Our second day in Islay during the 2014 Scotland Trip started in Bowmore (Bogh More) – the largest settlement in Islay. I use the word ‘settlement’ because it looks larger and nicer than a village but it can’t be called a town 🙂

There are some other interesting things to see in Bowmore, as I’ll show in a later post, but, the real reason everybody goes to Islay for is the whisky (hh-we-ss-kay as the master distiller of Bowmore pronounces in the introductory video). That meant that in the earliest possible hour of the day (9 o’clock) there were more than ore afficionados arriving in the city center of Bowmore, looking for this:

At the early hours we have encountered one of the iconic messages of the trip: “Unfortunately our license does not allow us to serve alcohol before 10:00am” so the tours start at 10. Therefore we headed to the beach to take a look around:

Don’t worry, there are some nice I shot in Bowmore too, but, since this is a post about the distillery, they will be included in a different posts. They’re some amazing city panoramas. Ok, back to our story:

Keeping in line with the ‘don’t bore the audience with photos of distillation stills’ idea, I will show from Bowmore 2 more photos that have remained in my memory:

The Bowmore tour is one of the most instructive, since one gets to taste 7 kinds of spirits, including ‘new make’ spirit. This is enlightening because it allows one to see how much whisky evolves from the new make (moonshine) spirit until the aged, crafted, elegant beverage that is single malt.

In the end of this post I would like to share with you a revelation I had. There are words that now, in the connected world of the Internet of Everything have meaning that we all know, understand and associate with certain ideas, concepts. However, they used to have a different meaning before the Age of Computers. One of them, which still retains it’s original meaning somehow is ‘mouse’ 🙂 But there is this one below that just blew my mind. I simply did not EVER stop and think about the original meaning of this phrase:

If you wish to know more about the Bowmore Distillery, here are some great pieces of info, and this is the official site. The one thing I would like to add to this post is the fact that the Japanese precision and respect for tradition and quality is a perfect match for the passion of the people on Islay (and in this case, the people at Bowmore). Why am I saying this you ask? Like Laphroaig, Bowmore is now owned noy by a Japanese company – Suntory (the makers of Yamazaki single malt among others).

You should go visit Bowmore and watch the introductory film. If that does not remind you of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, than you haven’t seen the latter 😉

As always, I promise that more posts from this trip will follow, so be sure to subscribe and have them automatically delivered when they are pressed ( by email or via RSS). Until then, have a look around for more travel photos from around the world.