Kilchoman

Region: Islay

Owner: Kilchoman Distillery Company

Founded: 2005

In these days of mega, glass and steel edifices built to honour the gods of whisky, Kilchoman is a refreshing throwback to the early days of whisky production. No, I don’t mean it’s an illict still secreted in some old cowshed, but rather it pays hommage to the old idea of the farm distillery, with almost romantic echos of those long-gone days where the distillers of Islay used to make as much spirit as the island harvest would let them. Although the distillery isn’t fully self-sufficient with only around 25% of its barley coming from the farms surrounding the distillery, in this day and age it wouldn’t be feasible or profitable to rely on that once source for its production.

The remaining barley is sourced from the Port Ellen maltings and peated to 50 PPM (part per million) whereas the Islay barley is only peated to between 12 and 20 PPM. It is the 100% Islay bottling that the distillery releases once a year as, to me, the quintessential Kilchoman bottling s it perfectly balances the peat with the fruity spirit, created through a long fermentation time of 70-100 hours and a long, slow distillation process. This distillery as they say, does things proper!

The distillery was built by a former independent whisky bottler called Anthony Wills. Apparently in the early 2000’s he became somewhat frustrated at the lack of quality casks that were available to his young company that he decided that he was better off making the stuff himself. Now, he has said that he wanted to do things differently but whether his creating a farm distillery was purely down to that idea or more down to the fact that finance for a new distillery was a lot harder to come by back then. Nowadays banks and financial institutions are quite happy to throw tens of millions of pounds at new enterprises but twenty odd years ago the single malt whisky landscape was considerably different.

This whole ‘doing things proper’ approach also evident in their wood policy. Many distilleries claim to have a first-class wood policy but in my experience that claim isn’t always backed up by their releases, Kilchoman is different in that Anthony Wills purchases only first top quality casks. I must admit that I’ve never asked him about that, but from tasting his whisky it is rather obvious. None of the bottlings I have tasted have been compromised by poor quality wood or manky sulphur ridden sherry butts.