Grove Koger
When Maggie and I reached the western Scottish port town of Oban (OH-bin) on the Firth of Lorn by train in 2006, we were on our way to Mull in the Inner Hebrides. As so frequently happens, however, the train and ferry schedules weren’t a good match, so we’d reserved a room for the night in a guesthouse. That left us plenty of time to visit one of the town’s main attractions—the Oban Distillery, which, as its owners like to point out, is only 208 steps from the waters of the Firth.
The Oban Distillery is one of the oldest in Scotland, having been established in 1794 as the Oban Brewing Company by brothers Hugh and John Stevenson. The brothers’ first brew was Cowbell Ale, but they converted their brewery to a distillery within a short time and began producing scotch. The town of Oban, which borrowed its name from the distillery, wasn’t founded until 1811.
Despite its age, Oban remains one of the smallest distilleries in Scotland, boasting only two small stills and, at the time of writing, seven employees. It draws its water from a nearby loch but buys its barley from the Burghead Maltings in the Strathspey region of northeastern Scotland.
Scotch needs no introduction, and I have nothing original to say about it, aside from my impression that sampling Oban scotch in Oban itself conferred a kind of “identity” on it for me. For the first time in my life, there in that little grey granite port, the smoky, peaty beverage made sense. Since then, Maggie and I have been delighted to discover that several lounges in Boise offer Oban.
The Gaelic word oban actually means “little bay,” so it’s appropriate that the distillery’s latest offering is Oban Little Bay, created by blending Oban scotches of different ages and then aging the blend further in a series of three small oak casks, including ex-sherry casks. Someone has given Maggie a bottle for her birthday, and I anticipate that we’ll be sampling it soon!
The panorama of Oban and the Firth of Lorn (with the islands of Kerrera and Mull in the background) is by Colin, and is reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia, while the photograph of the Oban Distillery is by Ayack and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The photograph of ferries in the Firth of Lorn is by Kasman and is reproduced courtesy of Needpix.com; we would have taken a ferry like one of these to Mull.
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