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InchDairnie ‘first’ Scotch maker to distil with oats in a century

Fife’s InchDairnie Distillery has created single grain spirit from oats, making it the first Scottish distillery to use the cereal in “perhaps a century”.

InchDairnie managing director Ian Palmer said the distillery is exploring the ‘outer edges of whisky’

The distillery was inspired to distil oats after finding evidence of the cereal’s use in Scotland in the 1908-09 Royal Commission Report on Whisky and Other Potable Spirits.

InchDairnie carried out its first distillation of oats on 10 June and the release of the whisky will “depend on how the spirit matures”.

Once matured, the oat-based single grain whisky will be released under The PrinLaws Collection. The new series will be a collection of “flavour-led whiskies” made with different yeasts, cereals and oaks.

Ian Palmer, managing director at InchDairnie, said: “The objective of the PrinLaws Collection is to share with our consumers some of the work we are doing in exploring the outer edges of the whisky world for new and lost flavours.”

The first release in the PrinLaws Collection has been made with a mashbill of minimum 51% oats blended with malted barley. The spirit was first distilled in a copper pot still, followed by spirit distillation in InchDairnie’s Lomond still.

The liquid will mature in a combination of American oak ex-Bourbon barrels and Portuguese Muscatel casks.

Palmer said: “Our intention with the distillery right from the start was to push the boundaries of flavour in whisky using a combination of our experience and new technology while remaining true to whisky’s traditions.

“Creating this whisky is one of many experimental ideas we had in mind when we built the distillery and one of the reasons we chose to install specific equipment such as the hammer mill, the mash filter and Lomond still.”

InchDairnie Distillery launched in 2016 with a “forward-thinking approach to producing malt Scotch whisky”, based around technology, innovation and energy efficiency.

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