Price: €10

I've been to well over 100 distilleries now with several in remote locations in Scotlan, but ths is the remotest Distillery I have visited. The disitllery is located in County Mayo in the west of Ireland; I approached it from Connemara where you travel down a lot of single track roads which wind through some beautiful mountainous areas with the roads taking you over hills and mountains and through the valleys between them. I was navigating using Google Maps and found it was very accurate at getting me to the distillery.

The Distillery itself is located within quite a modern building giving them substantial space to increase capacity without needing to move premises and has quite a lot of parking available. There was meant to be one other person on the tour with me, a Frenchman called Jérémy, but he had called ahead to say that he would be late; apparently he had trouble finding it.

The tour was conducted by Niamh, with the Distillery founder Eoin arriving part way through. The tour is by prior booking only which I did, and paid, via their website.

The tour opens with by covering the history of Irish Whiskey from the days of illicit distilling through to the modern day as well as a detailed description of the distillation process which was covered using a mural painted on the wall.

The next part of the tour discusses the botanicals used in the gin making, but as I'm not a fan of gin, this part was kept to a minimum to allow more time on the whiskey process (one of the benefits of being the only person on the tour). It ws at this point that Eion, one of the founders arrived, and joined us for a while giving some more background and explanations.

We then went through to the production area where you see the equipment, mash tun, wash backs and two copper Portuguese alembic stills. You hear about the origins of the equipment and also how it is used, referring back to the process explaination at the start of the tour.

This is a new Distillery, only just over a year old, so they do not yet have whiskey. Instead, while waiting for the sprit to mature into whiskey they are making gin and vodka which I got to sample both of these.

The tour at Lough Mask is very good; it was thorough and detailed and well explained. Niamh and Eoin are both friendly people who are engaging, especially Eoin as he tells you about why the distillery came about and some of the challenges they did and do face. It's an exciting time for the Irish Whiskey industry and Lough Mark look to be a great addition.