-strength whisky. I didn’t see that coming. But once you taste it, there’s no going back.”
The trip was not all whisky and tasting notes. In Inverness, they boarded a sleeper train so small it felt like climbing into someone’s station wagon. In Edinburgh, they navigated streets where every corner revealed either a castle, a ghost tour, or a Harry Potter gift shop scribbling credit card sales into a notebook. They even ran into a herd of “hairy coos”, the iconic Highland cattle that looked more like rock stars than farm animals.
As the journey wrapped, one thing was clear. Whisky was the excuse, but the soul of Scotland, from its castles to its cows in the mist, was what left the mark. “Would I go back?” Rob said. “Of course. But first, I need new shoes.”