Lost Loch Distillery and standing stones

I experienced a tasting session at the Lost Loch Distillery yesterday for a friend’s birthday. It was a wonderful experience. Lost Loch is very different to your average Scottish distillery because it’s not a traditional one with giant copper stills and they don’t actually make any whisky. They do produce two whisky products but they’re made from a whisky base that is made elsewhere in Scotland and brought in. Instead their expertise lies in creating a range of spirits – gin, rum, whisky, absinthe – by mixing in a variety of botanicals to create products with unique flavours.

It reinforced the idea for me that flavours comes from plants and you don’t need to add salt to a meal to provide flavour. Instead you can get it from combinations of herbs and spices. At Lost Loch they truly live this philosophy and have a huge wall of botanicals which you can experiment with if you visit the Spirit School.

Some of their products include an award-winning gin call eeNoo, a Scottish Absinthe called Murmichan that’s made with wormwood, aniseed, fennel seed, hyssop, star anise, lemon balm, mint, bramble, lemon thyme and heather and creates an explosion of flavours in your mouth, and then my favourite of all, Haroosh, which is made to an old family recipe consisting of brambles, honey, and whisky.

For the under-aged or people who prefer not to drink they can provide a non-alcoholic drink called Talonmore that’s delicious and made by a family-run business in Edinburgh

Lost Loch is near Aboyne in Royal Deeside and is thus named because of a nearby loch that was drained mid last century for farmland and is therefore lost. Aside from sampling lots of flavours the tour includes a sneak peak into the production process that takes pure ethanol through to a product that gets bottled and labelled, all of which is done by hand at Lost Loch. It was fascinating and is well worth a visit.

Afterwards we went for a wee walk in the woods at Aboyne where I took this photo of Ben and the kids with some friends. They look like an album cover for a Scottish folk band.

Ben is the manager of course. Daniel has actually written a piece of music for the violin and it’s very good. He just woke up one morning with a tune in his head and his guitar teacher encouraged him to write it down so he did. Elizabeth plays the violin and has been learning it. It’s not finished yet as he wants to add the accompanying guitar chords.

The woods in Aboyne are home to an ancient stone circle. Some stone circle magic here.