Price: £50

I toured the GlenAllachie at 1400 after been at Tomintoul; that was a fantastic tour, leaving the GlenAllachie a high bar to avoid disappointing. I booked the tour via an email exchange with Karen, the manager of the visitor centre; the website has tours listed at 1330, but Karen asked if I could do 1400 as they had a different tour booked at 1330. This was fine with me, but on arrival found the people booked on the previous tour hadn't bothered turning up.

This has been a bit of a pattern so far where I have ended up alone on tours as other people booked in hadn't arrived, and Graeme at Tomintoul had mentioned the same thing. It is both very disrespectful and disruptive to a distillery to not show up for a tour you have reserved.

The tour was a one-on-one tour with Karen. I did the Connoisseur Tour which includes four expressions of The GlenAllachie Whisky and a more in-depth tour where you see the filling store and warehouse.

Karen has worked as a tour guide for quite a long time, previously at Glen Garioch and followed Billy Walker to Tomintoul a few months after he bought the distillery. This experience was apparent in her knowledge of the whisky making process. The tour was comprehensive and well presented.

In addition, as we went round, she introduced me to members of the production staff who took time to speak to me. There were two in particular I need to mention:

1. Mike who showed me the computer system which monitors and controls the equipment in the distillery; he didn't know this, but I am a bit of a Geek who is massively interested in computers. I'd pretty much only ever seen similar computer systems before when walking past them (the exception was Waterford where I got a brief show-and-tell), but Mike gave me a detailed talk through the process and how it is controlled.
2. Stuart in the filling room who took a break for his work to discuss what he does.

The five samples provided at the end of the tour will vary, but will usually include distillery exclusives rather than the core range which you can buy anywhere. It did include one from the standard range which was the GlenAllachie 25 Year Old Single Malt Whisky. I was driving so the samples were provided in glass jars for me to take away so the usual tasting session at the end of the tour was abbreviated.

The tour from Karen was very good, but adding in Mike and Stuart added a huge amount more which you would not usually hear on a tour.