Price: £45

I booked and paid for the Taste of the Highlands Tour online. However, when I arrived at the distillery I found that there is a lot of work in progress. Diageo are resurrecting rhe old Brora distillery which has been out of production for years. This means that the warehouses are inaccessble and so the tour isn;t being run.

Clynelish is two and a half hours drive from Dufftown in Speyside; if I had known in advance I very probably wouldn't have come up to Brora and then onto Wick and Thurso. However, despite having my email addressa nd phone number, Clynelish did not contact me to tell me the tour would not be running.

The tour is still available, as of today on the website, but anyone visiting will be disappointed:

I understand that distilleries are businesses and works will always be ongoing, but a distillery in a remote area, such as Brora, have a responsibility to notify people if a booked tour will not be running and Clynelish didn't do this.

I also discovered that the extended tour as described on the booking page, is not actually an extended tour, unless you call visiting a warehouse extended, which I do not. I had the money for the tour refunded and did the standard tour which was free as I have one of the friends of the Classic Malt journals.

Price: £12

After the issues with the Taste of the Highlands Tour, I did the standard tour which has three tastings. Clynelish is currently undergoing a redevelopment which will see a new visitor centre built and the old Brora distillery which shares the site resurrected.

The tour has seven people, including myself. The tour guide, Lyla, gave us an introduction to the distillery and briefly covered the plans for the Brora distillery and new visitor centre. Then we moved onto the production areas where the tour started with the mash tun before moving to the wash backs and then to the stil house.

The mash tun and wash backs can only be looked into via windows in the tops; many other distilleries have open tops or will open them so you can look inside. There was quite a few questions asked on the tour and this was because the information given was often quite light; the malting and milling wasn;t really covered until someone asked.

The tour ended with samples of two expressions and one blended Scotch which has Clynelish as the main single malt:

1. Johnnie Walker Whisky Gold Reserve
2. Clynelish 14 Years Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky
3. Clynelish Distillery Exclusive

The tour here wasn't very good; couple that with the issues around the tour I originally booked, I'm not sure when I will return to Clynelish. The new visitor centre itself won't be enough to bring me back, but being able to tour Brora probably will, although I don't know if this distillery will be included on a tour (I think Diageo would be follish not to, but, from my point of view, they haven't covered themselves in glory this year; I'll do a blog post another day to explain further).