Speyside Aypple grew from a long-standing connection to Speyside, its landscape, and its traditions of making spirits well and with care.

For many years, Michelle has run Speyside Tours, guiding visitors through the region’s whisky heritage, particularly during the busy summer months. After earning her distilling licence, she realised she didn’t want to follow the conventional distillery path. Instead, she chose a smaller, more hands-on approach, combining her interest in distilling with a long-standing love of foraging and local produce.

This led to the creation of her own gin school, which is taught at the Gordon Castle Walled Gardens, where she helps others learn how to create their own botanical gins. Alongside the botanicals grown there, Gordon Castle is also home to a large and varied orchard. Like many places in Speyside, not all of the fruit finds a use.

Beyond the estate, apple trees across Speyside were dropping fruit that was rarely gathered or used. Rather than see such valuable local produce go to waste, Michelle wanted to find a practical way to give these apples a purpose.

Inspiration also came from time spent in France, where small-scale fruit distilling is part of everyday rural life. There, families ferment their own fruit and use mobile distillers to turn it into eau de vie. While that culture is well established in France, Scotland tends to favour maturation in cask, particularly when it comes to the areas’ single malt whisky.

These ideas came together in a simple question: Speyside has apples worth celebrating, so why not treat them with the same care given to barley?

Speyside Aypple began with apples harvested by hand, pressed locally, and allowed to ferment naturally into cider before being double-distilled into a clean apple spirit. The distillery itself is intentionally small, based at home, using two copper pot stills. Like whisky, the apple spirit now rests in quarter oak casks to develop both its depth and character.

While the apple brandy matures, Speyside Aypple has taken shape through a small range of products such as the Speyside Aypple Aperitif and Speyside Aypple Sorbet that reflect the same approach.