This was a most unusual distillery. It was originally a brewery, now sadly demolished, to make way for some urban irrelevance. It was turned into a distillery producing both malt and grain whiskies when it was acquired in 1957 by Joseph Hobbs of Ben Nevis Distillery. A controlling company, Macnab Distilleries Ltd., was set up and a blend, Sandy Macnab, was promoted alongside Lochside, as a single malt.

Lochside was bought in 1972 by a subsidiary of Domecq, who were, in turn, acquired by Allied Distillers 20 years later. The distillery itself was immediately decommissioned in 1992 and the warehouses were closed in 1997. The distillery equipment was removed around then as well. Sadly, the remaining Lochside structure burned down in January, 2005 just as permission was being granted for its demolition.

When I visited Lochside more than 30 years ago it was the only operating distillery actually using the premises of a converted brewery and one of only two Highland malt distilleries bottling their product on the premises.

We have a couple of bottles each of the official distillery bottled Lochside 10 years old, and of some relatively rare independent bottlings. Even rarer are bottles of the Sandy Macnab blend, which was the public face of Lochside.

There is very little around by way of memorabilia but a lovely framed colour print of the distillery in its heyday gives an idea of its former glory.