Stroma is Old Pulteney's malt whisky liqueur, a sweetened expression built around the distillery's single malt spirit and named after the small, now-uninhabited island of Stroma that sits in the Pentland Firth between Caithness and Orkney. The liqueur has been part of the Old Pulteney stable for many years and survives as one of the few single-malt-based liqueurs still produced by a working Highland distillery.
Bottled at 35%, it is sweeter and softer than the core range, closer in style to the traditional Highland honey liqueurs than to a modern cask-finished malt. The base is Old Pulteney single malt, blended with heather honey and a proprietary mix of herbs and botanicals — the distillery has always been coy about the exact recipe, in the well-established manner of such products.
Historically, liqueurs of this kind occupied a specific niche in Scottish drinking culture, served after dinner or as a winter warmer, and Stroma fits comfortably in that tradition. It is not intended to compete with the distillery's 12, 15 or 18 Year Old, but rather to accompany them, and the Caithness setting gives it a local credibility that the big Drambuie-style brands cannot match.
Drunk neat and chilled, or stretched over ice, it is unapologetically sweet. A curiosity rather than a serious malt, but an honest one, and a reminder that Wick's distillery has always been willing to make things that sit a little outside the usual Scotch single malt playbook. The Pentland Firth namesake is a fitting choice — a small, storm-battered place that most Scotch drinkers will never see, attached to a product most of them will never seek out, and all the more characterful for it.
