Skye waited almost two centuries for a second licensed stillhouse, and when it came it arrived not as a gleaming industrial monument, but as a listed 19th-century farm steading at Teangue on the Sleat peninsula, rebuilt with the quiet seriousness of a conservation job. The idea was Sir Iain Noble’s, first drawn up in 2005, and after years of planning and stonework the distillery began producing spirit in January 2017, now under the Mossburn Distillers umbrella.

From the outset, Torabhaig set itself a precise target: a peat character it describes as “smoke with taste”, elegant rather than overbearing, and revealed in chapters through its Legacy Series releases. The process is deliberately traditional where it matters. Scottish barley is commonly peated to 75 ppm or more, then mashed with water drawn from local burns including Allt Gleann and Allt Breacach, before a long, flexible fermentation of roughly 70 to 120 hours in eight Douglas Fir washbacks coaxes fruit into the frame. Distillation follows through two Forsyths copper pot stills, an 8,000 litre wash still and a 5,000 litre spirit still, with copper shell-and-tube condensers, all working toward a medium-weight, medium-peated island style with clarity at its core. The earliest public bottlings were positioned as a running logbook of that character, beginning with Legacy Series 2017 in February 2021, then expanding through Allt Gleann as the distillery’s voice grew steadier.