I Survived Drinking 23 Drams at a Whisky Festival in Scotland

So this is 30-something. After spending my 20s heavily experimenting with drinks (tequila and tomato juice? Sure), a slow realisation crept in. If I stuck to one spirit and one spirit alone, I might feel less like Gollum after a 20-minute tanning bed the next morning.

I settled on whisky. I would drink it neat, swirling the ice chunks around like an absolute don (Corelone or Draper). I would revel in the newfound respect from my father, himself a lifelong whiskey drinker. I'm a good Scottish girl—it's in my blood to have a wee dram every night.

Roughly at the same time that this booze epiphany was breaking, I realized I should never go to another music festival again. Having endured a final, traumatic Glastonbury a few years ago and a night at Leeds Festival spent in a one-man tent under a serviette and surrounded by ham sandwiches, I reached a tipping point. Still, when I got an email from someone asking me if I'd like to make a pilgrimage to Islay in Scotland's Inner Hebrides for their music and whisky festival, I (nearly) shat myself with excitement.

Islay is the innermost Hebredian island. Its population hangs around 10,000 sheep and 3,000 people. A tiny propeller plane lands in the airport—a tin shed near some sheep—twice a day. Here's a picture, with my bag for scale.

I sat with this chill dude waiting for one of the four taxis on the island that came to take me to the Bunnahabhain Distillery. The air rattling through the windows was, unlike the grey asshole smoke that London blows at you, like heaven on earth. The surrounding fields were lush and verdant, rolling into a sea the color of Walter White's crystal meth, and all overlooked by the tits-like Paps of Jura.

Islay is famed for its whisky. Irish monks first started distilling it there in the 14th century, growing barley like nobody's business with the island's pure water and peaty soil. There are now 11 distilleries, and some of these places like Bunnahabhain produce small batches of single malts. Others, like Laphroaig or Lagavulin, produce blends—the difference between having good shit and really good shit. A single malt means exactly that—a whisky from one batch. A blend is a—still delicious—mixture of malts from loads of different whiskies.

This guy, Andrew—who runs the show at the Bunnahabhain distillery—is pretty much the Mick Jagger of whisky. Everywhere we went, women threw themselves at him, asking him to sign their bottles. Before I'd even introduced myself, he'd offered me two drams, a Bunnahabhain 12-year, and a limited edition 17-year. It was 10:30 AM.

After having been off the menu for nearly a century, niche or massed produced, the whisky industry is having a boom. Bunnahabhain has just hired three more tour guides—a three hundred percent rise from last year. During the festival, each distillery on the island has an open day. You can have a guided tour, buy a bottle of limited edition bottle available only on that day, eat a sausage sarnie that's fried up in front of you by a nice lady who runs Munchbox—the island's greasy spoon—listen to a local cèilidh band and basically riff with whisky pals from around the world like this man, wearing a shirt that says "single malt whisky drinker" on the back. Yes, that is a whisky glass on a lanyard. Worship him.

Andrew managed to grab a few moments away from his fans to give me a personal tour of the distillery, which is based in a building that looks not dissimilar to a prison—all high walls, small windows, and cool breezes. The smell of burgers barbecuing on the pier outside fills the air. Having genuinely always wanted to see how whisky was made, I had about as much decorum about me as a toddler in a ball pit. Andrew first explains that whisky starts life as malted barley and how Bunnahabhain was the last distillery on the island to bring it in by boat. Now, 100 tonnes per week winds its way through the hills to reach them by truck.

The barley is then put through an ancient grinder (I withheld how much I thought it resembled a robot—Andrew was a focused man) that breaks it down into three parts: husk, grist, and flour. The ratio of these changes with every barley batch, so it's measured in an ancient box with three different sizes of sieve that's shaken 80 times, once a week. They like the old-time techniques around here.

Then, the barley goes into a mash tun with 45 thousand litres of water from the spring up the road. This steaming, bubbling quagmire is left to do its thing at a precise 85 degrees Celcius.

After getting washed four times, it goes into 18-foot-deep barrels that are, like, 20 feet across, where it ferments for between 48 and 100 hours. The air smelled—frankly—like warm gusset, but in a comforting way. This liquid is then passed through copper stills to burn off the alcohol. Bunnahabhain takes the middle cut, then it's put into barrels and left for up to 40 years. The rest is either sold off for blended whiskies, or bottled and flogged in the duty free market, "where the real money is," Andrew winks. The whisky is bottled at 43.6 percent alcohol—something to think about the next time you spend a tenner on some shitty beers.

My notes on the distillery tour ended with, "get those enzymes popping," which I think was referring to the dark arts of the fermentation process. Who knows—the wafts from Munchbox were making me hangry.

The face of Bunnahabhain is "Sean Connery," who had apparently returned for the festival after being away for "17 years" to say a few words. He was then piped off by McMorpheus here. I didn't see him again after this. Glitch in The Matrix? Och well.

I lamented my grief at not seeing him again with a local delicacy—freshly-caught oysters with a splash of whisky. Andrew looked very disappointed when I said I preferred a traditional squeeze of lemon. You can't win them all.

Part of what makes whisky such golden nectar is that, like a scuzzy flat in Hackney, it's a fucking great investment. Each cask here holds 300 liters of whisky. It just sits there in the warehouse for up to four decades and is basically an Austin Power cryo chamber with a wicked profit margin—the entry price for a bottle of Bunnahabhain 12-year is £35. A few years ago, they sold a limited edition 40-year-old bottle for £2000.

By the evening, I've had 23 drams pressed into my hand. It was time for some music, so we headed to Bowmore, the island's biggest town, which is so small that the local Spar store has to leave its trolleys outside. Everyone from the distillery is so warm and welcoming—they love their whisky-based life. Why wouldn't they? Perhaps they are immune, but the malty mists of the distillery made me feel a gentle, blissful level of pissed before I'd even drunk any. Coupled with the verdant pastoral beauty, it's as close to any heaven I can imagine.

I was expecting to be greeted with a heavy whisky snobbery on Islay, but couldn't have been more wrong. A hirsute Brooklyn barman might scorn you for not drinking a good whisky neat, but the Bunnahabhain brand ambassador won't. "Have it how you like it, darlin'," she said. "It doesn't matter if you want it with ice, neat, or watered down with some ginger ale. There's nothing worse than a snob."

She lead us to a pub that's half the size of my kitchen, when a woman with a lamb wearing a diamante collar on a leash walked in. As she sat down with a whisky and ginger, the lamb promptly gushed an enormous piss all over her. She ignored it. We all did. I could get used to life up there, I really could.

After the drams hit their 20s, talk turned to the local airport. "Watch it," one of the ladies from Bunnahabhain waggled her finger. "It's harder to get through there than a Syrian checkpoint." It's hard to believe that a shoebox airport whose security staff consists of the same lady who mans the local café would be so scary. Apparently I'm wrong. "The metal detector only beeped once and the woman took me aside and made me strip to my pants. I just stood there, looking out at a field of sheep."

So, with a blood alcohol level so high I could probably breathe on a sheep's face and set it alight, I went to bed both fearing and half looking forward to a naked pat down in the airport the next morning. Filled with a newfound knowledge of my favorite drink to bore people with back home, though, and ringing with the after-effects of close-range bagpiping, I fell asleep a very happy woman.

The flight home was interesting, though. Necking the equivalent of a full bottle of 43.6 percent whisky will do that to you.