For over 200 years, Ardbeg whisky has been made on the Scottish island of Islay (pronounced ‘eye-lah’), where Celtic monks found refuge from raiding Norsemen and early distillers smuggled their illicit “aquavitae” onto the island.
Today, Ardbeg whiskies have been called “close to perfection” by whisky connoisseurs. Ardbeg whiskies are also highly regarded by organizations that rate the world’s best whiskies. Proof of that is the fact that six different Ardbeg expressions have won prestigious titles including World Whisky of the Year, Scotch Whisky of the Year, and World’s Best Single Malt.
So why are these expressions so highly regarded?
The Ardbeg Distilling Process
Making Ardbeg requires a special kind of chemistry, and a combination of the process itself and the people who make it.
Ardbeg uses the most phenolic malt in the business (i.e. the smokiest). The water used to produce Ardbeg comes from Loch Uigeadail, three miles up a hill behind the Distillery. The water flows down the hill and runs into Loch Airigh Nam Beist – from there the burn takes it to Charlie’s Dam at the Distillery and from there it is piped into the Mash House.
Overseeing this complex process is Colin Gordon, Distillery Manager for Ardbeg.
Gordon wears an effusive smile and a love for his craft. Pursuitist recently sat down with Gordon to learn more about Ardbeg whisky:
Pursuitist: Good morning Colin Gordon! Thank you for joining Pursuitist today to discuss all things Ardbeg. Your bio states that you worked in the whiskey industry before coming to Ardbeg. Please tell us how your pathway led you to Ardbeg whiskey.
Gordon: Well, I have been working in whiskey for 13 years. In Scotland, there is a university degree you can obtain through the study of brewing and distilling in Edinburgh. I did a year’s masters program studying brewing and distilling. It was great training. They sort of rotate you around various sites in Scotland maltings as well as distilling to understand process, safety, and people management. And I ended up coming to Islay, an island with nine iconic distilleries and I took a job there where I ran the malting so making malted barley, peated malted barley for lots of distilleries on Islay, and then I went to Lagavulin distillery and for two years I ran Lagavulin, but at the end of the road coming out of Port Ellen where we live in Islay, at the end of the road sits Ardbeg distillery. During the COVID pandemic, the job came up to take the opportunity to run Ardbeg. It’s an iconic distillery with a great team making great whiskey. So I moved a mile and a half up the road and never looked back. I’ve been there ever since.
Pursuitist: Then did you start us distillery manager or did you move up the ladder when you were hired at Ardbeg?
Gordon: I went straight in as distillery manager.
Pursuitist: Clearly, the distilling process is what sets your Scotch whiskey apart. Please discuss the the distilling process that makes Ardbeg such a special whiskey. And what set you apart from the new distilleries on Islay?
Gordon: Well, Ardbeg has been there over 200 years. In 1815 the distillery was founded. So our distillery has great history and heritage. We make single malt Scotch whiskey using only malt, barley, water, and yeast. If you count peat as an ingredient, we use four ingredients because we use peat as well. So when you burn peat, it gives off a very rich aromatic smoke. It’s just decomposed vegetation and it sits in peat bogs. Once you dry it and burn it the smoke is very automatic. So after five days you dry it and now lots of the distilleries in Scotland will dry it with hot air and then take it and make whiskey out of it. We dry it with peat, and the peat smokes sticks to the husk of the grain, and that smoky peaty note is going to follow right through the process, right through maturation, and you will taste it in your whiskey.
Ardbeg uses very heavily peated malt, so it’s a smoky, sooty, ashy whiskey, but what really sets us apart is we talk about this thing called the “Peaty Paradox” where we have, it’s like soot and fruit, right? We’ve got these sooty ashy, very smoky notes, but wonderful citrus, herbal fruity notes, soot and fruit. So the Peaty Paradox and Ardbeg is just an iconic Islay whiskey that just shows this off that it’s not just all about this heavy smoke in the peat. That’s what we want, but we’ve also got these very sort of delicate, really fruity herbal notes to our whiskey.
Pursuitist: So how do you keep your competitors from replicating the Peaty Paradox?
Gordon: Well, anyone can walk around for a tour, although if someone walks around for a tour with a sketch pad and a measuring tape, we get a little bit suspicious. But every distillery in Scotland will have different shape and size of stills. Copper is the most amazing material because it’s a great conductor of heat. It’s easy to shape, but it also cleans your spirit. During the distilling process, the copper actually starts to wear. You strip copper off the inside of the still and it forms copper sulfide. So it takes the sulfur out of the spirit. If you were to distill in stainless steel it would be horrible, as sulfur tastes terrible. So copper’s an amazing material. So depending on the shape and size of your still, if it’s very, very tall, you’re going to promote a sort of very light fragrant character in your spirit.
If it’s very short and dumpy, you’re going to have a very heavy, oily spirit with less copper contact. So someone could come in and try and replicate our stills exactly and they could recreate the Peaty Paradox, but no one has done it yet and we would know, so we don’t want that. We’re all friends in the industry. We don’t want to go down that route. We all know each other!
Pursuitist: Laura Baddish from your agency was kind enough to send me a sample of your new expression – Eureka, which I thoroughly enjoyed last night. It was very smooth on the palate. Tell us about this new expression – your most recent special edition.
Gordon: I’m glad you like it! Would you like another taste? Come on mate and pass me that glass. This is Ardbeg Eureka. Ardbeg Eureka is a non-age statement whiskey, so there is no age on the bottle. Now, by law, single malt Scotch whiskey has to be matured in an oak cask and has to be matured in Scotland for a minimum of three years.
Now, we will mature whiskey for a variety of ages from about five years, our youngest expression, right up to 25 and 30 years old. We’ve even done older than 40 years old. So it’ll depend on the age. There is no age statement on Eureka because it’s a mix of ages. So there’ll be some whiskey in there that’s, you know, anywhere from six, seven, eight to ten years old. We don’t put an age statement on it. It is a “Committee” bottling and we’ve done this to celebrate 25 years of the Ardbeg Committee.
So Ardbeg had a really turbulent history. It made an amazing spirit and it was a very well loved whiskey, but the 1980s were really tough on the whiskey industry in Scotland and there’d been a lot of production, and it became quite unfashionable to drink whiskey, particularly Scotch whiskey, and Ardbeg ended up closing between 1981 and 1989.
We reopened again in the early 90s and then we shut down again in 1996. And then Ardbeg was bought in 1997 by the Glenmorangie Company which completely got the place going again and invested in great quality casks, making sure the spirits were perfect. And we’ve sort of grown from strength to strength, but in the year 2000 we formed the Ardbeg Committee, which was a group to make sure that Ardbeg would never close its doors again, and the Committee is 25 years old this year. The Committee has 200,000 members from all over the world. I’m sure you’ll be signing up after this Brian and that’s good.
Pursuitist: I will Colin and will put a link at the end of the story so more Pursuitist adherents can join the Committee!
Gordon: That’s great Brian, and to celebrate the 25 years, we gathered 100 committee members two years ago and gave them a number of different samples to try and they picked two that they really liked. One was an Ardbeg made with heavily roasted malt barley, so almost like black, dark malt that you would use in like a stout or a heavy beer. We use this sort of dark malt, which gave us these sort of chocolaty and coffee notes, like really, really dark.
Pursuitist: Did that expression have a specific name?
Gordon: No. We just like we did well, as we did a bottling with very similar ingredients called Ardcore a number of years ago, the spirit was similar to the process to make Ardcore, but we just we held it in these bourbon casks for a bit longer. They really, really liked this, and the other type that they loved was an Ardbeg standard spirit that we make day-to-day, matured in Pedro-Ximenez sherry casks from Spain, which is going to give you dark fruit notes like raisins, stone fruit, and peach notes. And these two cask types have been combined to give us Eureka.
Pursuitist: So what’s the proper way to drink Ardbeg?
Gordon: It’s almost ritual like similar to wine tasting so what we like to do is to look at the color, as Ardbeg is always a natural color, so the only ingredient you’re allowed to add, apart from malt, barley, water, and yeast is caramel coloring.
It’s all natural coloring, so all this color has come from the cask and you can see the color more influenced by the sherry cask, which creates this sort of lovely dark. It’s almost a ruby color. It’s quite strong.
Pursuitist: Yes, I found out last night!
Gordon: It’s 52%. Now, what we always do is we will “nose” it and try it “neat” and then you would add a little water and nose it and try it, because water is going to open that spirit. But on the nose, you can get a bit of the smoke there. That’s sort of it’s like a smoked meat sort of thing coming through. And there’s this lovely sort of dark fruit note, like a raisin note coming through from the sherry cask. There are sort of chocolaty notes there, a bit of coffee coming through from the dark malt and you can definitely smell the chocolate.
Pursuitist: Yes, I definitely smell the chocolate!
Gordon: Oh, wait ‘till you taste it. We’ll have a little taste, we say Sláinte go brách, which is Gaelic for cheers. So we’ll have a little taste. Roll it round, feel a better chew. Now was that worth your commute to Washington, D.C. to meet us?
Pursuitist: Oh, absolutely. Thank you! It was definitely worth the commute to Washington, D.C. to meet with you and try this!
Gordon: Great Brian! You always get with Ardbeg a whiskey you get a great mouth coating as our whiskey is not chill filtered. So for a long time, the majority of Scottish whiskeys have been chill filtered, which was really started for the U.S. market – Scotch on the rocks and adding ice about 50 – 60 years ago.
What they did was that if you cool your whiskey before you bottle it to just above freezing, the fatty acids and lipids, some of them come out of solution. You then put it through a filter, and it means if you add ice, it won’t go cloudy. It’ll keep its clarity. But we don’t do that, so with Ardbeg if you do add ice gets very cold it will sometimes go cloudy, but we want you to get that full mouth feel, that great coating on your in mouth on the cheeks – you’re feeling that. It’s a lovely chew that’s great Ardbeg. But with this Eureka the chocolaty coffee, fruits and the smoke are still there.
Pursuitist: So with the Committee, you have 200,000 members now. What impact have they had on your business and how does one become a Committee member?
Gordon: Well, if you visit our Ardbeg.com site you can sign up to be a Committee member. Back in the day when it started, if you bought a bottle of Ardbeg 10 Year-Old, which is our sort of flagship of the cool range, you used to get an invitation to join and you would fill it out and send it off to join the Committee. With the Committee, there’s a number of things we like to do in the past such as holding annual meetings where they can dial in and listen to stories about the distillery.
Committees are a huge thing on Islay! There’s committees for everything. We send out minutes minutes to tell people what’s happening at the distillery. As a member of the Committee there are opportunities to buy limited bottlings, and attend special Committee events.
So there’s lots of things for the Committee to get involved with. And there are special things like this Eureka expression, where we’ve given members of the Committee a chance to influence a bottling, which is really exciting.
Pursuitist: Colin, you travel here to the U.S. often. What’s the difference between a U.S. whiskey drinker and a Scottish whiskey drinker? Do you notice any significant differences?
Gordon: Brian, We did an event here in Washington last night at the Jack Rose Dining Saloon, which has a world famous whiskey bar. Whiskey consumers tend to be very passionate people and they like information. I think it’s the same in the UK and in Scotland and in Islay – people like to know what they’re drinking and tasting. But I think the U.S. tends to take that to the next level. I think the level of education that people have as consumers, whether you’re buying a car or clothes or wine and spirits, I think Americans like to really understand what it is. There’s an amazing diverse mix of people and over the last couple of hundred years that people have come to the States and you’ve got this great sort of mix of culinary and food and people are always interested what things are. And I think that goes the same for spirits. So with Scotch whiskey and the whiskey fans in the States, they are so interested in the casks and what water it is. I think with the bar scene here, the bartenders are very interested and very well educated. I’m not saying they aren’t in Scotland. Because if you go to whiskey bar in Scotland people will know. But if you go to a standard bar in Scotland, you probably won’t get that same level of information. I think in the U.S. there such a great culture around education and people really understanding spirits that I think it’s always a joy to do tasting sessions for U.S. audiences. It’s great.
Pursuitist: Final question, what’s your favorite way to enjoy Ardbeg?
Gordon: Well, I like to mix as well. Single malt Scotch whiskey is there to be enjoyed. We’ve got this incredibly diverse range of flavors. There are 150 distilleries in Scotland. Everyone makes a different spirit with the same ingredients. It’s amazing. I tend to drink Ardbeg neat with a little bit of water, but I like to mix Ardbeg and I love a cocktail. We’ve had a few good ones. Ardbeg daiquiris have been the choice of the last few days. And I love a “Penicillin” cocktail with honey, ginger, and lemon. And with Ardbeg with that peated malt – it’s the best!
Pursuitist: Colin, thank you very much for taking time to share with Pursuitist all that is Ardbeg Whisky. It’s been great chatting with you! Sláinte!
Gordon: Thank you Brian and Sláinte to you!
Find out more about Ardbeg Whiskey here
