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Organic

Ever wondered what whisky used to taste like a hundred, two hundred, even five hundred years ago? In the nineteenth century all whisky, would have been distilled from organically grown barley. It was the birth of intensive farming during the wars, integral to the survival of these islands, which ended the traditional farming ways known to our forefathers. Whisky must have tasted different back then.

Today organic farmers are rediscovering farming of a pre-industrial era, the reconnection with time-honoured working of the land that had been unchanged for five thousand years. It celebrates individuality, the delicate harmony between soil, subsoil, bedrock, microclimate, and plant. The French have a word for this concept: ‘terroir’. Scotland, by default, had its own terroir too: specific farms that grew barley in a soil that lived and breathed – not inert, dead, waiting for its next chemical fix. This produced the whiskies of the nineteenth century and before. Sadly, today it is homogenous, standard barley, most of it not even grown in Scotland.

Green Bruichladdich
In December 2003, Bruichladdich distilled the first, Organic Islay Whisky, certified by Demeter. The Chalice barley was grown at Culblair Farm near Inverness in a Site of Special Scientific Interest on glacial gravel deposits with sand and loam and a touch of clay, one mile from the sea. It was malted and shipped to Islay.