Meet a new whisky gem with a heart of pure liquid gold

“Adelphi” is without doubt one of my favourite independent bottlers and it is behind Ardnamurchan Distillery which opened in 2014.

The distillery is located 50 miles west of Fort William and not far from a little village called Acharacle, where our bar manager John has family roots.

John’s gran kindly offered us the use of their caravan so we packed our bags and headed west!

Driving down the snaking single track surrounded by greenery and lochs I couldn’t help think, how an earth did they get all the equipment along this road? I don’t know how they did it, but I’m very glad they did.

We met up with Connal MacKenzie who is the Adelphi group sales manager and was our host. The first thing worth mentioning is how efficient the distillery is.

There’s a hydro-electric generator in the river which also provides Ardnamurchan’s cooling water and generates all the power required, while a biomass boiler using wood chips from a local forest provides all the hot water. The distillery is making both peated and unpeated spirit and filling a variety of casks.

Unlike most new distilleries it has not gone down the gin-making route, instead solely focusing on the whisky and offering a very attractive cask-buying scheme.

We were lucky enough to try some of the whisky and we were all astonished. When visiting any young distillery you often hear comments along the lines of, “it’s good for its age”, which really means it needs more time. However, Ardnamurchan is good full stop. I’m super excited for the future of this distillery and highly encourage you discover this gem.

Many thanks to Connal, the team at Ardnamurchan Distillery and of course John’s gran Marjory!

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