Ardnamurchan Small Batch AD/7.21:04 Single Malt Scotch Whisky

The nose shows a dehydrated banana, grilled peaches, seaside wood fires, fresh grain, and a savory nori note. The palate shows the peated proportion of the batch with additional notes of dehydrated fruits, peach, sea spray, turned earth, and stadium peanuts. D&M Tasting Notes

The Ardnamurchan peninsula is a place that today can appear untouched and almost desolate, but it has been an outpost of human habitation for about four millennia. The Vikings stayed for 500 years with a watchful eye on the nearby islands of Skye, Mull, the Western Isles, and the Argyll coast. In 1266, the last Viking Mhuchdragain Mac Righ Lochluinn was killed by one of his own Scottish vassals. Later in the 1200s Mingary Castle was built by the MacDouglas of Lorne to serve the needs of the Lords of the Isles in their positioning against the King of Scotland. Three mainland military expeditions failed over the next two hundred years before King James IV visited the Castle in 1493 and this most western peninsula on mainland Scotland was ever so tenuously added into the lands of the Scottish crown. The Gaellic translation for Ardnamurchan can be interpreted as Headland of the Great Seas, a reality echoed in much of the peninsula’s history.  

The distillery is a long dreamed of project of the Adelphi independent bottlers. As their director Alex Bruce has said, “as early as 2007 we noticed that demand had overtaken supply, and there were three options: start filling new make, buy a distillery or build one. For some stupid reason we decided to take the third option!” Ground was broken in 2013 with distillation commencing in 2014. With such a sense of history to the district, some distillery owners would be more than happy to slap up a pagoda roof and talk up the Viking connection, but that was not the path that Ardnamurchan chose. While there is a pagoda roof, there is also a type 2 EV charging connection at the visitor’s center. The distillery was built to be one of the most green in Scotland, and works in concert with the larger estate on which it resides to form a ‘circular economy’ of everything from power to byproducts. The washbacks for example are heated by wood biomass from the peninsula’s own forests, and the power for plant operations comes from a combination of wind and hydro power. In a very 21st century turn the distillery uses blockchain technology applied to a very traditional product to show total transparency on every step of the production process.  

Thanks to this transparency we can talk in quite precise language about the steps that went into the production of your bottle. The Barley that was to become your whisky was grown in County Fife in the lowlands (incidentally ancestral home to the Bruce Clan.) It is of the concerto barley variety grown on Broomhall land and made into both peated and unpeated malt at Bairds Maltings. From there it was transferred via truck to the peninsula and after being milled is added to the 3.2 meter wide mash tun (the width of the narrowest bridge on its journey before being installed.) Gordon Mackenzie oversaw the mash for all parts of this batch, as he did the 76 hour long fermentation in a combination of wood and stainless steel washbacks. (Leftovers from this and the distilling process are converted to animal feed 7 km away.) From there Nicki Docherty took over the process at the stills. Ardnamurchan uses a standard two copper still setup with the wash still holding 10,000 liters and their spirit still holds 6,000 liters. The spirit still has a boil ball on its neck for extra reflux and the neck leads outside the building to typical shell and tube condensers. The ABV of the spirit for your batch ranged from 69.5% ABV to 75% ABV. Regardless of the exit still proof it was diluted with water from the Glenmore spring to 63.5% ABV before entering the barrel. The batch we have for you is made up of 38 peated and 34 unpeated casks. Of the unpeated casks, 31 were ex-Bourbon barrels and 7 were ex-sherry barrels. Ten were produced in 2014, fifteen in 2015, and thirteen in 2016. Of the peated casks 21 were ex-Bourbon barrels and 13 were ex-Sherry barrels. Sixteen were made in 2015 while 17 came from 2016. Finally because data is fun, it appears that the distillery runs their peated slash unpeated distillation runs in rolling cycles across years, ie the peated barrels came off at the latter end of the year in 2015 while in 2016 the peated barrels were produced at the beginning of the year. Michael Kennel, D&M

46.8% ABV