Torabhaig Distillers' Series: Same Stills. Different Story.

Everything that makes whisky worth drinking happens long before it ever sees a glass

I’ve said this on more tours than I can count. Malt bill, fermentation, cut points, casks. Every decision looks minor until you taste the result. Change one thing, just a fraction, and you don’t get a gentle variation. You get a whisky that’s gone off in its own direction entirely. It’s two ships leaving the same harbour, one degree apart. They don’t end up waving at each other from the same dock. They’re continents apart.

Torabhaig (pronounced TOR-uh-veg) gave two of its distillers the chance to prove exactly

that.

Torabhaig kicked off its Distillers’ Series in August 2026. Each year, one of the team gets the keys for a month and does things their way. Malt, yeast, fermentation, cut, casks, the lot. Their name goes on the bottle. In Iona Macphie’s case, her own painting made it onto the label as well.

First up: Niall’s First Edition (59.3% ABV) and Iona’s First Edition (60.9% ABV). Both cask strength, both 5,250 bottles, both landing in September 2026 for about £75. That’s where the similarities end.

Two ships, two coordinates, two completely different destinations

Iona Macphie and Niall Culbertson left from the same point. Same stills, same island, same water. After that, they went their own way.

Iona’s story starts with an unusual origin for a whisky. Not a cask, not a still, not an island, but a grain shed in Portgordon. Visiting Crisp Maltings, she encountered chocolate malt for the first time and liked it enough to eat it by the handful. That settled it. When her month came around, she built her entire recipe around that single discovery.

The results were dramatic from the start. A minimum 120-hour fermentation. Worts so dark they came through almost black. The wash looked, in her own words, more like Guinness than anything you’d expect to find in a Skye whisky distillery. She noticed the chocolate character emerging within fifteen minutes of the foreshots and changed her cut point to preserve those deep, rich notes rather than lose them. “I adore chocolate, so I always knew I wanted to incorporate that in some way. The chocolate malt turned the wash black as stout, but the final spirit is really rounded and rich.”

What she produced is unpeated, a departure for a distillery whose house style is built on smoke, matured in first-fill bourbon and refill sherry casks. The bottle label is painted by her.

Niall grew up about a mile from where Torabhaig now stands. His father is a sailor. As a boy, he’d cross the water to the bay by boat, and those arrivals, the salt air, the light on the water, stayed with him. His whisky is essentially that memory translated into liquid.

He worked with a lightly peated base malt and added small proportions of brown malt and dark crystal malt for depth and toasted sweetness. For maturation, he chose first-fill bourbon barrels combined with ex-rum casks, a nod to his father’s taste. The tropical fruit and maritime character he was chasing came through. “I knew what sort of spirit I wanted, but this whisky is even better than I hoped. It has all the tropical fruit and maritime notes I was aiming for and brings them together in a way I didn’t think I would quite be able to capture.”

What happens when a business actually trusts its people

When a company actually lets its people do things their way and bottles the result, that’s worth paying attention to. That’s something I’d put on a shelf.

Most companies are obsessed with core ranges, global reach, and spreadsheets. But people want the real stuff. The story. The person behind the spirit. Torabhaig let these two put themselves in the bottle, no filter. They took it seriously. The company just handed over the keys and got out of the way.

Torabhaig’s founder and whisky maker Neil MacLeod Mathieson put it: “Torabhaig has always believed that whisky is about stories, especially the stories of the people making it. The stills are the same, the island is the same, but the story changes with every maker. That is exactly the point.”

Even if neither of these is your usual style, though I’ve got my eye on one, it’s the story you’re buying. Torabhaig’s made it impossible to ignore how much changes when you let two people loose with the same kit. The more you see how much can shift with a different hand on the controls, the more interesting whisky gets.

On instinct

Iona didn’t follow a recipe when she picked her cut point fifteen minutes into the foreshots. She just went with what felt right. That kind of gut-level, sensory decision-making doesn’t happen much in production.

It’s instinct. Instinct can mess with you, but most people forget to trust it, whether they’re making something or walking away from it. Worked for her.

It’s rare to see someone that sure of their own judgement. Most of us have been told to stick to the script and not get clever. Sometimes the thing that doesn’t work is exactly what you need to try before you find what does. She trusted her gut and ended up with something nobody else could have made.

I hope she’s proud of herself.

And for anyone who’s ever sat in a tasting room wondering whether their read on a spirit was the right one, this is the industry telling you from the production side that there isn’t one. The same stills produce different things depending on who’s driving. The same glass produces different things depending on who’s tasting. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the system working exactly as it should.

If that’s the kind of experience you want to have with spirits, get in touch at vantagecreativescot.co.uk.

Your senses. Your discovery.

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About Torabhaig Distillery

Torabhaig is located in Teangue on the Sleat peninsula of the Isle of Skye. Built into a restored 1820s farmstead, it has been producing single malt Scotch whisky since January 2017, making it only the second licensed distillery on Skye since Talisker was established in 1830. Mossburn Distillers owns the distillery and operates one wash still and one spirit still with a capacity of 500,000 litres of pure alcohol per year. The Distillers’ Series will continue with two new releases per year, each developed end-to-end by a different member of the distillery team.

The releases

Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series: Niall’s First Edition

59.3% ABV · 70cl · Lightly peated · First-fill bourbon and ex-rum casks · Limited to 5,250 bottles · RRP £75

Torabhaig The Distillers’ Series: Iona’s First Edition

60.9% ABV · 70cl · Unpeated · 10% chocolate malt · First-fill bourbon and refill sherry casks · Limited to 5,250 bottles · RRP £75

Both expressions will be available from specialist retailers in September 2026. Hard To Find Whisky (htfw.com) stock both and ship internationally. The Whisky Exchange (thewhiskyexchange.com) is also worth checking for availability.