Glen Moray Distillery
Glen Moray was established in the year 1897 in a picturesque little location not far from the centre of Elgin. Situated towards the North of the Speyside region it is known for producing a style that is seen as fairly typical for the area: light and fruity. Alongside this the distillery has a long tradition of cask experimentation with their first distillate in 1897 being filled into a wide variety of casks including Marsala wine casks, something not too common at the time.
We booked ourselves onto the ‘Distillery Explorer’ tour to have a look around.
The condensers mounted externally to the still house can be seen above.
Like many other distilleries of a certain vintage, Glen Moray has a well used and highly reliable Porteus mill. Unfortunately photography was not permitted in the mill room but I did spot this lovely old Porteus badge in the impressively large malt store.
It doesn’t really look it from the approach but Glen Moray is a fairly large operation behind the scenes. As well as the distilleries single malt, French owner La Martiniquaise uses a good chunk of the spirit produced on site to go into the Cutty Sark blend.
The three large wash stills are located in a modern hall that is also home to the very big and shiny mash tun. Secondary columns on the wash stills redistribute the captured heat to other areas of the distillery to increase site efficiency.
By contrast the original stillhouse containing the spirit stills feels suitably nice and grimy and everything you’d expect from a distillery that’s around 130 years old. The old spirit safe is no longer in use having been replaced by a more modern safe at the other end of the room. I love seeing the old manufacturers badges on distillery equipment, like the above for the Blair, Campbell & McLean Copper Works in our home town of Glasgow.
The visit to Warehouse Number 1 is one of the highlights of our entry level tour. As mentioned previously Glen Moray have explored filling their spirit into a wide variety of cask types. As a result you’re able to nose a whole range of different casks giving a very obvious demonstration of what different cask contents can bring to the maturation of a spirit. The distillery has capacity for up to around 180,000 casks to be maturing on site at any one time with around 4,000 of those in the dunnage style Warehouse Number 1.
The tour ends back at the visitor centre with the tasting of two core range drams. A very enjoyable and informative tour all round.
I think it’d be fair to say that Glen Moray goes under the radar with most whisky enthusiasts. It may suffer from being regarded as a bit of a supermarket whisky with their core expressions being fairly ubiquitous at most large retailers and at the lower end of the price spectrum. Not to mention the branding perhaps verging on the wrong side of old fashioned… Which is a bit of a shame really because I think if you can see past that there is some nice whisky on offer. We hand-filled this 16 year old Manzanilla finish at 54.1% ABV, non chill filtered and natural colour. A really lovely dram and compared with a lot of far younger distillery hand-fills, a decent price at £90.