There’s a particular kind of excitement that comes with catching something mid-stride. Not at the beginning, when everything is new and uncertain, and not at the peak, when the story has already been written — but somewhere in between.
That’s roughly where Lagg Distillery finds itself in 2026, and if my recent conversation with distillery manager Graham Omand is anything to go by, the people making the whisky are acutely aware of it, and capitalising on it.
Lagg sits on the southern tip of the Isle of Arran, and has been producing spirit since 2019. By whisky’s standards, that makes it very young indeed. But Graham, warm and enthusiastic throughout our chat, is clearly done with thinking of the distillery in purely nascent terms. “We are not just a good distillery,” he told me. “We are a distillery that works.”
From Night Shifts to Distillery Manager
Graham’s own journey to the role is one of those stories that immediately inspires. He joined Isle of Arran Distillers at 23, having moved to the island specifically for the job, starting out as a stillhouse operator at Lochranza Distillery (the sister distillery of Lagg, and producer of unpeated whisky).
For nearly a decade, he worked his way through the operation, picking up training along the way — health and safety courses, production qualifications. Then, in early 2018, he was called into a meeting with senior management and asked if he’d consider taking the reins of an entirely new distillery.
“I fell through the floor,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I said, well, why are you coming to me? I was basically just under 30 at that point.”
The answer, as it was put to him, was straightforward: he’d worked his whole adult life in distilling, he understood how a distillery worked as well as anyone, and they trusted him.
He’s been there ever since, and Lagg opened its doors to visitors in 2019. His advice to anyone starting out in the industry is simple: “If your boss offers you training, you bloody take it, because you look back and you realise that things like this can happen to you.”
Why Lagg Exists
To understand what Lagg is trying to do, it helps to understand why it was built in the first place.
For years before Lagg existed, Lochranza had been producing peated whisky in short annual runs, usually in October, using the same stills and production schedule as its unpeated spirit.
That whisky eventually became Machrie Moor, and it was popular, but the process of switching between peated and unpeated production in a single facility was, as Graham put it, an absolute headache.
Cross-contamination was a constant risk, and the cleaning required to purge phenolic content from the system before returning to unpeated production was extensive and time-consuming.
When the idea of a second distillery was first discussed, the decision was made immediately: it would be fully peated. Lagg was conceived from the start as what Graham calls “the dark side” of Arran’s spirit production, allowing both sites to focus fully on what they do best.
Why Not Use Local Peat?
The peat itself is sourced not from Arran but from Aberdeenshire, a decision that raises eyebrows occasionally but makes a great deal of sense once explained.
A large portion of Arran sits under SSSI protection, and the island, recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site through the Arran Geopark, is in the middle of active peatland restoration efforts. Commercial harvesting simply isn’t an option.
This is not something that Lagg begrudges, though. In fact, the distillery is part of the effort, partnering with the Dougarie Estate to restored 325 hectares of peatland.
Beyond the environmental reasoning, the choice of inland peat from the northeast of Scotland is also a deliberate, creative one.
Unlike the coastal peat of Islay, which brings with it the TCP, seaweed, and rock pool notes that define that region’s character, Aberdeenshire peat tends toward something ashier and more tobacco-like — a smouldering, smoky sweetness that Graham describes as “almost like toasted marshmallows.” It works particularly well, he says, with the naturally sweet new make spirit that Lagg produces.
The result is a house style that he summarises as “a peated whisky that’s accessible, but also has a complexity that peat heads would appreciate.”
A Sense of Place in Lagg Whisky
Interestingly, when I pushed him on the question of sense of place — if you’re not using local peat, how do you make something that feels genuinely ‘Arran’? — his answer was disarmingly good for something he admitted he’d never quite articulated before.
“Arran is a very unique island, and it has long been called ‘Scotland in miniature’,” he said. “So I feel like because we’re borrowing from so many different aspects of Scotland, like peat from Aberdeenshire and our range of finishes, it really adds to that Scotland in miniature feel, and I think that’s where our uniqueness is.”
Experimentation as a Philosophy
From its earliest releases, Lagg has been willing to try things that a more established distillery might shy away from.
Unusual cask finishes appeared as early as batch three of the inaugural release, where small Rioja firkins were used, and the list of experiments since then reads like an enthusiastic tour of the wine and spirits world: tequila casks, manzanilla sherry, merlot, calvados.
“We’ve filled these casks, and they will eventually be out in maybe one or two years,” Graham said of the trials. “Don’t know, it’s whenever the whisky is ready.”
The success story he’s most excited about right now is the newly-released manzanilla sherry finish. Manzanilla is a style of sherry with a distinctive saline, briny quality, and when combined with Lagg’s sweet peated spirit, it produced something Graham clearly wasn’t quite prepared for.
“It created this salty, briny, sweet profile that I’d never tried before,” he said. “I had no idea I was going to have such a chaotic storm of flavour in it.” He’s confident enough in it that he believes Manzanilla will become a regular part of Lagg’s lineup going forward.
His personal favourite, though, remains Corriecravie — the oloroso sherry finish released when the distillery was just four years old, with six months of sherry cask finishing.
“I think Corriecravie is the whisky I’m most proud of, and the whisky I’d most like to have in my house,” he told me. “It’s the one that’s kind of proved to me that even at a young age, Lagg can stand tall and show what it can do.”
The Single Cask Moment
If there’s one development that most clearly marks Lagg’s transition from young upstart to distillery with genuine depth, it’s the upcoming launch of a single cask release programme — something that requires a level of confidence in individual casks that simply wasn’t possible a couple of years ago.
For the past five months, Graham has been sampling around 100 casks a month, working through early 2020s production and some of the very late 2019s, looking for what he calls “diamonds in the rough.” The casks that scored a ten out of ten have been gathered into a list that will form the backbone of the programme going forward.
The first releases include a mail order exclusive and a regional exclusive for Japan, with a further release tied to the Arran Geopark, a fitting local partnership given the island’s newly minted UNESCO status. More will follow throughout the year and beyond.
“It’s a way to show what the spirit can do in its own right,” Graham said. “It’s letting the spirit talk. These casks can stand on their own now.”
Summer Plans and the Long View
June 2026 will bring the Isle of Arran Whisky Festival, which this year is expanding from a single day split between the two distilleries into a proper multi-day event. Lagg takes the Friday, Lochranza the Saturday, with a broader open tasting day on the Sunday.
Graham is keen for Lagg’s day to be about more than whisky — there’ll be a local brewer producing a special collaboration beer, local artisan businesses, games and music, and a genuinely family-friendly atmosphere.
Looking further ahead, Graham is clear-eyed about where Lagg sits in the minds of some whisky drinkers. He knows there’s an audience out there that’s waiting. Waiting for the distillery to reach ten years, to feel like a safer, more established proposition. His ambition isn’t to rush that, but to be ready for it.
“Once we reach that mythical age of ten and we start having these more regular releases, I’m hoping that when people finally come in and have a sample of what we’re producing, I will be able to turn their heads,” he said.
On the evidence of what Lagg is already producing, that seems less like a hope and more like an expectation.
Read the full article at Inside Lagg Distillery: How Graham Omand is Crafting Arran’s ‘Dark Side’ Peated Whisky
