Ardnahoe Distillery

The newest distillery on the famed Isle of Islay, and the ninth in total. When Ardnahoe opened in 2018 it was the first to do so in over a decade, since Kilchoman in 2005. It was founded by Stewart Laing, along with his sons Andrew and Scott. The Laing family has long been a staple of the whisky industry, with Stewart’s father Fred Douglas Laing establishing one of the most well known independent bottling companies back in the 1940s.

Stewart established his own bottling company with his sons in 2013, Hunter Laing & Co. Not long after that they began making plans to go beyond bottling and selling the work of other distilleries, and get involved in the production side themselves. With Islay’s peaty, maritime whiskies enjoying a surge in popularity in recent years, Laing knew where he wanted to set up shop.

Land on the northeast coast of Islay was bought by Laing in 2016, and planning permission was granted that September. Work got underway shortly on building an £8 million distillery from scratch, and within two years it was ready to begin production. The distillery sits within spitting distance of Loch Ardnahoe, which supplies its water.

The distillery is equipped with a 2.5 ton mash tun, four Oregon Pine washbacks, and and a single pair of lantern shaped stills. The wash still has a capacity of 13,00 litres, while the spirit still holds 11,000 litres. The stills have the longest lyne arms of any stills in Scotland, gently descending for 7.5 metres. Combined with 77 metre copper tubes in the cooling worm tubs, the only ones on Islay, this gives the spirit vapours a lot of copper interaction. On the larger end of the scale of new distilleries which have opened in the last decade, Ardnahoe has the capacity to produce 1 million litres of spirits a year.

The heavily peated spirits are mostly matured in first fill Bourbon barrels, but roughly a fifth of the production goes into ex-Oloroso Sherry hogsheads. These are matured on site in the distillery’s lone warehouse, though more of those are planned with such a large quantity of spirits being cranked out each year. No timeline has been given yet for when the first single malt release can be expected.