Reflections on Winning Distillery of the Year: A Conversation with Lagg Distilleries Manager Graham Omand

As another whirlwind year draws to a close we took the chance to catch up with Graham Omand, the Distillery Manager at Lagg Distillery to reflect on what winning the Scottish Whisky award for Distillery of the Year 2023 has meant to his team and how the award has impacted on his business this past year.

Hi Graham, as 2023 draws to a close, we thought it would be great to check in and hear how things have been going since Lagg won Distillery of the Year. We’d love to learn more about the impact this recognition has had on different aspects of the business. How has it affected the different strands of the distillery, the visitor numbers, and has it helped commercially to raise your profile?

It’s definitely raised the profile, particularly for customers. A lot of people that were coming to Lagg were probably going to come anyway, they were usually casual consumers, people just on the island looking for something to do. Arran is not yet known as a whisky destination, a lot of whisky enthusiasts will go to Lochranza. But because we won distillery of the year we noticed a lot more enthusiasts wanting to check out Lagg, not just thinking it’s a stopover, they were interested to see what a distillery that won this award was like.

Generally the total number of people to the island were down this year but what we did notice was a lot more people who were very knowledgeable on whisky wanting to come to the distillery, it put it on the radar that such a new young distillery had won such a prestigious award. We were flabbergasted, I still can’t believe it was a year ago that it happened.

Would you say you were surprised that you won? Because Lagg was such a new distillery, was it a shock?

It was absolutely a shock we had no idea at all. We were up against two titans, Arbikie and Glenmorangie, so we just thought it was nice to be nominated. It was the final award of the night, and Arbikie and Glenmorangie are fantastic distilleries, they have such pedigree. Arbikie is a bit younger than Glenmorangie but they are far ahead of us, they have such a large profile and a large spread of products, a very lovely distillery to visit too. Then we won the award, I couldn’t believe it.

Would you say it is uncommon for a distillery that is only five years old to win, does it happen?

It does happen, Raasay won it the year before, so they set the president for that, it just shows that the young distillers are really carving out an interesting reputation, a shakeup of the foundations of the whisky industry. It’s all about what the distillery can bring, what are they doing differently, what is the building like, what is the overall layout, what the staff, the visitors center, the experience. It’s all that as well as the whisky.

Did you get feedback from the judges?

It was the story, they mentioned something like you can almost feel the story coming out of the ground, in the marsh and in the bogs. The description we have of Lagg as this peated distillery, it’s in our nature, bogg, peat, black, dirt and how we are not ashamed of it. That seemed to be a big part of the winning aspect, that story that we tell of peated malt and the history of peated malt on Arran.

One thing that comes up a lot is the combination of the traditional with the modern, traditional methods and a modern building, that’s usually the big soundbite.

That is quite a unique selling point. Even inside, in the stillhouse it’s all about the new technology with the old, I guess that’s all come through and the judges have picked up on that.

We are not fully automated. A lot of new distilleries tend to work with large consoles, we have a small touch pad just for essentials. All the staff here work with large pipe and valve manifolds which they have to memorise themselves, the traditional way.

You have been operating for five years now, so it’s a good time to reflect on the layout of the distillery, the process and functionality as well as future proofing. How do you find all of that is working in regards to the flow and layout?

It’s fantastic, it’s all under one roof, you don’t have to travel far. It means that one person can confidently run the site by themselves, obviously with safety measures in place, you canny ask better than that for efficiency. One person can look after the mash, the fermentation, the milling and the distillation.

It’s not just efficiency of the layout of the production, it’s future proofed. We can easily remove parts of the windows to access the stillhouse itself, which is coming up soon. With minimal disruption and damage to the building we can easily double up production, without having to move anything, which is very important.

In terms of the tour route and visitors experience, do you feel the layout is working in that regard as well?

100 percent, the transition from visitors center to an AV video to the still house catches everyone off-guard. It’s such a seamless transition, it doesn’t feel like there are barriers, it feels like one unit, one building. That plays quite heavily into the relationships we have here, there is a close relationship between the production and visitor center staff, that doesn’t happen in distilleries, they are always separate, but here we are one unit, it’s very nice.

If you tried to build it today I think it would have been pared back, due to the impact of rising costs and global events. In one way it was unlucky with its timing because when it came to open it was Covid which wasn’t great but it was lucky in another way in that you could be a bit more generous with the spaces. Have you found that the design of the distillery has helped the business commercially?

Through the design of the distillery being spacious but tight, there is not much loss. The building itself, it feels like there is a broad amount of space but it is used very efficiently, in terms of electrical and heating costs, and efficiencies of production costs, I would say it definitely works well.

Do you feel a sense of pride in being the Distillery Manager for Lagg in this new building?

Oh yeah definitely and the first thing everyone always talks about is the building rather than the whisky, it might change in the future but right now it is the design of the building that’s usually the first thing in people’s mind. The design, the roof, the view, also you make a good malt, that usually comes after all that, that might shuffle in time as we get older, right now that’s the big talking point. It’s what is giving Lagg its edge in its early years, it’s definitely allowed Lagg to appear on the map when it’s such a young distillery, when normally that wouldn’t happen.

The design on the building, the views, the visitors center, all that brings Lagg this focus that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. It wouldn’t give the whisky a chance to be tasted, I believe, if it wasn’t for the building.