The distillery currently attracts 60,000 visitors a year - Diageo’s busiest distillery visitor centre - and the new facilities are much larger, with extra tasting rooms.

Distillery manager Mark Lochhead is to open the new centre in time for the Easter tourist season.

He said: “Talisker is going from strength to strength as a brand and the distillery is growing in popularity with people coming from all over the world to visit the home of our iconic single malt.

“This investment has been a significant construction project which has brought work in the local economy and the increasing tourism will also have a great knock-on effect for local businesses.”

The investment follows the launch of Talisker Storm earlier this year and there is another new launch in the pipeline. Storm is a more intense, more peaty expression of Talisker and it was launched in Europe, first.

Diageo operates 28 malt whisky distilleries in Scotland. 12 of these have visitor centres. Talisker is also one of Diageo’s leading malt whiskies in terms of sales performance, delivering net sales growth of 20% in the company’s recent half year results.