Isle ofHarris Distillery

The Isle of Harris Distillery opened in Tarbert in October 2015, the first legal distillery built on Harris, and began production that December. It describes itself as a social distillery, founded to create jobs on an island where young people had been leaving to find work; it now employs more than fifty people, several trained on site from scratch. The gin is flavoured with sugar kelp, hand-harvested from local sea lochs and dried before it goes into the still, a botanical unique to this coastline. The single malt, called The Hearach after the Gaelic word for a Harris native, was first bottled in 2023 after ageing on site. Visitors can tour the stills and warehouse and buy both spirits from the shop on site. The building sits close to the harbour where the Tarbert ferry docks.