Octomore Download the article, story and image here

Octomore is our new Islay single malt whisky, almost three times as peaty as any other existing whisky in the world to date.  It was distilled at Bruichladdich from barley  totalling 131 parts per million of phenols, as certified by Dr Harry Riffkin FRSC of Tatlock & Thomson scientific services.

The peat flavour comes when barley is malted, the process concluding with a drying out phase. Traditionally in the Hebridean islands, far from any coal, the heat source was peat fires. Because of it’s oils, peat smoke ‘sticks’ to barley grains, so even after distillation the exotic aroma of peat smoke is detected in the maturing spirit.

Our stills are unusually tall and narrow-necked, deliberately designed by the Harvey brothers to produce a pure, fruity spirit.  Having seen how good the PC  spirit was at 40 ppm, it begged the question: “Just how peaty could we go?”

For no better reason than ‘because we could’, we decided to push it to the max. Our maltsters, Bairds, rose to the technical challenge for it took a full week of peat-smoking to achieve this astonishing  world-record level of peatiness.

During distillation, condensers are run to cool the vapour back to spirit. So slowly were the stills run,  Jim’s famous ‘trickle’ distillation, that they weren’t required at all. The result is an exceptionally creamy spirit with the subtly of a sledgehammer. It’s certainly not for everyone – or indeed everyday dramming -  with  wave after wave of powerfully aromatic peat smoke, Octomore is more the reserve of the serious peat freak.

The combination of fine casks, trickle distillation, high original filling strength of 70%, and massive peat makes this is an astonishing whisky at  just 5 years old,  guaranteed to put hairs on your chest.

 Octomore farm is two miles to the south west where in 1816 a small distillery was built. Its whisky, at that time, would have been very peaty. But it was a tragic story that dramatically unwound after sibling rivalry, litigation, famine and emigration led to it’s demise just 24 years later. Our ‘Octomore’ is the first in 168 years.

Number of Bottles: 6,000         Strength: 63.5% ABV