And, in thick shelter of black shades imbowered,
Excels his mother at her mighty art;
Offering to every weary traveller
His orient liquor in a crystal glass

These words are from John Milton’s work ‘Comus’, written in 1634. It’s a philosophical discourse about the tension between sensual pleasure and physical abandon, extravagance and moderation, chastity and virtue.

Milton’s morality play of a beautiful virgin’s struggle to protect her virtue is based on an ancient legend.

Bacchus, the god of wine (and debauchery), seduced the enchantress Circe, ‘the loveliest of all immortals’, daughter of Helios the sun god. The result of their union, a son, Comus.

Invested with the divine powers of his parents, Comus ‘excels his mother at her mighty art’, in conjuring up yet more powerful magic potions.

His was the skill to create sensual, hedonistic and intoxicating potions, ‘orient liquor in a crystal glass’, that could seduce the innocent, the virginal, with wild, sensual orgiastic pleasures.

Comus became the god of excess. But in Milton’s struggle the innocent’s virtue prevails.

In Octomore 4:2 ‘COMUS’ we have such a mysterious and ambrosial potion.

The same duality, a similar struggle: the most heavily peated whisky in the world, matured in the very finest oak possible, impregnated with the greatest sweet wine known to man.

An unlikely combination. A tension? An excess? Or a divine, ethereal, otherworldly experience?

We call it Comus.

Do not be deceived, all is not what it seems.

As with all previous releases of Octomore, this is bottled at 5 years of age. Distilled from barley peated to 167 ppm. There are only 18,000 bottles available world-wide

Available from 14th February.

If you’ve never been to Dr. Jekyll’s in Oslo, then put it on your list.  One of the most amazing Whisky Bars we at Bruichladdich have ever been to and one we are extremely proud to be featured at. Saturday afternoon in Oslo was put aside to help Dr. Jekyll’s and their most enthusiastic customers get their collective heads around Bruichladdich’s wonderful story.  We did our best to to entertain the audience, as they sampled no less than 15 whiskies from Bruichladdich’s vast range.  We tried everything, from some new make I actually helped distil, to the new Laddie Ten and the Single Cask micro-provenance 1985 exclusive to the Norwegian market.  The snow may have been falling outside, but the cheeks were rosy for different reasons at the back of Dr. Jekyll’s!

January 21^st 2012

Bruichladdich now has a TV channel on Youtube.

For the first time in one place we have various tasting videos, distillery profiles, special events and general video clips taken over the last decade.

Laddie TV has a wide variety of film, both in quality with some professionally produced, like the Crow's Nest Films distillery profile used for a bank advertisement, and others which are more spontaneous, off-the-cuff, amateur video.

We have chosen the video for the content, not necessarily the production values.

The recent whisky profiles on Octomore 4:2 COMUS, The Laddie 10, and Black Art 3, hosted Jim McEwan, explains some of the background to these three whiskies. More will be added shortly.

There are some bits of film taken several years ago - one with Mark in shorts! - that have a freshness and vitality that we think is engaging and still of interest.

Hope you enjoy them.

There was a buzz of excitement as Bruichladdich came to EWOLS for the first time since it reopened in 2001.  Over one hundred eager whisky enthusiasts gathered to listen to the Bruichladdich story through five of our Islay Single Malt Whiskies.

We kicked off the evening with the one they’d all been waiting for: the Laddie Ten showing exactly what we have been striving for.

Following on we had the Organic whisky to emphasise the traceability of our single malts and the First Growth Cuvee A to highlight the wonders of our wood policy.

To round off the Bruichladdich we poured Black Art II, allowing the crowd to appreciate the immense skill that goes into marrying and maturation, as well as the master craftsmanship possessed by Jim McEwan.

We were not finished there though as Port Charlotte: An Turas Mor gave everyone an insight into our peaty portfolio and left them with a wonderful aftertaste for at least the next two days.

All in all an amazing event, we can’t wait to go back!

Bruichladdich distilled the world’s first ever whisky from biodynamic barley last year. Such is the extraordinary quality of the spirit that we are doing a second distillation - and it is double the size of the first one.

We will be distilling 200 tonnes of biodynamically grown barley, harvested in September 2011, from Monday 23rd January for four weeks.

If you thought that using organic barley for Bruichladdich was mad enough, biodynamic is barking. Biodynamic is über-organic. Barley that is sown, grown and harvested according to the controversial agricultural principles of the messianic Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, educationalist, spiritualist and lecturer, is considered the ‘Galileo of organic science’; to critics, and there are many, he was just a cosmic nutter.

In the twenties, to counter farmers' over-dependance on agrochemicals, Steiner set out an holistic approach to agriculture, where the farm itself becomes self-sufficient in all its needs, as any farm would have been before the advent of the agrochemical industry and as far back as the stone age; the farm becomes "biologically dynamic".

Biodynamic Farmers are guided by a cosmic calendar. Phases of the lunar and astral cycle do not only influence the tides and lunatics, but the ideal time for sowing, pruning or treating crops. Whisky is an agricultural product; barley is the crop.

The problem though for biodynamics, what with astral calendars, nettle insecticides, and cow horn fertilisers, is that it all sounds far too hippy, whacky, cultish and alternative. It's wide open to ridicule and an easy target for sceptics. Many exponents keep quiet about it for fear of being labelled a crank.

But there’s a very simple method to this apparent madness: Steiner basically codified the rapidly disappearing 18th century farming ways. He could see that the knowledge, or folklore, that was being lost as people migrated from the land to the cities. Stripped down, biodynamics is a farming way of life based on our forefathers' knowledge, the culmination of 8,000 years of accumulated, agricultural know-how, from an era when Man was more in tune than we are to day with the earth’s natural cycles. And when there was no alternative.

It's no fad. It started with a handful of farmers following Steiner's agricultural doctrine ninety years ago, and today the world’s greatest wine makers, the likes of Leflaive, Lafon, Zind Humbrecht, Romanée Conti and Domaine Leroy, are all exponents. Surprisingly, Beaux Freres, the US property of the most powerful wine critic Robert Parker, is also an advocate of Biodynamics.

Biodynamics does not make a poor terroir good, or an incompetent wine maker a genius. But it does seem to produce the very best crop possible.