Inside Ardnamurchan Distillery, who put taste and sustainability at the forefront of whisky making

At the most western point of Britain’s mainland you will find Ardnamurchan Distillery, located on the peninsula of Lochaber in the Highlands and considered the remotest whisky producer in Scotland. The small team behind the company took a year to perfect their recipe before filling the first casks in 2014. Then, waiting two years beyond the Scottish law requirement that whisky live inside the oak for at least three years, they launched their first single malt whisky in the midst of a global pandemic which proved immediately popular. Today you can get hold of their specialty spirits inside most Glasgow pubs.

Sustainability and taste are at the core of Ardnamurchan’s values which have laid the foundations of their operations, directing how they work. Climate change was rapidly moving to the forefront of conversation when the distillery was launching, thus the first seeds of the business carried green intentions. Utilising a circular, local economy also proved vitally convenient considering their isolated location.

“It’s not a choice, working with what we have around us is the most important thing”, said Jenny Karlsson, Marketing Communications Manager for the distillery. “Our energy is all from renewable sources. We have a renewable plant two kilometres away from the distillery that produces wood chip for us. The biomass burner that heats up our stilts is all generated from steam that’s been generated from wood chip fire. The wood chip comes from the forest that grows around the distillery, it’s all locally produced on the peninsula.

“There is a whole regeneration programme in place to plant more forest over the next 100 years to keep supplying the peninsula. It’s not just us, it’s the schools, it’s the hotels, it’s the local industries and the houses that have access to the biomass to have as light a carbon footprint as possible. We recently installed solar panels as well. Everything to do with generated energy at the Ardnamurchan Distillery is none with natural resources. There isn’t a diesel generator in sight.”

The small team does not consider itself driven by commercialism, in fact it’s because of this they believe they have flourished: “Our big thing is that we’re all whisky geeks, we’re all interested in how whisky is made and how we share our whisky. Our aim is to make a whisky that has the best taste possible. That may sound stupid but it has to have flavour, it needs to be the whisky that you taste and want another taste of. If it doesn’t do that then we simply don’t go with it.

“On our blending team there’s five of us and part of what we do is sit in a room and discuss the recipe and then approve the samples to go into the next blend. I love that about the distillery in that it’s not a commercial decision. We get customers complaining that we sell out too fast, the reason being is that we won’t just dilute something to make a bigger batch. It has to be the whisky that we ourselves want to drink.”

Ardnamurchan’s core range includes a standard single malt in a clear glass bottle, limited released of either cask strength, Madeira wood, or cherry wood which is released with a copper top. Additionally there are single casks which come in blue bottles with copper tops. The label of every bottle features a QR code which when scanned, will transfer the purchaser into the making of the whisky - what barley was used, how long the spirit was fermented for, the distillation timing, who was involved in the making of the drink.

The late MND activist and founder of the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, Doddie Weir OBE, visited Ardnamurchan with a group of friends in October 2022 - just a month before he passed - and personally selected a cask. The whisky was then divided into 327 bottles, most of which were put up for sale to raise funds for his charity on 19 April 2023, selling out within minutes.

Jenny and her team are proud of the work they do and the products they create, “we are overwhelmed with the response we’ve had from the whisky drinking industry and people all over the world that are into single malt whisky from Scotland, they have been incredibly supportive of us throughout this journey,.”