TL; DR: This year Spirit of Speyside took us to Aultmore for a great tour and tasting. Fantastic value for money and, as usual, the staff were amazing. We closed the day in Elgin at Glen Moray distillery with our friend Justine for a sherry-and-whisky tasting with Iain and Diego. What a day!

After a three-week break, we’re writing this post from our holiday in Europe, a trip that took us all the way from Scotland down to Emilia, in Italy, and back. We visited some very interesting boozy places, and we’ll talk about them later in the year. This story, though, is about distillery visits much closer to home. This trip happened in early May, a period that for us means Spirit of Speyside!

It is an unmissable festival for whisky aficionados, especially for distillery baggers like us. The reason is simple: many distilleries that are usually closed to the public open their gates to give a glimpse of their production to whisky nerds like us. Anyone who has taken one of these tours will know how nerdy they can get, especially when a distillery manager or an operator is taking you around. On paper, this should be an easy business: we want to visit the distillery, they want the money. In practice, things are a bit more complicated, mostly because of greed. Unfortunately, some tickets got ludicrously expensive, with the worst offender being Chivas Brothers, with prices as high as £120 (Dalmunach!) and even up to £190 (Longmorn!!). So between the two of us, we decided to put a stop to this, and we set a limit beyond which we’re not willing to pay: £100, just barely enough to get into some of the second-worst offender’s distilleries: Diageo (more on this next week).

Fortunately, other producers seem to have whisky fans’ interests more at heart, and provide more affordable experiences. A great example is Dewar’s: they usually open one or two of their Speyside distilleries, Craigellachie and Aultmore, for about £25 (a bit more with fees), and they give all the proceeds to local charities. As a matter of fact, they also recently opened their non-Speyside distilleries (Royal Brackla and Macduff) for similar prices, and again they donated the extra income to charities. While we visited Craigellachie a couple of years ago (on a warm spring day!), this time it was the turn of their second Speyside distillery: Aultmore!

This year was a short festival for us, so we left Leith on Saturday morning and arrived at the distillery, near Keith, after a 3-and-a-half-hour drive. We were welcomed by Matthew, their global brand ambassador, and Luke, who we’d met on previous tours. We were given a high-vis vest as usual, and the tour started in the courtyard. The distillery was founded in 1895 by Alexander Edwards, who also founded Craigellachie, and the architect was Alexander Doig, the “father of the pagoda ventilator”. The name means “big burn”, but the whole area was named “foggy moss” (this gives you a sense of the surroundings). The distillery was owned by the Pattisons, who went bankrupt a few years later, causing havoc in the whisky industry (if you are interested in this story, grab yourself a copy of Justine Hazelhurst’s book, Opening the Case). Because of this and the war, the distillery went through periods of closure, until it was acquired by Dewar’s in 1923, and so joined DCL. At the end of the 1960s, it was closed for a few years when it underwent massive renovation, saying goodbye to the malting floor and the pagodas. Together with Dewar’s, it was acquired by Bacardi in 1998, and it was expanded again in 2023. Nowadays, it has a capacity of 6 million litres of pure alcohol per year (mlpa), making it the biggest in the Dewar’s group.

They get their malted barley from Simpsons, using 100% Laureate variety, which is milled by a Porteus mill of unknown origin installed around 1970. Water comes from the nearby Auchinderran burn, which they add four times at increasing temperatures (64°, 75°, 81° and 83°C) to the malt in the full lauter German mashtun recently installed. They run 15 mashes a week, with 10t of malt each.

They have 15 washbacks (9 of which were added in the last renovation) for fermentation, which is triggered by 270 litres of liquid distiller’s yeast from Lallemand and lasts around 80 hours (longer than in the past). Byproducts of these phases are sent to Rothes to generate biofuel. They have two still houses with three stills each, heated by steam from green gas. The wash is divided into three and sent to the three wash stills for the first distillation, then to the spirit stills for the second. In this case, the cut points for the spirit are 76% abv and 62% abv, yielding about 4k litres of spirit. Like many other distilleries, they mix foreshots and feints with the next batch of low wines. The spirit is sent to the Central Belt in tankers, so there is no filling store on site.

The tasting, consisting of three Aultmore single malts, was very interesting. We started with a 15y finished for 6 months in a Sweet Marsala wine cask (46%, previously in ex-bourbon and Sherry casks). Here we learned that there are three types of Marsala: Sweet (with added sugar, aged about two and a half years), Ruby (less sugar, aged 5 to 6 years) and Dry (no sugar, aged 8 to 12 years). They created an Aultmore expression for each of the three, but we tried only the first one: nice, but indeed a bit sweet for our palate. The second dram was their 21y, from refill casks, bottled at 46%, while the third was the 16y Spirit of Speyside 2026 release (Exceptional Cask Series), from a single ex-bourbon barrel, bottled at 59.2%. These last two drams were belters, we loved them!

After the tour, we drove to Elgin, where we met our pal Justine, and together we went to Glen Moray distillery. There, we did a tasting with Iain, the Glen Moray brand ambassador, and Diego, a sherry expert, who gave us a fantastic Sherry-and-whisky tasting. It was a very fun experience: we loved the sherries, but mostly the Fino-cask-finished Glen Moray.

What a great whisky day! Starting from the end, it is always lovely to meet Iain, and we love what Glen Moray are doing, having interesting expressions for casual drinkers, whisky beginners, and aficionados. And what about Aultmore? The Dewar’s team gave us yet another unforgettable experience, tailored to whisky nerds but without ripping us off. To be clear, we’re not just in it for the cheap stuff, we simply aim for value for money. Annoyingly, greed seems to be common in the industry. For example, some controversy recently arose when Dalmore reopened their visitor centre but priced tours at £250 minimum (of course we gave up visiting it). And when looking at distilleries that open for special occasions only like the Spirit of Speyside, we really struggle to understand how so many of them seem to just want to squeeze as much money as possible out of their fans, almost punishing them for wanting to visit. To be honest, even the £100 we decided to pay in some cases is pushing it. Distilleries also have the option of offering different types of experiences, making them more accessible, but this option doesn’t seem to be given much consideration. Thankfully, some companies like Dewar’s, but also Tamnavulin and Tamdhu, don’t follow this greedy trend and offer great experiences at very honest prices. Well done, guys!

Stay tuned for the second and last tour of this trip! Until then, slàinte!

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Aultmore Spirit of Speyside Tour

Price: £25.88 pp (May 2026, inc. fee)

Duration: 1hr 30min

Tasting: Aultmore 15 Sweet Marsala finish (46%), Aultmore 21y (46%), Aultmore Spirit of Speyside release (16y, Exceptional Cask Series, 59.2%)

Target: everyone

Value for money: great

Highlights: the amazing staff

Recommended: absolutely

Link: https://www.spiritofspeyside.com/