Glen Scotia. Thirty-one whiskies.

Campbeltown lies on the Kintyre peninsula, far to the southwest, and in the nineteenth century was called the whisky capital of the world. There were almost thirty distilleries in that one small town. When American Prohibition wiped out the market, next to nothing remained: there are now three left, and Glen Scotia is one of them. The other two, Springbank and Glengyle, both belong to the same family.

Glen Scotia was founded in 1832 as Scotia Distillery. Its history is turbulent: countless owners, closures in the 1980s and 1990s, and a manager who drowned himself in 1930 after a bankruptcy in the lake from which the distillery drew its cooling water. Since 1994 the house has belonged to the Loch Lomond Group, and things have gone well since: in 2021 the distillery won two major awards in the same year.

The style is distinctly maritime: salt, oil, a light spiciness and fresh fruit. Both peated and unpeated spirit is distilled.

The distillery works with a single set of stills and produces around six hundred thousand litres a year. That is a fraction of what an average Speyside distillery makes.