REOPENS AFTER 40 YEARS
It was pure serendipity. The magic happened because the whisky was forgotten about and left alone. Being in the less active refill casks meant the spirit could shine, and the longer it aged in the Scottish climate, the better it got. With its long pedigree and its seafront location on Islay, it became a place of pilgrimage for maltheads the world over.
Port Ellen, once the remnants of a "ghost" distillery on Islay, a great source of peated whisky in Scotland, is now an ultra exclusive distillery with a luxurious and polished blueprint.
Port Ellen was founded in 1825 on the island of Islay, known for its smoky whiskies. For more than 150 years, the distillery produced peated whisky, which was mostly used for blends as opposed to single malts. In 1983, the workhorse distillery closed due to an excess of single malt whisky production in the area. The surplus forced a number of whisky-making locations to close in order to promote the financial robustness of larger companies.
In the years since, the site was used for malting barley. That didn’t last long. As whisky fans, collectors, and aficionados discovered there were still barrels of Port Ellen whisky hidden away in warehouses around Scotland, the liquid gained in popularity—and increased in price. In 2017, parent company Diageo announced that the distillery would be rebuilt and reopened.
There are several highly regarded ghost distilleries throughout Scotland, a term that refers to distilleries that were shuttered decades ago but still release whisky from barrels tucked away in warehouses throughout the country. Some of the prominent ones are Auchnagie, Stratheden, Gerston, Lossit and Towiemore, among others. But none as familiar as Port Ellen and its astronomical prices when released by parent company Diageo. The distillery officially reopened end March 2024 after seven years and a £185 million investment.
The new Port Ellen distillery has a completely fresh design, featuring a glass stillhouse, two pairs of copper pot stills that are exact replicas of the original stills, and a set of experimental stills that will be used for smaller batch whiskies (whisky production got underway early this year). The rest of the distillery was completely modernised as well, including the roller mill, the laboratory, the spirit safe, and a sustainability effort that has made it completely carbon neutral. The team is also launching a special programme to study smoke, which will use algorithmic imagery to decipher how the peat levels in the whisky respond to aging.
Port Ellen was a flavour factory for creating a sweet, smoky type of Islay whisky. For the reopening of Port Ellen, what they wanted to do was create two different styles of whisky there, that still had the same style that Port Ellen was known for. What they wanted to do was recreate the stills to the exact specifications as they were before it closed in 1983.
Among the eight million items within Diageo’s renowned alcohol archive lie the blueprints for the stills of Port Ellen from decades ago. The originals have been recreated. While some of the once-abandoned features of the distillery were replicated, Port Ellen reopened with a number of modern improvements and functional elements.
Port Ellen is a private oasis, and visitors will need to request an appointment in advance. Walk-ins are encouraged at other distilleries on Islay, including Caol IIa and Lagavulin. Visitors finish up with a tasting of some of the liquid from that distillery from before it closed in 1983 as a luxury experience.
The transformed construction subtly nods to the history of the ghost of Port Ellen, but there is one timeless relic that is crucial to today’s whisky emergence. Iain McArthur, a former employee of Port Ellen, recently retired after a noteworthy career in whisky making. The remnant cask that is presently being used by Port Ellen to create Gemini, a newly released whisky, was saved by McArthur before the original distillery closed down.
He took it from Port Ellen to Lagavulin, and that's what Diageo took back to Port Ellen for the recent bottling. This was a critical, intrinsic part in, not only the distillery story, but also in saving that wonderful barrel. Such are the rewards on offer for waking a ghost. But reaping them requires deep pockets.
Across the courtyard, the new still room resembles a vast industrial greenhouse with four shiny new copper stills as its exotic plants. Two giant “Phoenix” stills are replicas of the ones that made Port Ellen’s reputation. The smaller second pair – The Experimental Stills – designed expressly for experimentation, will take the art and science of whisky exploration to levels of precision never before seen in Scotch whisky distillation.
The Experimental Stills are linked to a signature Ten Part Spirit Safe –a truly innovative piece of distilling equipment - that allows the Port Ellen whisky makers unprecedented opportunity for experimentation. While standard distillery spirit safes allow for three cuts of the spirit run – the head, the heart and the tails - the Port Ellen Ten Part Spirit Safe allows multiple cuts to be drawn from the heart of the run, accessing previously unexplored flavours and characters, and takes the whisky-making art to new levels of intricacy and complexity. The distillery has a dedicated on-site laboratory and a full-time laboratory technician to analyse and catalogue the new experimental whiskies that emerge.
In line with Diageo’s commitment to be carbon neutral in its direct production business globally by 2030, Port Ellen will be carbon neutral from the start, with every part of the distillation process optimised so that water and heat are both recycled, and all energy produced by a renewable-biofuel boiler. For example, by choosing biofuel they have avoided vast amounts of carbon emissions, and after minimising the emissions very significantly, they work with reputable suppliers to offset the low levels of residual emissions using verified, high-quality carbon offsetting schemes.
In the background, the Maltings, a Diageo-owned plant that supplies bespoke malted barley to Port Ellen and other distilleries on the island, emits a rarely interrupted plume of gray smoke, filling the air with the bouquet of a peat-fired brewery. Looking out, if there are no dolphins or Caledonian MacBrayne ferries gliding across the bay, the eye is drawn to the hills of Antrim in Northern Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre on the Scottish mainland, with an unobstructed line of sight through the glass stillhouse to the stunning coastline of Islay, across the bay to Carraig Fhada lighthouse. On clear days, they loom so large on the horizon, it’s easy to imagine Viking longboats darting back and forth, as they once did.
Back inside, the tea service offers further inspiration. Having been served Hijiri Hojicha, a roasted green tea from a supplier to Japan’s imperial court, to attune their palates to notes of hay, visitors might find themselves detecting similar scents in one of the straight-from-the-stills experimental spirit samples created under the watch of Master Distiller Alexander McDonald.
The remarkable differences between freshly distilled batches of spirit run off as little as half an hour apart offer an insight into the distillery’s future as a center for innovation with a particular focus on how peat smoke is managed throughout the distilling process. McDonald already has a to-do list of over 1,000 experiments that will involve playing around with variables such as peat and copper contact, and even the shape of the stills. An on-site laboratory and what can only be described as a make-your-own-whisky playroom add to the alchemical ambience. Innovation was part of the old distillery’s story — it was notably one of the first Scottish distilleries to export to North America — and it aims to continue breaking new ground.
“It is important that we recreate that classic Port Ellen character that people love, but we also want to be doing things we’ve not done before,” says McDonald. “For me, leaning on the past is not quite good enough.”
THE ANALYSES
For two years, Diageo analysed various Scotch whiskies using AI and algorithms. They invested $230 million in a portfolio of whisky tourism projects. A portion of this lump sum was dedicated to the exploration of whisky maturation using technology called SmokeDNAi.
The announcement of SmokeDNAi comes on the heels of Port Ellen’s reopening in Scotland after 40 years with modern advancements to both construction and whisky-making.
Port Ellen Gemini Original
Port Ellen Gemini Original is an exquisite whisky matured in reserve European Oak butts, longer than any previous release from this cult icon, and left in its original splendour. This untouched whisky from 1978 has smooth, sweet, salty, and smoky characteristics allowing an appreciation of Port Ellen distillery’s time-honoured craft and the characterful Islay smoke.
Tasting Notes
Appearance: Clear harvest gold.
Body: Medium to full.
Nose: Explore light prickle, hints of baked pear and sweet edible seaweed. Dive deeper, for maritime scents born of long years in a sea-side warehouse. Surface, to faint traces of smoke that become ashy, as with a spent bonfire. Late on, seek out a sweet suggestion of soft fudge. Add water to find that sweetness and smokiness more pronounced.
Palate: Find pleasure in the firm, smooth body and vital, sweet-spicy flavours. Marvel at the intensity and freshness of those flavours after so many years. Discern a dash of salt mid palate, amid the embrace of a smoky warmth. Add water to find a smooth mix of baked apple skins and lightly medicinal aromas, the charred ashes of a bonfire clear in the development.
Finish: Luxuriate in its length, leaving aromatic sweet smoke to linger on the palate.
Overall: A Collector’s item, in all its glorious pomposity.
Port Ellen Gemini Remnant
Port Ellen Gemini Remnant, the second of these twin whiskies, embarked on a new maturation journey within the Port Ellen remnant cask. A feature of every distillery, the remnant cask is used to measure excess spirit from a filling run. Safeguarded on Islay, the Remnant Cask, an unusual barrel of timeless worth, was revealed to have touches of three generations of Port Ellen history. The cask was then revived with the same liquid it contained a century ago, walnut brown sherry. Saved by a group of Islay distillers at the close of Port Ellen in 1983 and sheltered for 40 years, the cask was recovered and its re-seasoning set new life in motion through the innovative finish of the 44-Year-Old Port Ellen. This finishing technique imbues the whisky with a golden garment of sea salt, smoke, dried fruit and oak.
Appearance: Gaze into clear harvest gold.
Body: Medium to full.
Nose: Explore light prickle, hints of baked pear and sweet edible seaweed. Dive deeper, for maritime scents born of long years in a sea-side warehouse. Surface to faint traces of smoke that become ashy, as with a spent bonfire. Later on, seek out a sweet suggestion of soft fudge. Add water to find that sweetness and smokiness more pronounced.
Palate: Find pleasure in the firm, smooth body and vital, sweet-spicy flavours. Marvel at the intensity and freshness of those flavours after so many years. Discern a dash of salt mid palate, amid the embrace of a smoky warmth. Add water to find a smooth mix of baked apple skins and lightly medicinal aromas, the charred ashes of a bonfire clear in the development. Dried fruit makes its appearance felt, as it merges into the defining oak.
Finish: Luxuriate in its length, leaving aromatic sweet smoke to linger on the palate.
Overall: Presented in a luxurious, striking display case, this is sure to be the jewel in any whisky collectors treasure chest.
The purpose of the analysis is to better understand whisky ageing in a barrel.
SmokeDNAi technology: SmokeDNAi technology is used by Diageo to test and analyze mouth-feel and flavors of liquids from different casks. They want to have a slow maturation in a barrel where they’re controlling the flavour. They get a much better understanding of why they taste the way they taste, or why they smell the way they smell, or the mouth-feel.
Between two whisky casks from Port Ellen, the vanilla characteristic, vanillin, varied. One cask contained around 3%, while the other included more than double, around 6%. The remnant cask contained liquors from the 1960s and 1980s. Port Ellen can leverage data sets in order to maximize production, flavour and sales of whisky and new blends in the future.
Using samples of whisky, the liquid is put through a chemical analysis process, gas chromatography or liquid chromatography, and data sets of distinct components are broken down by an algorithm. Diageo then uses SmokeDNAi technology and Out of the Ether designs to create a visualization of the flavour profiles of liquors.
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It basically takes a signature of that liquid, and then it gives analysts a reading or a spike reading of the different compounds that are in there. Diageo wanted to do was demystify that and make it easy. Diageo also sought to offer consumers taste and flavour through sight. Out of the Ether, "an algorithmic machine generated work of art that harnesses SmokeDNAi technology," according to Diageo, produces imagery of whisky smoke over time. Design experts, in collaboration with Bose Collins, worked to produce visuals that are more easily digested by a consumer versus data sets.
They have, for example, an overlay with the chemical name like vanillin, which smells and tastes like vanilla. Here, whisky enthusiasts can gaze at flavour combinations, aromas and unambiguous profiles that wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye.
On the visual, observers will see the small amounts of one particle that moves around. Then, there's a larger cloud in there and then that will show them the percentile of these compounds that sit in there. Visual profiles may include a combination of coconut, smoky, earthy, medicinal, floral and sweet flavours. It gives the observer a really great, at a glance, visualisation of what's going on inside the barrel, a much, much clearer understanding of your own whisky.
Aqua vitae (‘water of life’ in Latin) was the generic term for distilled spirits throughout the Roman Empire, widely used during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and translated into many languages. In Gaelic, it was uisge beatha, in Irish uisce beatha. Whisky connoisseur Charles MacLean says that this was Anglicised from uiskie (c.1618) to whiskie (1715) to whisky (1746). F Paul Pacult, the author of ‘A Double Scotch’, 2005, says that Aqua Vitae ultimately became whisky in 1736. But whiskey? For a complete run-down, try this site.
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