John Clotworthy was already a man of the trade when he started Loch Ewe in November 2005. He ran the Drumchork Lodge Hotel up the brae from the loch, and he had served as Whisky Ambassador of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association - the body that speaks for publicans, hoteliers and the people who sell drink for a living. He wanted to make whisky, but the budget was a stubborn £50,000. Industrial stills would have eaten that and asked for more before lunchtime. So Clotworthy went the other direction. He bought small, flame-heated copper stills of the sort the moonshiners of Wester Ross had used for generations, each holding only 120 litres of mash per batch - roughly a fifteenth of a professional minimum. Then he spent three years arguing the matter through the licensing system. The lever was the 1786 Wash Act, a Georgian-era statute whose drafters never imagined a hotelier in Aultbea would use it to legalise a garage. The loophole has since been closed. But for a window of years, Loch Ewe ran on it.

Most Scotch whiskies sit in oak for at least three years before they earn the name. Loch Ewe could not afford that patience. The bonded store behind the hotel was tiny and demand outran capacity from the start, so the spirit was typically sold after six weeks in small bottles - not legally Scotch whisky, but legally distilled in Scotland, which was the joke and the point. Visitors who came for the distillery tour could go further. The smallest stills on the premises held one to five litres, and Clotworthy ran courses that let guests distil their own spirit and walk away with a souvenir bottle. The technique behind it was deliberately ancient. The distillery used a copper alembic with a downward-sloping tube, sat atop a copper pot - a design recognisable to anyone who had seen the apparatus described in texts from Ancient Egypt around 200 BC. The smell of warm mash and copper drifted out of the garage and across the back garden, more cottage industry than corporate distillery.

In 2015 the distillery and its hotel were put up for sale for around £750,000, advertised as Scotland's smallest legally operating distillery. No buyer materialised who wanted to keep it running. In 2017 Loch Ewe closed permanently. The garage is silent now, the stills gone or quiet, and Scotland's smallest distillery has been overtaken by a wave of new micro-distilleries that did not exist when Clotworthy lit his first flame in 2006. Drive the single-track road past Aultbea today and there is no plaque, no visitor centre, only the loch below and the hotel above. But for twelve years, on a stretch of Highland coast better known for Arctic convoys and crofts, one man proved you could make a legal dram in a garage if you were willing to read the small print of a 1786 Act of Parliament.