Borodale House sat empty for years before R&B Distillers bought it. The Victorian hotel near the ferry pier on the south-west of the island had been a guesthouse, then a tea room, then nothing. R&B was founded in 2014 by entrepreneur Bill Dobbie and whisky expert Alasdair Day, with the plan of establishing a distillery on Raasay. The renovation took two years. The hotel's old guest rooms became distillery offices and a six-bedroom hotel for visitors; a new glass-and-stone stillhouse was attached to the rear, looking out over the sea. The distillery received its licence and began legal whisky production in September 2017. There had certainly been illegal stills on Raasay before, in the long centuries when smuggled spirit was a Highland mainstay, but no one had ever paid the excise tax on whisky distilled there until then.

Raasay's whisky is made from both peated and unpeated malt, with the proportions blended at maturation. The flagship Isle of Raasay Single Malt was released in 2020, finished in a combination of Tennessee whisky casks, Bordeaux red wine casks, and ex-rye casks. The water from the Iron Age well, called Tobar na Ba Bàine, is hard, with a high mineral content that gives the spirit a particular profile. The distillery makes about 200,000 litres of pure alcohol a year, tiny by Scotch standards. While the first single malt was maturing, R&B kept the brand alive with While We Wait, a series of five independently bottled malts (the final one subtitled Last Orders) that ended in 2020. They also launched an Isle of Raasay Gin in 2019, made with ten botanicals including rhubarb root and cubeb pepper, using the same Iron Age well water.

The distillery opened its visitor centre in January 2018 and was awarded five stars by VisitScotland that June. It is one of the easier serious distilleries to visit, sitting fifteen minutes' walk from the ferry slip at Inverarish, which the Hallaig ferry reaches in about twenty-five minutes from Sconser on Skye. Tours run daily, ending in the tasting room with the stillhouse view. In 2025 the distillery expanded its accommodation by opening Na Bothain, five luxury cabins on the hillside above the buildings, alongside the six original bedrooms inside the distillery itself. In 2023 a Cask Connoisseur ranking placed Raasay third among the most popular whisky distilleries to visit in Britain, ahead of much older and more famous operations on Speyside and Islay.

Raasay is fourteen miles long and at most three miles wide, with a population of around 160. It sits between Skye and the Scottish mainland in a sound that was used as the Royal Navy's submarine training ground. The island has the cleared village of Hallaig at its centre, the poet Sorley MacLean's birthplace at Osgaig, the flat-topped hill Dun Caan rising 444 metres above the heather, and a long history of leaving. The distillery represents one of the few significant new businesses the island has seen in decades. It employs more than twenty-five people on the island year-round and brings visitors who would not otherwise come. The single malt that ages in casks inside Borodale House does so within view of Skye's Cuillin, ageing on an island that exports few products and has spent two centuries losing people. Each cask is also, in a small way, an argument for staying.