Pro tip: I don’t care how full you are, if you’re going to drink scotch all day long don’t skip breakfast. By the end of the day yesterday I was feeling it a little. So today I made sure to hit breakfast at my hotel hard, cereal, yogurt and full English breakfast.

The first stop today is Lagavulin, my favorite whisky and basically the whole reason I came up to Islay. I did the tour and their “Sensory Tasting Experience.” The tour was pretty standard. One thing that has struck me about all of these places is how small they are. Lagavulin is four stills, two wash stills and two spirit stills. That’s the whole outfit. Oh, also worth mentioning, Islay has a really laid back attitude. At one point our guide dipped a cup into their nearly finished wash (just the barely, yeast and water before it goes to distillation) and passed it around so we could all have some. Kind of weird… just like “barley-y water.” The sensory tasting experience was interesting. In addition to drams of their various “expressions” they had deconstructed the various flavors and aromas of whiskey into little vials for comparison. The bottles on the left contain vanilla, malted barely, sherry infused oak, sea salt, peat, souchong tea and dried figs. The idea was you could compare each element to the flavors in each whiskey on the right. Kind of a neat idea. And now I have a box full of the constituent elements of scotch so… yeah, that’ll come in handy?

I wanted to hit Ardbeg but they didn’t have any activities that fit into my schedule. They are just a short walk from Lagavulin and they actually have a cafe at their distillery so I opted instead to just walk over their for lunch. The Ardbeg distillery is easily the most picturesque of the ones I visited. I had lunch there, and conducted my own informal Ardbeg tasting.

The last stop of the day and of my little tour was Kilchoman which I had never even heard of before my trip. It’s the smallest distillery on Islay and just restarted about ten years ago. It’s located on a farm and they grow their own barely right on the grounds as well. Since they are newer they don’t have the age on their whisky yet but they have been winning all kinds of awards already and I really enjoyed all the different varieties we tried. I’ve never seen this in The States but if I do, it could become the scotch I use to bring people around to liking whisky. They have a great setup with their distillery too, farmhouse feel, little cafe, nice tasting area. It was easily my favorite tour just because the place was so small.

I had to change hotels for this last night so I moved over to The Islay Hotel in Port Ellen. It was nicer than the Brigend Hotel but it lacked the charm, I thought. Both Freddie and Stewart had mentioned the Ardview Inn to me as a “crackin’ pub” in town so I thought I’d go see what a truly local pub was like not expecting anyone to be in there on a Sunday afternoon. It was quite rowdy! So I just had a quick drink and rolled out. I later saw a comment on FourSquare that referred to it as “slightly less soul crushing than the White Hart” which really made me want to find the White Hart. I had dinner back at the hotel and called it a night.