Torabhaig handed the distillery to two of its nine distillers for a month, and the result is the first pair of bottles in the Distillers’ Series: Iona’s First Edition, an unpeated single malt built on chocolate malt, and Niall’s First Edition, lightly peated and part-matured in rum casks. They go on sale at £75 in ten markets from September 2026, 5,250 bottles each at cask strength, non-chill-filtered and with no added colour.
Iona’s First Edition: chocolate malt, no peat
Iona Macphie joined Torabhaig in 2017 at 21, after a spell as a tour guide at Talisker, and distilled her whisky at 23: she is the youngest distiller to complete her own release. The recipe starts from 10% chocolate malt from Crisp Maltings, which turned the wash black (“black as stout”, in her words), with a minimum 120-hour fermentation, an early cut onto spirit and a low cut point to hold on to the richest flavours. It matured in first-fill bourbon casks and refill sherry butts and was bottled in 2026 at 60.9%. For a distillery whose signature is smoke, this one is an exception: it is unpeated. The label is a painting by Iona herself.
Niall’s First Edition: light peat and rum casks
Niall Culbertson, also at Torabhaig since 2017, grew up a mile from the distillery, the son of a fisherman, and as a boy used to sail into the bay where Torabhaig now stands. His whisky comes from 90% lightly peated malt, 5% brown malt and 5% dark crystal malt, matured in first-fill bourbon and ex-rum casks, and was bottled in 2026 at 59.3%. “It has all the tropical fruit and maritime notes I was aiming for,” he says. The official notes list vanilla, toasted oak, caramel, citrus and pepper on the nose, with a full palate of creamy vanilla, honeyed fruit, salt and citrus zest.
How the series works
Torabhaig, on the Sleat peninsula, has been distilling since January 2017 and is Skye’s second single malt distillery after Talisker. From the start Mossburn Distillers hired local people and newcomers to the industry and trained them from scratch. Every year the distillery sets aside one month for two of them, who choose the barley and speciality malts, the yeast, the fermentation length, the cut points and the casks. The series, announced on 28 August 2026, will continue with two releases a year: the next distillers are Douglas Stewart, Kieran Roberts and David McKellar. Neil MacLeod Mathieson, the distillery’s whisky maker, says: “The stills are the same, the island is the same, but the story changes with every maker.”
Price and availability
Both bottles cost £75 on the distillery website, where, as of 9 September 2026, they are both in stock. The announced price is €87 in Europe and $100 in the United States. In Italy, as of the same date, no retailer lists them: the shops that carry Torabhaig only stock the Legacy Series.
