Holyrood Distillery only began operating in 2019. It can’t yet offer its own whisky, but it does offer gin and a tour of the building.
It’s all about the nose: up to 90 percent of flavour comes from the sense of smell rather than the tongue. That’s why the tour of Holyrood Distillery begins in a kind of smell laboratory: six sealed Erlenmeyer flasks with a cotton ball await the visitor. In a short quiz, everyone gets to test how well they can identify certain aromas that play a role in gin and whisky.
Holyrood Distillery only began producing whisky in 2019. Like many distilleries, it also produces gin on the side. Making gin is quicker and cheaper. While the whisky is still maturing, the distillery has a product it can already sell in the meantime.
That’s why the tour through Edinburgh’s only single malt distillery to date is split into two parts. After the smell laboratory, everything first revolves around gin. Within sight of the still, participants taste different variants of Holyrood’s juniper spirit.
Anyone looking around while smelling and sipping will notice steel columns and steel beams running everywhere. That’s because this old building used to be a shed for railway parts. From 1831, the Innocent Railway connected the St Leonard’s district with Dalkeith, from where coal was hauled in on rails by horse-drawn wagons.
Today the rail network is gone, but the old railway hall remains. And the whisky distillery needs that space too. The mash tuns and washbacks are still relatively shallow.
The stills themselves, however, are currently, at around seven metres, the second tallest in Scotland after Glenmorangie’s, which stand at around eight metres.
This is also where things get interesting for whisky fans. Because Holyrood Distillery departs from the usual distilleries: it uses barley roasted to different degrees, which then also carry different flavours. Tour participants can smell these for themselves in small glasses.
The master distillers at Holyrood Distillery also depart from the usual varieties when it comes to yeast, and are beginning to experiment. And of course, interesting casks come into play too – after all, they’re responsible for most of a whisky’s flavour.
Here, the Japanese whisky casks stand out in particular, carrying a very distinctive smell of their own – which visitors can check for themselves straight away using the display casks.
The real casks, however, are stored in a warehouse outside the city centre.
At the casks, there’s then a whisky to taste that’s meant to serve as a preview of the final product. Fittingly, the tour ends in the bar, with a wonderful view of the Salisbury Crags in Holyrood Park.
Whisky fans can experience a distillery in its very first phase at Holyrood Distillery. And for weekend visitors to Edinburgh, it offers the chance to take a tour through a working whisky distillery at all.
That said, the price of a tour is genuinely ambitious: £16.50 for an hour at a distillery that can offer gin but not yet whisky is quite a proud price to pay.
Did you know: Holyrood Distillery and others in Edinburgh
Behind this new small whisky distillery in the shadow of the Salisbury Crags stands a genuinely experienced man. David Robertson had previously proven his skills as master distiller at Macallan. Together with Canadians Rob and Kelly Carpenter, he raised £6.7 million for the project.
Holyrood Distillery isn’t actually the first whisky distillery in Edinburgh, since North British Grain Distillery still produces in the city – though not a single malt.
Producing whisky was actually quite a familiar business in Scotland’s capital once. In the 18th and 19th centuries there were many distilleries here – some of them illegal, too. The last single malt distillery, called Glen Sciennes, operated until 1925.
So it took 94 years before Holyrood Distillery revived this tradition. At least one micro-distillery in the suburb of Leith is already in the planning stages.
Getting there:
On foot: From Holyrood Palace you can walk along Queen’s Drive below the Salisbury Crags. When a fairly shallow flight of steps leads off to the right, you’ll reach St Leonard’s Lane directly, where Holyrood Distillery is located.
Public transport: Several bus routes (e.g. 30, 31 or 37) run through Clerk Street. Get off at the St Patrick Square stop and walk away from the city centre. Turn left into Rankeillor Street, right into St Leonard’s Street, and left again into St Leonard’s Lane.