Edradour

Historic Environment Scotland's listing says Edradour was established in 1825 by a co-operative of local farmers, trading as John MacGlashan and Company, "distillers of malt only", in the parish of Moulin. The distillery itself links the founding to the Excise Act of 1823, which made licensed distilling more attractive. By the 1920s it belonged to John McIntosh & Co. Campbell Distillers took it over in 1983, according to the listing, and "The Edradour" was first marketed as a single malt in 1986, when the Duke of Argyll opened the distillery to the public.

In 2002 Andrew Symington, owner of the bottler Signatory Vintage, bought Edradour from Pernod Ricard and formed the Edradour Distillery Company to run it. The company built warehousing, a bottling line and a tasting room, and from 2003 made a peated malt called Ballechin, first released in 2006.

Edradour lies at Milton of Edradour, in the hills just east of Pitlochry in Perth and Kinross, in the Highland region. The listed buildings date from the mid-nineteenth century, possibly with earlier fabric, and were extended in the 1950s: a two-storey mash and still house, a warehouse range, the manager's office, a cottage, a former kiln and malt barn, all whitewashed over rubble and brick. The distillery's worm tubs are cooled with water from the Edradour Burn, and the draff goes to a local farmer for cattle feed. Malting no longer takes place on site.

The equipment is small and worked by hand; the company says no computers are attached to any of it. An open cast-iron mash tun more than 110 years old feeds a Morton's copper wort cooler, marked 1933, which the listing calls the last working example in the industry. Two Oregon pine washbacks, formerly larch, hold the wash. There are two copper swan-neck stills: the wash still holds 4,000 litres and the spirit still 2,000 litres, and they condense through worm tubs. The whisky is distilled, matured and bottled on the premises.

Historic Environment Scotland records that the first single malt marketed as "The Edradour" was matured in Oloroso sherry casks. The present owners make both Edradour and the peated Ballechin. Historic Environment Scotland's listing calls Edradour Scotland's smallest distillery, and the company makes a similar claim for its stills. The company calls its product "whisky as it used to be", made much as it was 150 years ago.