Exactly two years and 144 days in the making, the new Ardbeg Stillhouse was completed in March 2021. Altering the character of the whisky was a risk they weren’t prepared to take, so the new stills were built to the exact specifications as the old ones were – right down to the millimetre. In true Ardbeg style, even the things that didn’t matter, mattered. Every nut, bolt and rivet had to be in the right place!Now they have four stills (instead of two) looking out to sea, and the ever-increasing demand for their whisky is secured for future generations of Ardbeggians.
In a grandiose plan floated way back in February 2019, Islay single malt whisky distillery Ardbeg was almost set to add two more stills, doubling its distillation capacity while moving production into a new Stillhouse.
The multi-million-pound project, funded by distillery owner
The Glenmorangie Company, was due to start work that year, subject to planning
permission, with completion scheduled for 2019. Plans included the construction
of a new still house on a site once occupied by warehouses, with the current
still house converted to house new washbacks.
The expanded distillery’s four stills – its existing duo of wash and
spirit stills, plus a new pair of wash and spirit stills – would be housed in a
‘traditional-style’ building, Ardbeg said. Planning permission had already been
granted to move Ardbeg’s boiler house a little further away from the
distillery, and work on this had begun. Plans for the new still house had been
submitted to Argyll & Bute Council, and the distillery was set to hold a
meeting for local residents on Islay to discuss the project in the near future.
Ardbeg would ‘continue its normal operations’ while construction work took
place alongside.
Ardbeg’s current era of high demand and expansion is a world
away from its near demise two decades ago, when it was acquired by Glenmorangie
in a poor state of repair. The distillery spent most of the 1980s and 1990s
either silent, working intermittently and conducting experiments or being used
for spare parts by nearby Laphroaig, then under the same ownership. News of the
planned expansion came just weeks after Glenmorangie unveiled plans to build
its own new still house to accommodate two new stills, in addition to the six
currently used at the distillery in Tain.
It also came at a time of expanding whisky production on
Islay: Kilchoman said it would double production capacity in November last
year, and Laphroaig is also planning to add more stills. Meanwhile, the new
Ardnahoe distillery was due to start production that spring, plans for a
distillery at Gartbreck Farm had been resurrected and the long-silent Port
Ellen distillery was to be revived by 2020.
As anyone who’s read the
recent feature outlining the 20-year-old story of the resurrection of Ardbeg will know, Dodson was the whisky veteran sent in to
patch up the Islay distillery and get it up and running again following its
acquisition by Glenmorangie in 1997. Dodson was clearly fascinated by the
Ardbeg spirit character – had been since the 1970s during his ‘Islay period’ of
single malt drinking. ‘I’d never been there, and it didn’t make sense to me,’
he recalls. ‘I always thought Laphroaig and Lagavulin were really heavy
compared to Ardbeg. But it wasn’t until I began to nose the new make spirit [in
June 1997] that I thought: “This is why.”’
But where does that quintessential Ardbeg character – the
lush fruit keeping the smoke in check – come from? Dodson has a sacrilegious
hypothesis: ‘My theory – which didn’t go down well with the marketing department
– was that, when they were starting up Ardbeg, the whisky was probably crap, so
they decided to put an angle on the lyne arm. ‘And it was probably still no
good, so they put in the purifier, collecting any liquid and directing it back
into the body of the still, allowing it to run back down, but not stopping the
vapours from heading up the still. ‘It’s serendipity. A lot of the things that
have happened in the Scotch whisky industry came about by accident.’ Serendipity,
yes, but also the willingness to make mistakes and the good sense to learn from
them, to improve, hone, tinker to get the best possible result out of the raw
materials and equipment at your disposal.
Distilleries, it seems, have an almost human character, full
of temperament and idiosyncratic traits that defy scientific analysis. Dodson
had thought that he’d be able to get 1.3m litres of pure alcohol a year out of
Ardbeg – until he faced the challenge of working with a spirit still that’s
almost as big as the wash still. ‘I could only get to the 1.1m-litre mark
because of the need to get a balanced distillation,’ he says.
On the night that the first spirit ran again from the stills at Ardbeg, the plan was to bring the wash still in slowly and gently. ‘That won’t work,’ said Duncan Logan, 35-year Ardbeg veteran and, despite no longer working there, an invaluable source of advice to Dodson at that time. ‘You have to let it come in, then slow it down afterwards. If you shut the steam off, you’ll lose it.’ Logan was ignored – but not for long.
At Ardbeg, the pre-pandemic talk was no longer that of survival, but of expansion, with its own challenges and potential pitfalls. Intervening in the
serendipitous evolutionary process that has made Ardbeg 'Ardbeg' over a period of
more than two centuries is something that has to be done with care and
sensitivity.
Ardbeg is a distillery, not a museum. And if a distillery is
like a person, then change is part of what makes you realise you’re still
alive. What will the serendipitous discoveries of tomorrow be? Well, the demand
for the peated Ardbeg Single Malt Whisky is growing insatiably. The distillery
has now completed its expansion on the Scottish Island of Islay and will in
future be able to almost double the production volume from 1.4 million litres
of alcohol annually to 2.4 million litres.
The newly built Stillhouse, which is situated next to the
waterline, is home to four stills: The previous pair of stills has moved here
and a new pair has been added. The new wash still and the new spirit still are
identical to the old ones so that the style of the Ardbeg Whisky does not
change. A special highlight that visitors can look forward to on future
distillery tours is a view of the Atlantic from the still house‘s large
panorama window.
The construction of the project lasted around two and a half years, although it should actually have been finished in 2019, as originally planned. It was delayed considerably, not least because of the pandemic.
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| WITH COLIN GORDON |
The first distillation with new stills, is of course a
special event and is traditionally celebrated by adding special ingredients
that characterise the distillate. At Ardbeg, this is undoubtedly peat. Dugga
Bowman, Head Warehouseman at Ardbeg, was the one to take on the task of digging
the peat at Kintour Moss, which Distillery Manager Colin Gordon then
symbolically placed in the still for a short time. "It is not often that a
distillery manager has the privilege of inaugurating new stills. With our new Stillhouse
we will keep the soul of Ardbeg and hope that our ultimate Islay Single Malt
will delight many more Ardbeggians," he said.
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