Ardnamurchan Distillery Hand-Fill
April 2023 - Peated | 62.1% ABV
Just move in already and save us the tedious sermon.
Dreich. That’s the only word that could ever describe the steel, bitter, relentless, driving rain that pelts off the upright windshield of our Land Rover, as we weave our way along the coastal path that leads to the most westerly point on the British Isles.
The week has been remarkably sunny and dare I say warm, at our base in Strontian, located at the most easterly point of Loch Sunart, separating the Morvern wilds from the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. We walked in the hills around Strontian one day, then drove over those wilds of Morvern to Lochaline to catch the ferry over to Fishnish another; the Isle of Mull is equally as beautiful and suited for meandering around, taking in the ambience.
Today though we make haste, for our allotted slot at 10:30am at the Ardnamurchan distillery has been shifted earlier to allow my guide enough time to show me around the place before he attends to some rather important duties. I’m chaperoned to the distillery by my father-in-law of last year's electrical lighting fame, affording me the courtesy of any potential drams that may be bestowed upon my eager face. He also loves his Land Rover, so any chance to stretch her legs is reason enough for him.
We’re soon slingshotting around Salen and onwards to Glenbeg, where the road seems to deteriorate further in both width and surface quality - we must work hard for these spoils. A bright white-painted cask end appears indicating there’s one mile left to go before we alight in the stony car park of the Ardnamurchan distillery and visitor centre. We mention it not - this isn’t the first time either of us have been here.
My in-laws visited this place in 2014 just after the distillery opened, enjoying a tour around the only warehouse on site - Warehouse 1 - where the grand sum of four casks had been laid down. A lot has changed since then. I visited in 2022 and in the time since my tour almost a year ago to the day, I too have changed a lot.
I’m nervous. Not because whisky tours make me nervous or because I’m worried I won’t like the whisky, but because I’m hoping to meet the people I’d spent so many months tagging in my Instagram posts and chatting over messages and emails. I guess my nervousness is a poor attempt to mask my desperation that they like me, that I don’t embarrass myself or make them realise I’m a giant fraud.
Last year at this time, the team had assembled at the distillery to blend the 2022 Paul Launois release and I’d been too shy to say hello. It turns out this year they’re doing the exact same thing. Today, in fact.
It’s no secret I'm devoted to the Ardnamurchan way - in fact it’s become a bit of fun for those wanting to tease me about my abject obsession with this place. I’ve spent many hours postulating why the Ardnamurchan distillery resonates so deeply with me, as a person and as a whisky exciter, and over the course of three hours, first in Warehouse 1 then up into the hills, nothing happens to change that. In fact, if you can believe it, my devotion has widened.
We started in the dark, cool climes of Warehouse 1. If you’ve never smelled a whisky warehouse then it's hard to convey the utterly absorbing aroma that greets you upon entry, arriving in waves through your red-hot olfactory machine. It’s easy to spill over into the saccharine romanticism when thinking and speaking about alcohol inside casks plopped inside a building (and oh boy do I fall foul constantly), but it’s undeniably a rather unique place to be. No-one gushes about the alluring aromas of an Amazon warehouse, do they? The difference being that whisky matures inside leaky wooden vessels, and that porosity allows alcohol vapours to find their way into the air circulating around the breezy warehouse and colours the environment with fabulous scents - Angels’ Share is what they call it.
But it’s more than smell - it’s touch and sight too. Casks and their condition are intrinsically linked to the quality and style of maturation and we get to see those variances as we walk along the warehouse. From rough to smooth, bright and clean to looking like a potato that you’ve just dug out the ground; the variety of casks, aesthetically, is quite amazing. If we are so inclined, we can touch the casks, feel their texture and knock on their wooden walls. Sometimes we get to stick our noses inside. There happened to be a cask waiting to get filled, and sniffing through the bung hole the diorama of scents unleashed into my frontal cortex was overwhelming. I managed to blurt out caramel, cherry and vanilla, but in truth it was a million things all at once and making sense of it was impossible - I only wish I could bottle that scent or turn it into a candle.
There’s a tasting element to a warehouse too, and today I was extremely fortunate to be accompanied by 3/5ths of the blending team, who were only too happy to see what was occurring in the warehouse. Drinking whisky decanted, through syphoning via a giant copper straw-like valinch, splashing all over the place before finally finding its way into a glass, surrounded by all this sensory overload is peak whisky for me. The liquid is really cold and viscous. It takes a moment for it to warm up enough in my hand to begin releasing aromas and flavours, but when it does, the mouthfeel, smell, sight and sound of it all is unbeatable. It’s untouched, unfiltered.
It’s been suggested I might soon get to a point where Ardnamurchan stops offering enough to keep my attention, and I’ll start to drift and dabble. Having now tried a number of remarkable whiskies maturing in the cask, from a variety of different cask types, styles, ages and sizes, I have to say I can’t see that happening anytime soon. I kneel down, lower my arms and prepare for the hiss of the blade - perhaps I’m blinkered and naive, or perhaps there’s nothing more to it than simple resonance.
Review
Ardnamurchan Distillery Hand-fill, Ex-oloroso Octave 412PR, April 2023, Peated, 62.1% ABV
£70, at the distillery, until it’s gone.
Before long the blending team head off with the Paul Launois duo to perform their annual alchemy, gathering the chardonnay cask-matured whisky and making some sense of it all. What a fantastic experience to spend the morning with such devoted, educated, excited people - my father-in-law was really struck by just how passionate they all are. It’s not a job to them, he said. They clearly love what they do. So would I, and I could’ve spent all day bending their ears.
The rest of our morning was spent with DJ touring the warehouses and production side of the distillery, and by the end I felt like I knew everything I possibly could about how the place runs, why it runs that way and what could be done to tweak it. A tour de force of information - no-one knows this place quite like DJ does. A quick spell in the shop and we were back on the road - it was past lunchtime now and we were both starting to dip - and I picked up a new hand-fill bottling from an ex-oloroso octave cask - a five year old peated whisky by the name of 412PR. This would be my second hand-fill having enjoyed quite considerably the 2022 octave of PX 790R, unpeated whisky. With regret and lack of foresight I didn’t save any of this hand-fill to compare, but I did review it as part of the Ardnageddon feature, so I can use those notes if I need to.
Returning to base amidst heckles that I was still standing upright, we soon settled in for the evening in front of the fire and I couldn’t resist opening the hand-fill. I might have a few now, but I’ll be saving my analysis for a time when I’m not getting ribbed for knowing what happens to the draff from the aesthetically coppered mash tun.
Nose
Juicy maritime magic. Dark cinder toffee coated in smoked milk chocolate. Woody Weetos. Burnt peanut brittle. Sugary pencils. Hint of plasters. Waves of maltiness - cereals. Dark toast. Minty something. Menthol? Leafy minty fudge. Letting the dram sit brings back the smoke. Swooshing it about brings out the sweeter notes. Sticking nose fully in glass and taking a big old sniff, a hugely endearing sweet cedar wood sauna thing blasts into the olfactory. Cough inducing but worth it for the flavour experience. Dunnage vibes too - damp dusty warehouse of dreams. A celery stick makes a brief appearance at the death.
Palate
Subtle smoke. Coastal. A good amount of warming spice - cinnamon and ginger abound. Big. Hot. It has the Ardna character but at Exocet speed - 62.1% is a big ABV to contend with. Drinking it at this level is exciting and after a bit of time does reveal powerful flavours, but also invites a crushing hangover.
With water and a short bit of time it becomes something of a slightly smokier version of the salty, fudgy, sweet delightful Ardnamurchan I know and love. Quite similar to the black label cask strength releases but with an extra bit of smoky red sweetie oomph. Woody, coastal and wonderful.
The Dregs
Something Ardnamurchan’s sales director Connal Mackenzie said to me has, for some reason, surprised me more than it should have as we stood over the open cask waiting to be filled: The Ardnamurchan distillery has something of a unique attribute. All casks are filled with new-make Ardnamurchan spirit and matured on-site at Glenbeg. That’s important for a number of reasons, not because the coastal air is soaking into the sleeping casks and imparting some salinity - if that’s even a thing - but because the water used to bring the freshly distilled spirit down to casking strength - in Ardhanurchan’s case 63.5% - is different to other water.
Distilleries with off-site casking and warehousing must transport, in bulk at the highest distilled strength (circa 70%), their spirit to be diluted down to casking strength using the local water supply at the warehouse location. Tales of whisky influenced by the unique water supply can be nothing more than marketing therefore, if we accept that nothing is retained of the local water’s characteristics throughout the distillation process. A lot of the big players also use bog standard, unfiltered cooncil juice to dilute their new-makes. One of my memories from touring Dumgoyne was asking if the water from the waterfall is used for the whisky, to stifled laughter from the tour guide. No, he said, that’s only used for cooling. “Where do you get the water for whisky then,” I asked sheepishly. See that tap on the wall? Council’s finest.
The water for diluting Ardnamurchan’s whisky down to casking strength is, like very few other distilleries that share this facility, drawn directly from the natural stream behind the distillery, and it’s this very local water supply that’s thought to impart the more coastal, salty, seashell flavours we find and love in Ardnamurchan whisky. Having the maturing casks sitting right next door is handy too, for sampling and blending - this place is ultra remote, and so having to commute for 3-4 hours just to take samples from casks to travel back up to the distillery would be a bit of a task. It might be why the consistency of releases since late 2020 has been exceptional. West coast Scotland is said to be the pinnacle of locales for maturing the Uisge Beatha.
Ardnamurchan peated spirit is around 30 peaty parts per million, and has been used in all their white and copper labelled core-range bottlings since the get-go in a 50/50 blend ratio with unpeated spirit. There was also the black and copper labelled “Cask Strength” range, released in two batches in 2022 which was far more weighted into the smoke, with an 84% peated to 16% unpeated barely ratio. This bottling, from cask 412PR was distilled in 2018 using peated malt and matured in a refill ex-oloroso octave - Peated Refill. It’s the first pure peated Ardnamurchan spirit I’ve tried, and simply put, it’s fantastic. Peaty monsters like Ardbeg are hitting 50-100ppm for the majority of their releases. Bruichladdich’s Octomore range, in an effort to please the folk who have vulcanised rubber tongues, are hitting 140ppm. Ardnamurchan’s 30ppm by comparison then, seems relatively safe for those unaccustomed, or unwilling perhaps, to endure the raw, visceral experience of these smokey bastards.There have been single cask peated expressions released before through the “CK” designated deep blue matte finished bottles, but right now this is the only 100% peaty nibbed Ardna amber nectar around and it is…I’m going to insert a disclaimer in here, because I feel somewhat responsible for the words that I type.
I’m on an unapologetic free-falling journey right now through a kaleidoscopic Willy Wonka tunnel of whisky produced through Acharacle copper stills. I’m soaring like a glorious (ageing) sea eagle over the thunderous crash of salty Atlantic waves blasting the black rocky outcrops of the most westerly of western Highlands, chewing a combination of a Murray Mint and Werther’s Original I found inside a seashell that had been fused together by the wildfire created by the scorching midday sun.
Also, you know that thing where two single notes of a synthesiser are played at the same time and it’s dissonant and quite unsettling to listen to at any length, then some deliciously damped metal knobs are slowly turned, converging the two notes together, closer and closer, relaxing the dissonance and sounding more in tune until there is a perfect overlap of two identically pitched notes and you feel a euphoria of mind and soul?
Ardnamurchan whisky on the whole is like both these things for me and I recognise fully the bias it clearly gives to my feelings for it - I’m not in the business of trying every single whisky from around the world and trying to align them all in a global matrix of good or bad. I’m in the business of finding what I love and diving in head first. You might not feel that way about Ardnamurchan whisky, so qualify everything you read from these swollen fingers with that in mind.
This particular expression, smoky and hot, sweet and salty, sugary and spicy, malty and mineralic is delicious - a very high Dougie 7 if it was allowed. It’s not quite making me sit in a puddle of joyful tears like the CK.1308 Nickolls & Perks bottle, but it’s another vivid stitch in the cloth of Dougie Crystal’s growing Glenbeg tapestry. I cracked open a new CK.339 UK exclusive (found in the wild by our master at arms who selflessly offered to me) to sign off the holiday where my connection to Ardnamurchan whisky was injected with rocket fuel, and I sampled a few drams of that rare beast alongside this hand-fill.
If you think this is getting a bit old already, you know, all the gushy thesaurus melting word butchering stuff and it’s tiring you out… just wait until you read the CK.339 review.
There will be a revolt.
Score: 7/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC