Holyrood Distillery Edinburgh: the tour, and why it matters

St Leonard’s station was a freight terminus on the south side of the Old Town, and the goods shed is the surviving piece of it. It was listed at category B on the thirtieth of June 1988, under the not especially romantic official name of “St Leonard’s Lane, St Leonard’s Station Including Outbuilding at Gate and Gatepiers”.

Putting a distillery inside a listed goods shed is a harder engineering problem than building one in a field, and it shows in the layout: everything is fitted to the building rather than the other way round. That turns out to be the most interesting thing about the tour, because you can see every decision that the constraint forced.

It also puts a working still house about twenty minutes’ walk from the Royal Mile, which is the practical reason this is the distillery most visitors to Edinburgh actually manage to see.

From the Royal Mile you walk down towards the Pleasance and St Leonard’s. It is about twenty minutes, and the useful detail nobody mentions is that it is downhill going and uphill coming back, which after a tasting is the right way round.

It is close enough to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat that pairing the two makes a genuinely good afternoon: the hill first, the distillery after. Doing it in that order also solves the problem of what to do with your legs afterwards.

There is no reason to drive. If you do, you will be given your drams in sealed miniatures — say so when you book rather than at the door.

Visitors sometimes read the gin at Holyrood as a compromise. It is closer to the opposite: it is the thing that makes the whisky possible.

Scotch cannot be sold as Scotch until it has spent three years in oak, and a distillery that started producing in 2019 therefore had years of costs before its first legal bottle. Gin needs no maturation at all. It can be distilled on Monday and sold on Friday, and the cash it brings in pays the staff while the whisky sleeps in the warehouse.

Nearly every new distillery in Scotland does this, and the ones worth visiting say so plainly rather than burying it. Holyrood is in the second group, which is one of the reasons the tour is well reviewed: you are being told how the business actually works rather than shown a heritage story.

Fifty-three thousand litres of capacity is small. A large Speyside distillery can make twenty times that. It is easy to read the number as a limitation and it is at least as much an opportunity.

A distillery with one pair of stills and no volume commitments can change what it is doing from one run to the next. Different yeast strains, different fermentation lengths, different barley varieties, different cask types — all of it is possible at fifty-three thousand litres and none of it is possible when you owe a blender two million litres a year of exactly the same spirit.

That is the genuinely interesting thing about visiting a small new distillery, and it is why the questions worth asking are about process rather than heritage. There is no heritage here yet. There is a group of people making decisions in public, and you can ask them why.