May 14, 2025 • 78 mins
Geese, Barley, and Peat At The First New Islay Distillery in 124 Years
In this brand new episode of the Whiskey Ring Podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with James Wills, son of founder Anthony Wills and a worldwide face of Kilchoman Distillery on Islay. This episode marks a significant milestone as it is my first interview with an Islay distillery (I was surprised too!), and I was excited to delve into the unique aspects of Kilchoman and the challenges of distilling on this iconic island.
We start off where any good whisky podcast starts: with geese. Yes, geese. They're kind of a big deal there. I'm not known for going with the grain (yeah I said it) so why not there. Kilchoman has a lot more going for it, though, as it enters its 20th year in 2025. As the first new Islay distillery in 124 years, Kilchoman needed to be different. They couldn't just be peaty, they had to be unique - and thus they became the first farm-to-glass distillery on the island.
We chat about all the nerdy stuff you'd expect, like barley experimentation and yeast and fermentation, plus a dive into how their bourbon barrel sourcing and full-term maturation (note: not finishing!) work. There's also plenty to explore about the "whys" and inflection points in the distillery's two-decade evolution.
I've been wanting to have Kilchoman on for two years, and I'm thrilled to finally make that happen for the podcast and for you, the listeners and supporters.
Thank you to James for entering the Whiskey Ring!
Thanks to our Presenting Sponsor, BAXUS
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Kilchoman Distillery
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hey folks, welcome to a new episode of the Whiskey Ring Podcast. Today, we're going back over
to Scotland and over to Islay, which weirdly
enough, I don't think that I have interviewed
an Islay distillery yet. So this will be the first one.
And if I'm wrong, I'll have people yelling at me afterwards, but that's
for afterwards. So to talk about Kilchoman
(00:24):
Distillery on Islay, we've got James Wills.
He is part of the founding family, one of the founder's sons.
He's had one title for a long time, but he's the person you're probably going to
see worldwide at events and one of the faces
of the brand. So to talk about James, welcome on.
(00:48):
Absolutely. So as I told James just before recording, we're
going to skip a little bit of the origin story and have the history kind of interwoven, but just
to set a little context. So Islay, it's kind of synonymous with,
with Pete in their whiskey with several
other things that are, have become synonymous with Scotch more broadly
in whiskey, but we're going to dig a little into that. So just
(01:10):
setting the landscape. Islay,
it's about 40 miles across, 20 to 25 miles north
and south. Kilchoman is on the far west
side of Islay on the peninsula, but just
at the north tip of the Rinns Peninsula, it's like
kind of mainland kind of peninsula where those two meet on
(01:34):
Rockside Farm, about a mile or two inland from Makir
Bay on the west coast. For
other fans of other island whiskeys, it's on the other side of the peninsula from places like
Perklade and Port Charlotte. You've got high
winds, sea spray in the air, not a lot of trees because
of those winds, but perhaps most annoyingly, you
(01:55):
have geese. And
I wanted to start there because it's just a weird Islay
only thing. And I thought it would be interesting to start. So Geese,
they've been not quite a problem per se, because they're protectors.
(02:19):
Yeah, well, so it's not unique to Islay or unique
to Kilchoman necessarily. It's because
Kilchoman is both a farm and a distillery, you
know, so the geese are a very destructive force,
if you like. You know, four geese will graze as
much ground as a sheep, roughly, and
(02:42):
you get about 50,000 geese coming to Islay every year.
And added to the fact that they eat
a lot of grass, this is
a strange place to start, but yeah, they don't cut
the grass when they eat it. They pull it up by the roots. So
(03:03):
they pull it up with their bills rather than like a cow or
a sheep where they'll cut it with their teeth. the
geese just pull it up. And so when we
come to sow our barley, we do it in the spring and
we have to wait for the geese to leave. So the geese are migratory.
They come to Islay for the winter and then they
(03:26):
leave in the spring. So we have to wait until they leave until
we can sow our barley. so that when the green
shoots come up, they're not just decimated by the
geese, because it would be, you know, if the geese came onto
a field and you had lots of nice green shoots of barley coming
through. That's just, you know, and it's not a
(03:47):
case of like when they eat grass, because that grass is only going to
get a couple of inches high and only going to produce so much nutrients. a
grain, a seed of barley will eventually turn into much more than that.
So we need to wait. And I've sometimes said
that if you come to Islay in the spring and you hear gunshots and
a sort of English sounding bloke swearing and
(04:10):
hooping and hollering at geese, then that'll be my dad. He's
not shooting at them to kill them, just to clarify. He's just kind of scaring
them away. Yeah, because they're
protected to an extent. So they can be controlled, the
numbers are controlled. But yeah, it's
not really in our hands to do that so much. So he's just scaring
(04:33):
I think the first came up in Mike
Billet's book, Pete and Whiskey. I was like, that's
a different problem to have. So,
yeah, it is a weird place to start, but it's all sense
of place in a way. So as I said, due to the geese, you're planning
six weeks behind the mainland. So
(04:56):
that in itself is going to have a little difference on the growth of the barley and
we'll get into that in a little bit. said
a little more context. This was the first new distillery on Islay for
124 years when you opened. This was the, you were the eighth
We were the eighth at the time. Yeah. In 2005. Yeah. First for
(05:21):
Yeah. So, you know, Islay used to
have as many as 30 distilleries,
which to me is kind of mind boggling for such a small island with the
travel issues that you've got to overcome.
But yeah, you had gone down to seven. When
starting Kilchoman, did your dad have this idea that
(05:44):
he wanted to either maybe revive a long lost brand or
try to reopen some distillery that had gone out pre-prohibition or
post-prohibition? Or was it, you know, want a fresh
Well, so I guess to kind of put it in context,
you have to go back a bit and the 30 distilleries were registered on
(06:05):
Islay largely because of its remoteness. We
are a long way from the excise men. And so
there was a bit more grey areas around having to register and
how much registered registering of whiskey you make and everything else. So
a lot of rural Scotland, still to this day, you know, because
of that history is where most distilleries are, you
(06:25):
know, you, you didn't until very recently have
distilleries in, in urban areas, really, because
you were bothered too much by the excise the tax map. So So
yeah, Islay had about 30. They were pretty small scale
farm distilleries, which, you know, grew their own barley, produced
(06:45):
the whiskey from that barley and everything was fairly, you
know, self-contained, you know, a farm distillery
describes what they were doing. But then as
the industry commercialised and kind of industrial maltings and
and warehousing casks on the mainland of Islay came
about as a result of more trade with the mainland. It
(07:10):
wasn't that long ago that you couldn't get a car on the ferry. But
as a sort of trade of barrels and bulk stuff
between Islay and the mainland became more regular, distilleries
commercialized, as I said, and this whole concept of a
farm distillery became extinct, really.
(07:31):
So my father wanted to build a new distillery, but he didn't
want to do it in just the same way that everyone else did.
He didn't want to just build another pile of distillery in the same way
that others had. So he came up with this concept of
recreating a traditional farm distillery. And
that's what he did. We were the eighth and people were thinking, do we
(07:52):
really need an eighth? And now we've got, I don't know, I've lost
I was gonna say, you've got, I think, 10 open and 12 if
So Ardnahoe started in about 2016 or something
like that. And then Port
(08:12):
Ellen restarted. There's Lagan Bay
and Port Natruan that are being built at the moment. And
then there's planning approval for two others. So
what, there's a difference between planning approval and building a
distillery, you know, but one of those
(08:33):
will certainly be built, which is a project from the
owners of Chivas, Chivas Regal. So they're going
to build a distillery near, near the dump, near
the dump on Islay. So yeah, lovely, you know, aroma in
the air down there. It's actually sandwiched between the dump and
(08:53):
Fantastic. So they're not going to
I'm not sure. I don't think they'll describe it in that way. They'll come
up with something much more. much more interesting. But if you're describing it
to someone in Islay, where the new Chivas distillery is, you would
say, go past the sewage works. And just after
(09:19):
So in theory, as you said, the planning approval is very different from
having something started, but that's up to 15, potentially. It's
an island of not a high population, really one
or two ways on and off by
ferry or by plane, and not a big plane. So,
you know, the island is certainly
(09:42):
growing to try to match the tourism that has
come over the last few years, the Feijial festivals and just
the immense whiskey tourism in general. But it's still,
as you said, fairly remote, not easy to do. And I know there's a
shortage of housing, there's all these things. How, right
now, kind of, and I know this isn't specific to Killholman, but how
(10:05):
is the island responding? And
I mean, the big the big challenge. Well, I should put it so
if we go back to my I remember my grandfather, you know,
20. No, probably more. Yeah. 20, 30 years ago, he
(10:25):
was part of a committee that were trying to bring
young people back to Islay, trying to
bring more visitors to the island, trying to diversify the offering from,
you know, basically, you know, an island tourist location
that had limited appeal. Since then,
the distilleries and whiskey tourism has
(10:47):
taken off, you know, so with that has come a lot more visitors, it's
come a lot, a lot more, you
know, money, it's been a good thing. It's been a good thing for the island, you know. And
then with the expansion of the distilleries as well, that's, that's created
more jobs and everything. So it but about probably five
or 10 years ago, it well less than about five years ago, it
(11:09):
really kind of reached breaking point a bit. There
are no houses, you can't really employ people
unless they live on Islay and that creates a
bubble where there's very, very
high competition for jobs, which isn't great as
(11:29):
an employer. And then as a resident of
Islay, there's extra pressure put
on the ferry service and the flights in that you can't get
bookings when you want to. The Scottish government
didn't help because they basically didn't renew a ferry for renew
the Islay ferries for about 10 or
(11:51):
20 years after when they should have. So the ferries break down a
lot. You know, so as a
as a family that run a
distillery on the island, we feel those pressures, both
in terms of employing people, keeping
people, getting whiskey off
(12:13):
the island, getting barrels and malt onto the island. And so
it's it's
improving, but not fast. And
then as a as people as residents of the island, island
that have nothing to do with the distilleries, necessarily, you
know, maybe you're a retired couple who live on the island,
(12:35):
or, or what have you, you know, you see another
distillery being built every year. And you go, really, is that really do
we really need that? Do we does the is the island going
to benefit from that? You know, so that it is, it
is still overwhelmingly positive. You know, people's
view of the whiskey industry is still overwhelmingly positive on Islay.
(12:58):
But it comes with a bit of a caveat now. So I
don't know if I explained that very well. But I've tried to give a
No, it's very useful. We recently spoke to Isle
of Harris distillers on the Outer Hebrides, similar
problems. in any of these more remote locations,
(13:20):
there's a similar problems of how do you get people there? How do you get people to stay there? Is
there enough housing for them? Are there enough jobs? Or
conversely, is there such competition for jobs because you can't get
people? These things tend to echo from place to
place. So I like to highlight those
echoes as themes, if you will, that go
(13:41):
Yeah. And to put it into context, it's a two-hour theory. to
Islay. So it's a two hour ferry to Islay. And
then it's a about a two, two and a half hour drive
to Glasgow, which is the next major city, you know, so it's
essentially a day trip to get to Islay
(14:02):
Right. And that's assuming, as you said, the ferry hasn't broken down or some
We had a terrible ferry captain recently, and
he almost got his, you know, he was chased out of town because
he refused to go in like, he refused to take the ferry
out of port, even if there was like even a what we would call
(14:22):
like a very mild breeze, which is like 20 miles per hour, and he
But anyway, gotta be harder than that. Gotta be stronger
than that. Alright, so focusing
in on on Kilohoman. So
you and I, quote unquote, met, or I
(14:44):
first got to hear you speak, at an August 2024 Drammers
event. This was a virtual event. It was
really great, because it was post-Faygiel. And Charlie,
as he is known to do, brought in some really crazy
bottles. I think you brought in,
you may have brought in a couple as well. so
(15:06):
many that I'm not going to go through all of them on the podcast today, just because that
would take up the entire time, but I'm going to reference a couple of
them. The first thing I want to talk about is
the barley. Being a farm distillery, having that as
your core ethos, if you will. You
talked about at the event that over the years you've grown Optic,
(15:27):
Publican, Concerto, Laureate, Diablo, Planet, Sassy,
probably others as well. In looking
at the varieties mentioned over the interviews in
the past and what you said at the event, you said Concerto
seems to be a tried and true favorite that works well in Islay.
It stands up to the winds. It's not too
(15:49):
big a head that it falls over. It seems to work. Laureate
can kind of go either way. It's sometimes better for spring, but
is kind of going either way. Have
there been varieties that you've tried that are
Not so far, but I'm sure there will be one coming. I
(16:12):
mean, there are, it's more Because you need a
whole number of things to kind of come together to get have a good crop, you know,
so you have to have a good sowing season, a
good ripening period. And then you know, the crucial period
is harvesting, you know, you have to get in and harvest it before maybe
the deer eat it all or the wind blows it flat, or, you
(16:32):
know, or you get a really wet period. So, you know,
taking that aside, you know, the barley varieties in
terms of like their success or failure in the fields have all
been, you know, okay. Some years are
better in terms of yield and other things than
others. We typically get about two tonnes an acre is
(16:56):
kind of success for us in terms of yield. And,
you know, we're not growing that heritage grains, whereas
they're very, very challenging to grow, you know, we're kind of pragmatists in that
regard, we don't, we don't go too far, too far into it,
you know, we want to make a reasonable amount of whiskey from the barley from the efforts that we make. But
in terms of the barley varieties, and how we look at it, from
(17:18):
my perspective, there's been no failures. There's been variable styles
that you get as a result at the spirit stage, you
know, before it goes into the barrel. And Laureate would be quite
a heavy style, very malty kind of style, whereas Concerto
was one of the ones that stood
(17:38):
out in my mind as being particularly kind
of fruity and floral, which is that
fruity floral element, kind of what makes Gilhom indifferent
in my eyes, you know, the marriage of the smoke and the floral sweetness.
So I guess like
(17:59):
sort of experimental cast types in a way, there's no real big successes
or failures. There's just personal preferences in a way. So
Do you often retry or rotate varietals on a set schedule or
(18:21):
I mean, there's one grain trader on Islay, so you have
to kind of work with him in terms of what he's willing
to bring to Islay or you have to go and get it yourself. And as
I said, we're a distillery which focuses on the detail of things.
We're not mad about like, marketing fad exercises,
(18:42):
you know, so we haven't experimented all
that much with barley varieties, you know, we've stuck within
like two row, spring barley, you know,
and generally speaking, the sort of more commercial end of
those barley varieties. So Yeah,
yeah, no, we we play around but it's not, it's
(19:05):
always with the goal of making consistent good quality whiskey at
the end of it. You know, we're not looking for anything dramatically different year on year.
Sure, sure. So, you know, one of the, as I said, one
of the synonymous things with Islay, rightly or wrongly, is
peat. Kilhom, from
the beginning, you've made a peated offering. And
(19:29):
We'll, we'll go a little bit into this, but for the,
there is a division between the Islay only Killhomad offerings
and the kind of broader core range.
So, for the Islay only,
like grown on Islay, fully on Islay range, you're
(19:50):
cutting peat from Loch Gorm, which is just three miles from the distillery.
So there's definitely a sense
of place that's even more microscopic than
Islay as a whole. something
that is a frequent topic whenever Pete is mentioned, particularly in Scotland, is
(20:11):
how much are you able to take? How much do
you have to bring in, whether it's conservation or
environmentalism? So
let's just start that, with Locke Worm, what does that Pete
Well, Locke Worm is is very close to the
(20:32):
ocean, you know, the Atlantic coast of Islay, you know, so it's
much more exposed to that salty spray,
essentially, because it is spray from the ocean that sweeps across
the ground. So it's more exposed to that than other areas of
Islay for sure. Yeah. No,
(20:54):
I mean, most of the peat on Islay, so
Lofroeg and Lagavulin and
others who cut peat on Islay. I
think Beaumont will use Islay cut peat as well with some of their stuff. But
most of that is cut from around the
airport, right in the centre of the island. It
(21:17):
sounds like I'm just describing the sort
of You know that the dump and
the sewage works in the airport is so beautiful. But there's a big, big
flat peat moss in the centre of the of the island, which
is kind of up from Lagan Bay, up
towards the hills from the big Lagan Bay in the centre of the island there.
(21:39):
And that's where most of the peat is cut. Yeah, and that's a quite
a different It's a different level of exposure to
the ocean. I mean, how that translates is
into the whiskey is up for debate because it's still, you
know, we're talking about nuance on nuance, you know. So
we're talking about different places on Islay to take Pete from
(22:04):
So you have the difference between the peat
taken from La Corme and peat that has, well,
I should really say malted barley that's been peated, gotten
from Port Ellen. So
the bought barley gets a 50 ppm measurement and
the grown barley is 20 ppm. Previously
(22:29):
on another interview, you said 20 PPM is pretty much a cap based on your in-house
on-site capabilities of how much you can get the peat in
there. I'm curious, was
going so much higher on the bought barley a choice
to go that much higher or was kind of what's available to buy
(22:51):
Yeah. So when we started, we were... we
were, I mean, we're a smallish distillery now that so we were producing about
50 to 100,000 litres of alcohol in the first couple
of years. You know, we now produce about 600,000 litres. So,
but even now, we're like, we're still between us
and Ardnahoe, we would be the smallest distilleries on the island. So even
(23:15):
though we're now a significantly bigger distillery, we're still pretty small.
And when we first started, we were, you know, we
were smaller again, you know, so we couldn't go
to the Port Ellen Maltings on Islay, which supply the
Diageo distilleries, as well as Ardbeg
(23:35):
and Kalina. Anyway,
so they supply a number of Islay distilleries, not all of them, but a
number of them. We couldn't, we had to choose someone else's
specification of barley, essentially, they wouldn't peat a
malted barley to our specific level of
of peating level whether we it might be 65 or
(23:59):
or 42 or whatever it might have been we had to choose essentially
someone else's specification so we chose uh
50 ppm which is Ardbeg's specification I
think they say it's 55 but um Yeah,
it's essentially that it's the same. It was the same,
you know, two tons went to Kilholman, 25 tons
(24:20):
went to Ardeg, you know, and it was it
was essentially the same. But people talk very precisely about
peating levels with malted barley, but
also in the Finnish whiskey, you know. So if you talk to the maltings, the
manager at the maltings on Islay, and you
look at the contract we have with them, they supply that our
(24:43):
contract with them would specify anything from like 35 to
60 ppm and the average being 50 essentially.
So you know as with all things in scotch whiskey we can get
slightly carried away with like things being absolutely
No, no, that's fine.
(25:06):
And like we said before, you know, that that's the green
PPM, that's not what's coming out in the final whiskey, that can be
as little as 10% of the PPM at
the final product. So I
know you said the other distillers are getting some
of their peat from Islay. There is kind of
(25:28):
a not so secret secret in the industry that as consolidation happened
and as malt houses closed, even on Islay,
there's plenty of peated barley that's used using
peat, not from Islay, but more so from mostly Aberdeenshire,
Aberdeenshire, excuse me, on the mainland. Even
if the end product, shall we say, like a bottle of Ardbeg,
(25:52):
Laphroaig, what have you, is identifiably Islay style.
That's to say, what are the major flavor
differences that you find in the profiles between the in-house
(26:16):
So the barley we grow and
goes into the 100% Islay range, so the ones
with the either clear or speckly white
labels. That barley is
grown and then malted using Islay peat to 20 ppm.
(26:37):
And then essentially, as you say, we produce a
separate style, which is made from malted
barley, which is grown on the mainland, and then pitted on Islay, using
Islay peat, but pitted to a higher level. So the differences between
the barley is where it's grown and the level of peat
that has been imparted into it, you know, so but
(27:01):
you get things in each
one that are unique to it. So the
100% Islay is very oily. It's more volatile to distill. So
it tends to have a higher husk to flour ratio. The
barley grains are flatter. So you get less, the ratio
(27:23):
between the flour and the husk is much higher,
I guess. And then, no,
sorry, it's much lower. There's more husk with
the barley that we grow on either. And then the barley that comes
in from the mainland is in more more
suitable, essentially barley growing areas of
(27:45):
Scotland, you know, so it's bigger grains, you
get more flour, and you get less
husk. So you have a chemically biologically
different grain of barley, and then you have the different peating levels. The
obvious difference is the smoke, there's the barley that we you know,
Macca Bay is more smoky than 100% Islay, Macca
(28:06):
Bay being the made from the 50 ppm malted barley we
buy. But also, as I said, the barley we
grow has this lovely oily, viscous texture
to it. It's more fragrant. And it
takes a little longer to mature. It takes a
little, you know, to come good in the cast. That might be partly just
(28:29):
to do with the fact that there is lower peat smoke, so it doesn't have the same structure
and sort of backbone at a young age. And
then the barley we buy in, heavier
peating level, but it's somehow slightly creamier, especially
with bourbon barrel maturation, it has this sort of creamy, malty
(28:51):
element to it as well. But not so thick, not
so viscous, not so oily. but obviously more
smoky and more
flexible in a way. We can take that
heavily peated malt and we can bottle it at three years old and
we can put it in a wine cask and mature it for 10 years
(29:13):
and it has more structure, it has more Backbone
is a good way. It can stand up to more flavor because it
has more peat, whereas a slightly more delicate 20 ppm,
So we'll, I have a couple of questions on maturation a
little bit later as well. I know you have a particular proclivity for bourbon
(29:35):
barrel maturation. We'll get into that. Don't
look scared. That's, it'll make sense. But so
before we leave the peat question, so one
of the, well, the first bottle we tried at that Dramers event
was an unpeated variety. It was a phase yield 2024 open
(29:55):
day bottling. It
was absolutely delicious. And I'll
have my taste notes for that in the show notes. Something
that was a little different about it for me was, I
had the same feeling drinking it that I get sometimes drinking Bruch
Latte's classic latte, which
(30:17):
is, it's an unpeated whiskey, But there's,
I still got Pete there, like, like there were hints
of it or like ghosts of it in the background. You know, it was from
nose to finish to like all nose palette finish. The
finish was particularly briny and smoky, long, long
finish, kind of sooty Pete on the back end. I
(30:40):
know I've asked Is
there something to this idea that you can have it unpeated from
a peat-making distillery and still have a little peat in there? Do
No, I think you're certainly not the only person to say that. And, you
(31:02):
know, there have been we've done some like Jack Rose, you
know, bottlings for, you know, the famous whiskey bar
down in Washington, D.C. We've done some single
cast for them in the past, which have technically been unpeated. But I
mean, I would say that that smoky element is
coming from the equipment residue within the equipment, essentially,
(31:24):
you know, use the same frying pan to make bacon
and then you know, cook some aubergines, there's
gonna be some bacon flavor in the aubergines, you know, so I
think it's as simple as that. And then also, you know, there is the four
shots and the feints, the spirit receiver, whether they clear that out, whether they
don't, you know, whether we did or whether we didn't, because that's
(31:45):
obviously, you don't
have a clean break when you switch from
I've always been a believer there's, you can't really get peat out.
Like you can, you'd have to chemically scrub a lot
So, no, that also they could be using some some refill
(32:06):
casks as well. Yeah, we could have used some refill casks that might not have
all been fresh, you know, so that there's lots
Sure, sure. Originally, the
founder, Anthony Wills, he said in multiple occasions that
he originally wasn't looking to do an unpeded version. But
(32:27):
there's an apocryphal story about one coming about
Yeah, yeah. It's become a bit sort
of run away with itself a bit this story. Yeah, I mean, essentially,
that did happen. We, back in
the early days, we had like two Stillman, that was my mom, my
(32:50):
dad, And there were some seasonal staff in the business center. And
then there were like me and my brothers, which kind of we
kind of came in and out on the breeze. And we
were, you know, either off the island chasing girls or we were there working
at the distillery basically. And one
of the jobs back in those days was we actually had a
(33:13):
we would peat the malt. So we would put it in
the kiln and burn peat for 10 to 12, oh,
sorry, 12 to 14 hours for the barley we're growing
ourselves. And that gives the 20 ppm peating level. But
after we'd burned the peat, we would burn coal to dry it,
which was a terrible idea. It didn't really work, to be totally honest,
(33:35):
and it was awful to do it, because you have to go on the kiln floor and turn
it. as it's, you know, so imagine a sort of five
by five metre room, completely dark. About
two tons, I think it was at the time, two, two and a half tons of barley, about
one foot deep. It'd be about 50 degrees Celsius. I
(34:00):
And we
would have to turn the bed of barley, get down
to the bottom and then turn it over. It would take about an hour. It was an awful job.
And one day we wanted to watch a rugby match rather than come
back halfway through the day and
(34:21):
turn it halfway through this rugby match. So
we built a slightly bigger coal fire than we should have
and we got a call from the
Islay fire brigade who told us that the kiln was on fire and we
should go back there. It was a particularly bad day
for my dad because he's an Englishman. My
(34:42):
mum's from Islay, she has a family from Islay, she's a
Scots lady. And so
when England plays Scotland, it's quite a big deal. And at that point,
Scotland hadn't beaten England for about 10 years. But this
particular day his, my dad's, you know, his distillery burnt
down and England lost to Scotland for the first time. And I
(35:04):
honestly I think it was 10 years. Yeah. So particularly bad day
for him. But
it gave rise to the unpeated stuff, because
we couldn't peat our own barley, so we
actually dried it using a
commercial grain
(35:27):
dryer, so what they use to dry grain when you
harvest the barley. So we malted it and then just
from the peat move on to production. So
you've said you've increased production over the years, started with 50 and
(35:48):
80 LPA, 15, 80,000 LPA, excuse me, now
up to a little over 600,000 LPA. But
you've made it clear in other interviews, like it's never at the expense of fermentation time.
You've added more washbacks as needed to allow
for fermentation time to continue being what you want it to be,
which is, exceptionally
(36:11):
long fermentation for scotch whiskey, and
even for Islay whiskey. In
2017, I think it was on One Nation Under Whiskey, your first visit there,
said the minimum was between 100 and 120 hours for fermentation. On
the website, you're listing at about 90. I know that's not a huge difference. I
know it's a nerdy question, but where are you at
(36:35):
It's still 90. It's 90. 90 is
probably what we've been at since. I
don't know, probably at least eight or 10 years now.
So initially, probably where that's
come from is we would have, when
(36:56):
we weren't producing 24-7, so when you're not on
a continuous cycle, and say you stop for night
shifts or weekends, you then have certain batches that
have a longer fermentation. So probably
what I was quoting there was up to 120 or
(37:17):
something like that, which was the fermentation
that we had if it was on a if it went over the weekend or
however it worked out, I guess it was maybe a Monday
shift or late shift and then it went over the weekend and was still
on the Monday or something. So yeah, that would
have been maybe, but we've always tried to, yeah, we've expanded a number
(37:40):
of times, I guess, but we've always tried to maintain
exactly what we're doing and not compromise on
And so with with 90 hours, you're getting almost four days, four,
four days, you're getting the normal esters, but you're also
getting that secondary level after a lot of the yeast has died,
cooled off of the fruitier esters. And as you said, that's
(38:04):
the light fruity style that you want the new make to be.
Yeah. Yeah, very, very little has changed since
Jim Swan said, do it this way. And my dad said, yeah,
No reason to change what's broken. It's worth
(38:29):
asking, because you have your own malt floor, how
many other distilleries in Scotland, let alone on Islay, still
I think it's eight. I
don't know exactly because new distilleries keep on popping
up and doing experimental batches and
(38:50):
other things. But I think, you know, I
think it's eight, you know, and I could try and name them if you like. Springbank.
Springbank, Belvini. I mean, well,
let me start on Islay. So Beaumont, Laphroaig, Kilchoman
(39:12):
on Islay. Anyway,
there's three on Islay, I think. And then there's Balvini
and Springbank, but that's only at five. I think there's three
or four others, but I can't remember who they are. But yeah, it's very, very small
number. And that's just a product of most of all of these older
distilleries have old malt floors. But, you
(39:35):
know, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, they would
have just outsourced it to a commercial malting facility.
for sure. And again, for reference, we talked a little bit
about that with Mike Bellet back episode 174 with
Pete and Whiskey about that consolidation. This is
(39:57):
a super nerdy question about your fermentation. So
I read that you wanted to keep the fermentation at
a relatively colder temperature since warmer
temperature barley is going to produce less alpha-amylase enzymes,
Oh, bloody hell. Here we
(40:18):
go. You heard that about us, did you? Yes. From
who did you hear that from? Give me a sec, I will find that. None
of, neither me or my brothers have a sort of
chemistry or biology degree or even
That's that one's that one's from Kuhoman's own
(40:48):
Yeah. No, no. I mean, it's true. It's just not
something that I've spoken about or or
I've heard my brothers or my father speak about. So I thought it
might have been someone Yeah,
No, no, that was basically the question. It's just something fascinating to point out. I hadn't come
(41:09):
across that before. There may be others doing it, just no one has outright
Yeah. I mean, there's so much to talk about in
terms of mashing, you
know, everything that brewers do, you know, a lot
of people put emphasis on distilling and the distillation process,
but there's so much that goes on around it, you know. So
(41:31):
the mashing and fermentation is very, very important. And we
do specific things and are aiming for a specific product
as a consequence of what we do. So yeah, the clear warts and
the cooler temperatures initially, obviously that builds up as
the activity increases within the
(41:53):
washbacks. But the end goal for us is,
with everything we do, having
is balancing the smoky character with clean, fresh, fruity
character as well. And so our 90 hour fermentation
isn't actually, it's long, and it's
(42:14):
roughly double most other Islay distilleries, but a
lot of mainland distilleries, particularly the new distilleries, they really focus on long
fermentation and getting a very, you know, fruity
spirit as a result. But for us, we want that We
want that heavier, earthier element in
the whiskey, but we don't want it to go
(42:36):
too far. So that one way of kind of tempering
down that influence from the pea is
No, no, no, there's no temperature control. So, you
know, distilling in the summer and or brewing in the summer and
(42:58):
brewing in the winter is, is different. It behaves differently. You
know, where you have warmer water, you will. Well,
sorry, actually, no, no, no, because obviously, it's temperature control at the at
the initial stage. Later on, I think it'll be a lesser, less of an impact on
fermentation. But water temperatures are an impact
more on on distillation and cooling
(43:21):
of distillation, it can be a that's, that's where things are
Gotcha. Gotcha. So, you know, in a weird departure
for this podcast, we're going to almost
skip over the distillation point a little bit. I'm
not entirely sure to be honest, why I am
(43:42):
doing so in the outline, but That's
just kind of how it happened. But I
really want to focus a lot on the maturation and the products you've got.
So yeah, we'll move over to that. So at
the Drammers event, this is where I'm getting this
(44:03):
from. You said that you like bourbon barrel maturation because while
you use Sherry, Sherry
can add, but it can also take away. I
don't know who asked this question, but it was specifically Sherry you mentioned as something that can
add but take away. I'm curious to hear what you may
have meant by that, and if that applies to other caste types
(44:28):
Yeah, so what I mean by that is like, So you have
the natural character of the distillery. So for
Kilchoman, it's the smoke, it's the saltiness, it's the sweetness,
the citrus, the tropical fruit. That is the
Kilchoman DNA of our spirit. when you
(44:49):
put that in a bourbon barrel, the characteristics and
the evolution in that bourbon barrel develop those characters
and add more to them in my eyes. Whereas
with the sherry cast maturation, they're adding, but
they're also kind of smothering some of that lighter
(45:10):
character flavors. So they do, you know, those flavors
like the citrus and the fragrant side
to the whiskeys, you can say that they're smothered, or
some people would say that they're just like evolve and transform into other flavors.
characters within that sherry cast. But so I
would say that personally, you know, those sherry casts are great. They
(45:32):
add a huge amount of flavour and very distinct, rich,
fruity flavour. But in some ways, because
they're so they're more of a dominating factor,
dominating influence on the whisky, you lose some of
that Kilhomian character. And I'm
very nostalgic about my whisky. I mean, I
(45:55):
pretty much, pretty much entirely drink Kilhomen. I
think that's, I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I
just enjoy drinking Kilhomen more than I do other
people's whiskey. Not that I don't enjoy their whiskey. I just enjoy drinking
our whiskey more because it, you know, I take more
from it. And whenever I drink Kilhomen,
(46:22):
Look, I can't argue with the results. The 2023 Maquia
Bay Cast Strength was one of my favorite pours of that year. Oddly enough,
I am without a Keelholman bottle at the moment, which
is weird. The closest thing I have, oddly enough, is a Bruklati Rockside
Farm bottle. But
(46:44):
no, I really have enjoyed, I mean, we tried 10 pours
through that event with Drammers and there wasn't a
clunker among them. They were all really,
none of them were even kind of meh. They were all really solid, some of them
extraordinary. So I can see
what you mean about, and one of the ones that we got to taste was one
(47:05):
that was kind of as close to new make as you can get with still being a
finished product. And it was beautifully
floral and fruity, the exact profile that you've kind
of talked about of wanting Kilchoman to be. So I understand that
want to not lose that profile. So
(47:26):
there was, this actually, this is another really nerdy question, but
your second visit to One Nation Under Whiskey in 2019, at
this point, you're getting close to having more 10 plus
year old stock. And you mentioned an
evolution that really piqued my interest. So
you've got this new make that's light, fresh, floral, fruity,
(47:50):
tropical fruit, and then about four
to five years in the whiskey becomes
it's big and bold and powerful, but you said it loses some
of the citrus and floral side. And then
around 10 to 12 years, the
lightness comes back. The fruitiness, the
(48:13):
floral notes. Do you have any kind
of guesses or explanation as to why that that
wave happens of having that flavor, then it
getting subsumed and then reappearing later
(48:33):
you know, the chemistry, the science of it. No, I don't. I
don't. I don't try and understand that to a certain extent. I just
enjoy the results of it. And try and learn in
what scenarios it happens in what scenarios it doesn't. But essentially, like
to me, and others would disagree, you know, whenever
I talk about our whiskey, I have I hear my dad on my shoulder saying
(48:55):
that's bollocks, you talking shite. But
essentially, for me, you know, the the Pete, if you take on taste
on you make, you know, on before it goes into the barrels, as
you said, as you described, very light and floral. in
the cask, the peat then comes through and peaks
at that 3-5 year period, so you've got maximum smoke
(49:17):
at that period. Maybe
it's a question of how the peat presents, maybe
more so than how the citrus presents. As
you go from that 5-10 year period, the peak is
then on that continuous downward curve
in terms of how dominant it is in the whiskey. So it's
(49:40):
probably just a virtue of the fact that, a result of the fact that
the peak has come up and then it's kind of going down a bit. So
at that four, five, six years old, you've got a lot of peat smoke
It makes sense. It was just, again, it was curiosity that I'd
heard before. So I Again, just had
(50:01):
to ask about it. In
sticking with maturation, in 2023, you guys had a major
shift. You'd always gotten barrels from Buffalo Trace, any
barrels from, they were bourbon barrels, but that could be anywhere from 10 to
51%, well, no, not 51%, 10 to 49% rye in the barrels. And they were sent over whole as opposed to
(50:22):
being broken down. Shipped
and then reassembled over there. So, you know, more expensive process, but
can't really argue with the results. But
(50:42):
in 2023, as you've said, Buffalo Trace
wanted to keep more of the bourbon barrels for themselves,
basically, to use. And so you
had to switch to a different source, and that ended up being Breckenridge Distillery. And
they've got a, rather than having a variety of mashables, you got a standard 56-38-6
(51:03):
bourbon recipe, corn, rye, malted
barley. With that, it's
only been a couple of years. First question I had was, does Breckinridge also send
Well, the Breckenridge thing lasted all of about eight
months, 10 months. I
(51:25):
mean, so essentially, yeah, the supply of bourbon barrels
became under massive strain in 2023. Because that
was the peak of, you know, COVID craziness in
terms of like, you know, demand for, for
premium spirits. So everyone in Scotland was
producing at maximum capacity. So bourbon
(51:46):
barrels just became very, very expensive. And that
was a large reason for Sazerac, the
owners of Buffalo Trace, deciding to keep them within their
group. So, yeah, we switched to Breckenridge.
And then since then, we've had to kind of get
direct supply where we can. and buy
(52:08):
through brokers where we can, but yeah, always, always try and get the
freshest cast we can. Always ship whole. And,
you know, hope that we're getting the best of what's available, really.
But that's the trouble if you're a smaller player, you know, things like
this can come around and bite you, you know, and
(52:33):
So, so let me alter my follow up questions that
a little bit being the You
know, having a relatively stable stock
of barrels coming in over the years from
Sazerac, from Muffler Trace, even though there was variation within that,
you had a certain profile that was created by those barrels.
(52:58):
Going to Breckenridge for about eight months or so, and then, as
you said, now, kind of whatever can come in, how
have you been managing the,
how do I want to ask this? whenever
you change a variable like that, there's gonna be some change of flavor, of profile,
(53:21):
and you can only control it to a certain extent. So
knowing what you know now of, okay, we're gonna have to pig
out wherever we can, try to get the best, et cetera, how
are you and the team managing or planning to manage to
keep the profile still identifiably Kilchoman with
(53:45):
I think not regardless
of what you do in terms of bourbon barrels, but to a point, Kilchoman
in a bourbon barrel will kind of always develop
in a certain way. To
a large part, it's about how quickly and when
(54:06):
they're at their peak and how consistently they do that. The
big factor, the big decision, the big reason why
we bought from Buffalo Trace was the consistency. You
know, so they're good cars and we could ship them home. We
got them very fresh. So those were all good things, but the consistency was
really the key thing. So what we're trying
(54:28):
to do is get a consistent supply again. And
the thing with scotch whiskey is it's not like, you
know, it's so many different variables, you know, so say
if you, you know, it might be that we just bottle them a little bit
later, but a bit older, you know, and that would be the natural progression
(54:48):
of what we're planning to do anyway. And also, you
know, any bottling is a vatting of multiple ages. So
provided this isn't a situation or we can't get consistent
supply for you know, four or five years,
it's not too much of a problem. So ultimately,
(55:09):
it's kind of a case of just rolling with it
and working with the spirit, working with the barrels, adjusting, you
got to be ready to change things, you know, you can't have a fixed recipe
and just, you know, work,
but purely based on, on, you know, on that recipe, you
have to be, there has to be a degree of flexibility. So, you
(55:31):
know, that's what that's what we've done. But hopefully, we
can, and we have had pretty consistent supplies
of bourbon barrels recently. So it's
a much better situation now. You know, the
cost of bourbon barrels went from mean,
it tripled, quadrupled in an
(55:52):
18 month to two year period. And the whole supply chain
of those bourbon barrels changed and both on the
American side and also on the Scotland side. So
it was a complete, we would call it
Oh, yes. And this is
(56:16):
in my mind, my interpretation of this as well. In
one way, you did have an advantage in that even though you're getting very consistent barrels
from Buffalo Trace and high quality, you had that range of
different mash bills. So you could get a
bourbon barrel that had, let's say, a little bit more rye influence
or less rye influence. I don't know if you ended up getting any weeded
(56:37):
bourbon barrels from them, but that would also be another factor. So you're already working with
Yeah. We got mainly, most
of them were Mashville number two, which I believe is their wheated
So that would still be Rye, but that would
(56:57):
be the Blantons and Elmer T. Lee.
But yeah, so you've already got experience working with a little bit of a spectrum rather than just
a single mash build, kind of absolute thing.
So last thing on maturation. You're
now at what I think is you're pretty close to a max capacity,
(57:21):
a little over that 600,000 LPAs per
year. And you're building a new warehouse every two years to
keep up with these stocks. So I'm seeing, I think
there are about eight at the moment, if I've counted
right, using a mix of dunnage and rack, you
know, earth floors, the newer warehouses could do up to 10 high. Are
(57:47):
there significant differences between the warehouses that you've noticed
so far like, you know, people can go a little crazy sometimes about, for
example, old forest or single barrels. In
the U.S. for single barrel bourbon, people will hunt for different warehouses. Warehouse
I is my favorite or J and whatever. Or
(58:08):
Wild Turkey is famous for that as well, for single barrels. But
that doesn't tend to be the case as much as I've heard for Scotland, for
Scottish whiskey. Are you noticing huge differences in
I mean, we have good warehouses and we have bad warehouses. Well,
we don't have bad warehouses, but we have good warehouses
(58:30):
that hold a much more consistent temperature. So
it depends what you want. It depends what you're looking for.
Someone's good warehouse is another person's bad warehouse. Someone's
cold warehouse is too cold and someone's warm warehouse is too warm. We
have a very cool couple of warehouses down at Connersby, which
(58:52):
is away from the Decidery. And part of
the fact that they're a couple of miles away and
the fact that they're very cool warehouses, a lot
of our older stocks go down there. We
have a pretty poor warehouse, which was
made using like concrete form panels rather than
(59:13):
block work with an air gap. And luckily, that was only a very
small one. And actually, we're going to change that into something else. And
the racked warehouses that we have, those are pretty new. So it's
kind of too early to say really. But
it's just the temperature variance isn't very big with the racks and the and
(59:34):
the dunnage in terms of the, you know, the
sort of mid temperature. But
the it's much drier atmosphere, because it's concrete floors.
whereas the Dunnage warehouses are very, very damp
and humid. So
it's a bit too early to say, really. I think probably
(59:57):
there's more emphasis put on warehouses in the US because
there are less factors in a way. When we're
putting together a Scotch whisky, we might use multiple
different cast types, fresh refill bourbon barrels, but then also
maybe some wine casts or some sherry casts or some, you know, rum
casts or pork casts, you know, so there's a bit more variance
(01:00:19):
there. And we play up the age variances of the Scotch whisky
tend to be bigger as well. So there's not the same like
direct line as might be the case with, you
know, well, Turkey or whatever where it's
new oak barrels, it's, you know, typically a
bottle of it younger. So, you know, so maybe just
(01:00:39):
in Scotch whisky, you're not able to draw that definitive
line in the same way. And maybe that's why it's not so, so much.
I think we don't quote it, maybe we don't put as much emphasis on
it as producers either. And also, I think There's
probably fewer single casts in the US of Scotch whisky
than there is of American whisky,
(01:01:05):
For sure. And that's actually a great segue into the
next question I have, which is more on the product side. So again,
there are several products from Kilchoman that are in-house products.
I have not had one that I have not enjoyed yet. So I highly recommend
them. There will be tasting notes in the show notes for as
(01:01:25):
many of them as I can put up before the episode goes live.
But talking about single barrels and
such works well for independent bottlers as
well. The
first time you went on One Nation Under Whiskey back in 2017, you
(01:01:45):
were talking about how at that point, at least, and keep in mind this is eight years
ago now, but Kilohoman was, you
know, you're maybe going to sell to IBs in the future. You had just
done one with, I believe, either ImpEx or Single
Cast Nation with Joshua basically at the time. A
few years later though, you're not giving it away by
(01:02:07):
any means, but you do sell some to independent bottlers. And
in 2021, your dad said he was, quote, really
excited about independent bottlers, talking
to Inside Whiskey. I'm curious what changed
in terms of that maybe becoming really
(01:02:31):
I've never heard him say that he was excited about it. Maybe he'd had a couple of
our openness to selling to independent bottlers basically
(01:02:51):
comes down to how much we want to make ourselves and keep ourselves
and whether there is any space between what we want and
our maximum capacity. So until 2020 or 2021 really, there
was no potential gap between
what we wanted and what we could make. We
(01:03:14):
were making the maximum we could, and we wanted it all. So
it wasn't really a question, to be honest. So when we expanded in
2019, 2020, we went up to 620, 630 as our maximum capacity. But know
(01:03:35):
that's a huge amount of whiskey so we probably don't need to always produce at
that level and so you know when in the years that we
don't we have a you know, five, 10% of
our capacity that we could, you
know, sell to independent bottlers. I think so
we have done that. And we're not going to tell people who
(01:03:56):
we've sold spirit to, I'm sure they'll be sort of telling people
in good time, even though we told them not. But you
know, so we have sold some spirit to independent bottlers as
as unnamed Islay, you know, because there's
no real downside to us, you know, if we're gonna, 640,000 litres
(01:04:17):
next redundant,
you know, so we don't want to do that. And the
only way to do that and do it in a sensible way is
potentially to sell to independent bottlers. So
(01:04:40):
yeah, we have done that. But you won't see Kilholman as
Sure, sure. That's a
factor for most islet distilleries, that independent bottle. Kalila is
pretty much, they'll put their name on any of them, but others,
Lafroigue is not known particularly for putting their name on any independent bottle.
(01:05:02):
So, no, but what is nice
about that is if you can at least say it's an islet distillery and
perhaps they'll put an age statement on there. Cause a lot of the independent bottlers do like to put an
age statement on there. Even if, if you guys don't for
your core ranges, um, I
enjoyed that game of trying to figure out where
(01:05:25):
it's from based on profile. And for me, at least I, I enjoy
the fact that Kilchoman is so unique in
the Islay spectrum. Let's say they're, you know, they're the 10 including
Ardenhoe that are even available with independent
bottlers. If
(01:05:45):
you know where to look, you can figure out maybe he was working with them, with Kilchoman, and
try to find some bottles that are from you guys. But
that's an exciting game for the consumer to do, rather than for the producer
Yeah. Independent bottlers do a great, great job. And my dad's
background was as an independent bottler. So he, he
(01:06:08):
sees what they do and values it, you know, and he sees that
they they can do things just as well as producers, you know, in terms
of maturation and stuff. It's just a question of us
wanting to maintain control over, over the Kilchoman name,
you know, and, and, and where
it's bottled, how it's bottled, what price it sits on the shelf at and everything
(01:06:29):
else. We want to keep that within our remit.
So this is going back a bit too, but it'll serve kind of the same
idea. It's a question of audience. On
both Kill Who Mania in 2014 and Whiskey Corner in
2015, so 10 years ago, granted, your dad said that at
(01:06:50):
that moment, the peat was popular in Europe and
North America, but Asia had yet to be won
over. Now, 10 years later, we've
had, you've had enormous expansion, product
launches, you've had COVID, all sorts of
things happening. But just in summation, have
(01:07:20):
I mean, it's interesting. So in probably
in like 2015, we were probably doing like, we were probably sending like less
than 500 cases to China. By
2022, that had become five or
10,000 cases, probably closer to 10,000 cases. Now
(01:07:41):
it's back at 500 cases. So
take from that what you will. I mean, we either cracked it and then they decided they
didn't like it. or something else was
at play, you know, but essentially, it's not it's
still not an established reliable single malt market, you
know, for Peter whiskey. The Germans are
(01:08:05):
crazy, like Germany is our biggest market. And
it keeps growing. And we're very, very strong in Germany.
And then, you know, Europe in general is a very mature
market for for isla single malt in general, you know, they.
So that's still the basis of of what we look
(01:08:26):
at as as reliable, you know, and the US,
I don't know, instead of Yeah, if you stop
buggering about with all the all the rulebook, you
know, maybe we'll look at it as a bit more reliable than ever at the moment, kind
That's completely fair. It's been described as 50 different markets, if not
(01:08:48):
more than that, because just in New York alone, you've got the metro market, upstate
market. Even
for domestic producers, it's a nightmare. For international producers, it's
even more of a nightmare. So I hear you on that front for sure. I'm
glad that we can get Killhuman releases here, I think
(01:09:10):
relatively easily. If you're in a market where you're
in that, you can find it. I know in New York, we've got plenty of stock,
which is great. But no, I understand
the, certainly understand. I've heard the German market is strong.
French market, I would imagine is pretty strong as well. They
love Scotch whiskey in general there. The German market, this is
(01:09:31):
just a quick aside because in just the last 10 or so
minutes, The German market is known for enjoying kind
of the extremes. Like they love the really peated stuff. They love the super
estuary rums from Jamaica. Um, I
was just curious to throw this to you and maybe I'll cut this out. Maybe we'll leave
it as a peated Scotch producer, peated
(01:09:54):
Scotch whiskey producer. Um, is there an attraction to the German market
or something, some insight you have as to why the Germans seem to love it
Quite often, the popularity of smaller brands is driven by
the established route to market. Do you
know what I mean? So in the UK, it's the
(01:10:14):
the route to market is dominated by supermarkets, um,
essentially, you know, so if you're, if you don't have a supermarket listing, you
know, in the UK, you know, if you compare that
to Germany, Germany has a very long established route
to market of independent shops and what
they put on the shelves is much more curated. So,
(01:10:37):
um, a brand like us who,
who, you know, um, is more
able to kind of get the products on the shelves and establish a
bigger distribution in
a market like Germany compared to the UK. So that's part of
it. But yeah, they like the extremes and they like, you
(01:10:58):
know, but we kind of roll with it. We
try and find distributors that understand what we're trying to do and
buy into that and we're
aligned with personally as much as anything. We
see these relationships as very long term relationships.
(01:11:21):
In the US, we've worked with the guys at Impex Beverages
for 15 years now,
and hopefully another 15 years. We
don't chop and change. We try and build for the long
It's wonderful. And I really thank the guys at Impex. They're a former sponsor
of the podcast, and I've been introduced to many, a great brand, Kilimanjaro
(01:11:44):
Included, because of the guys who work there. Sam, Joshua's no
longer with them, but Joshua, when he was there, the whole team, Chris,
all of them. All right. So, you know, I just
got a couple more questions in the last couple of minutes I've got you for, and I want to try
to get to all of them. We'll see. You
know, we kind of talked about the visitor experience in
(01:12:05):
that towards the beginning. So maybe I'll skip that question. Just go to the
last two. So I like to end these podcasts talking about legacy
and So the first question I have
for you is, your dad has, again, said
multiple times as recently as last year in an
interview that he never intended for
(01:12:27):
his sons to get into the business. That was never the point of the business necessarily,
that you guys would be exposed to the industry just by proximity fairly
early, but it
wasn't a purposeful path laid for you. if
you will. Now that's the perspective of
(01:12:47):
the father, the founder, the
distillery on what the next generation might look
like. I'm curious to throw that to you from the perspective of
the next generation of the child whose father has founded
a distillery, who has been in the spirits industry for
a long time before that, and what
(01:13:09):
your perspective and experience has been like in being exposed to the industry
Um, so, I mean, whether
my dad did, he might say he never expected us
to, but he wanted us to,
(01:13:29):
you know, so, um, what he says is,
you know, I, and I think as soon as we did start, he, it
made it more enjoyable for him. He, he kind of had more of a drive and,
uh, an ambition for the company because we were part of it.
So. You can't believe everything he says. But
(01:13:53):
also, you know, we have other shareholders as well. It's not like I
only answer to my dad, you know, we have other shareholders as well. So,
you know, there's more commerciality to it
than might appear on the surface. But
I mean, from the early age, I had no idea what
(01:14:14):
the whiskey industry was or what was involved in terms
of making whiskey, selling whiskey. But as soon as the stills
arrived and the stuff
started happening and we started making spirit, I mean, I was absolutely captivated by
that. And then it's just a never ending
journey of sort of like understanding the
(01:14:36):
spirit and how it develops. And so, you know,
If you're engaged by it, if it's something that that piques your interest, there's
just a whole, as I'm sure you've discovered, you know, you
can just go on and on and on and on and on with it. There's
always there's always more to learn with with whisky. And also the
(01:14:59):
industry is full of nice people, you
know, nice people who who are in it for the, you
know, because it's a job and and and it
pays the bills, but also, they love it. They
love traveling around the world and meeting people who are passionate about
what they're passionate about. So, you know, a combination of all those
(01:15:21):
things has meant that I can't really see myself doing
anything else, really. So, add
to that, you know, I enjoy working for my dad, you
know, I do work for him, he's, I say that Kilchoman is
not a democracy, it's it's a dictatorship. And I think I
think that's important for to a certain extent, you know, he He
(01:15:41):
knows what he wants, but he gives us the freedom to go and
kind of put our own stamp on things. So I enjoy working with him and
I enjoy working with my brothers, you know, and my
mum. I shouldn't forget my mum. It's
Great answer. Love it. So my last question for
(01:16:04):
you, James, is what do you
I don't think we've been around long enough to think that
we've got a legacy necessarily. In
terms of, if I think of it in the perspective of the 20 years
(01:16:27):
that we, you know, we're 20 years
now and, and look back on, on that 20 year
period, you know, it started off very, very challenging. You
know, my dad's first seven
or eight years of it was, it was, it
was terrible. You know, he did not enjoy it. It was a huge
(01:16:49):
amount of financial pressures and everything. But then all the
passion that people have shown for what he's done and
in terms of the whisky that he makes. And I
think the sort of maybe the way we go about it,
I don't know, really, but just generally the whisky seems to really
captivate people and the story and what
(01:17:11):
we do. You know, that's
the enjoyment for him, that's the enjoyment for me, you know. the
fact that people come to Islay, you know, from the
US and they're there to taste our whiskey
and look at our distillery. It blows my
mind every time, you know, so that
(01:17:34):
feels that feels like something very special. And as I say, I don't think
you can really have a legacy on an island where there's distilleries that have been
around for 200 years. You know, I think it's
I think it's tricky to talk about Guildholm and having a legacy just
yet. My dad and my mum have done a fantastic job
and we've got 45 people on Islay, you know, so that's a legacy in
(01:17:59):
Yeah, with the competition for jobs that you talked about at
the beginning, that's that's no small feat. So yeah, wonderful.
Well, James, thank you so much for coming on to talk about you home and it's been an
interview I really be looking forward to. I look forward to all my interviews, but
you know, this was one a long time coming. And I'm glad we can make it happen.
(01:18:21):
Yeah. So once again, it's been James Wills from Kilchoman
Distillery on the Isle of Islay, west coast of
Islay. I really encourage you to try the products that
you can find. There will be links to the show notes as always to
where you can find them and my tasting notes as well. Like,
rate and subscribe wherever you can. Thank you for listening to the Whiskey Ring Podcast. I'll
Hey folks, welcome to a new episode of the Whiskey Ring Podcast. Today, we're going back over
to Scotland and over to Islay, which weirdly
enough, I don't think that I have interviewed
an Islay distillery yet. So this will be the first one.
And if I'm wrong, I'll have people yelling at me afterwards, but that's
for afterwards. So to talk about Kilchoman
(00:24):
Distillery on Islay, we've got James Wills.
He is part of the founding family, one of the founder's sons.
He's had one title for a long time, but he's the person you're probably going to
see worldwide at events and one of the faces
of the brand. So to talk about James, welcome on.
(00:48):
Absolutely. So as I told James just before recording, we're
going to skip a little bit of the origin story and have the history kind of interwoven, but just
to set a little context. So Islay, it's kind of synonymous with,
with Pete in their whiskey with several
other things that are, have become synonymous with Scotch more broadly
in whiskey, but we're going to dig a little into that. So just
(01:10):
setting the landscape. Islay,
it's about 40 miles across, 20 to 25 miles north
and south. Kilchoman is on the far west
side of Islay on the peninsula, but just
at the north tip of the Rinns Peninsula, it's like
kind of mainland kind of peninsula where those two meet on
(01:34):
Rockside Farm, about a mile or two inland from Makir
Bay on the west coast. For
other fans of other island whiskeys, it's on the other side of the peninsula from places like
Perklade and Port Charlotte. You've got high
winds, sea spray in the air, not a lot of trees because
of those winds, but perhaps most annoyingly, you
(01:55):
have geese. And
I wanted to start there because it's just a weird Islay
only thing. And I thought it would be interesting to start. So Geese,
they've been not quite a problem per se, because they're protectors.
(02:19):
Yeah, well, so it's not unique to Islay or unique
to Kilchoman necessarily. It's because
Kilchoman is both a farm and a distillery, you
know, so the geese are a very destructive force,
if you like. You know, four geese will graze as
much ground as a sheep, roughly, and
(02:42):
you get about 50,000 geese coming to Islay every year.
And added to the fact that they eat
a lot of grass, this is
a strange place to start, but yeah, they don't cut
the grass when they eat it. They pull it up by the roots. So
(03:03):
they pull it up with their bills rather than like a cow or
a sheep where they'll cut it with their teeth. the
geese just pull it up. And so when we
come to sow our barley, we do it in the spring and
we have to wait for the geese to leave. So the geese are migratory.
They come to Islay for the winter and then they
(03:26):
leave in the spring. So we have to wait until they leave until
we can sow our barley. so that when the green
shoots come up, they're not just decimated by the
geese, because it would be, you know, if the geese came onto
a field and you had lots of nice green shoots of barley coming
through. That's just, you know, and it's not a
(03:47):
case of like when they eat grass, because that grass is only going to
get a couple of inches high and only going to produce so much nutrients. a
grain, a seed of barley will eventually turn into much more than that.
So we need to wait. And I've sometimes said
that if you come to Islay in the spring and you hear gunshots and
a sort of English sounding bloke swearing and
(04:10):
hooping and hollering at geese, then that'll be my dad. He's
not shooting at them to kill them, just to clarify. He's just kind of scaring
them away. Yeah, because they're
protected to an extent. So they can be controlled, the
numbers are controlled. But yeah, it's
not really in our hands to do that so much. So he's just scaring
(04:33):
I think the first came up in Mike
Billet's book, Pete and Whiskey. I was like, that's
a different problem to have. So,
yeah, it is a weird place to start, but it's all sense
of place in a way. So as I said, due to the geese, you're planning
six weeks behind the mainland. So
(04:56):
that in itself is going to have a little difference on the growth of the barley and
we'll get into that in a little bit. said
a little more context. This was the first new distillery on Islay for
124 years when you opened. This was the, you were the eighth
We were the eighth at the time. Yeah. In 2005. Yeah. First for
(05:21):
Yeah. So, you know, Islay used to
have as many as 30 distilleries,
which to me is kind of mind boggling for such a small island with the
travel issues that you've got to overcome.
But yeah, you had gone down to seven. When
starting Kilchoman, did your dad have this idea that
(05:44):
he wanted to either maybe revive a long lost brand or
try to reopen some distillery that had gone out pre-prohibition or
post-prohibition? Or was it, you know, want a fresh
Well, so I guess to kind of put it in context,
you have to go back a bit and the 30 distilleries were registered on
(06:05):
Islay largely because of its remoteness. We
are a long way from the excise men. And so
there was a bit more grey areas around having to register and
how much registered registering of whiskey you make and everything else. So
a lot of rural Scotland, still to this day, you know, because
of that history is where most distilleries are, you
(06:25):
know, you, you didn't until very recently have
distilleries in, in urban areas, really, because
you were bothered too much by the excise the tax map. So So
yeah, Islay had about 30. They were pretty small scale
farm distilleries, which, you know, grew their own barley, produced
(06:45):
the whiskey from that barley and everything was fairly, you
know, self-contained, you know, a farm distillery
describes what they were doing. But then as
the industry commercialised and kind of industrial maltings and
and warehousing casks on the mainland of Islay came
about as a result of more trade with the mainland. It
(07:10):
wasn't that long ago that you couldn't get a car on the ferry. But
as a sort of trade of barrels and bulk stuff
between Islay and the mainland became more regular, distilleries
commercialized, as I said, and this whole concept of a
farm distillery became extinct, really.
(07:31):
So my father wanted to build a new distillery, but he didn't
want to do it in just the same way that everyone else did.
He didn't want to just build another pile of distillery in the same way
that others had. So he came up with this concept of
recreating a traditional farm distillery. And
that's what he did. We were the eighth and people were thinking, do we
(07:52):
really need an eighth? And now we've got, I don't know, I've lost
I was gonna say, you've got, I think, 10 open and 12 if
So Ardnahoe started in about 2016 or something
like that. And then Port
(08:12):
Ellen restarted. There's Lagan Bay
and Port Natruan that are being built at the moment. And
then there's planning approval for two others. So
what, there's a difference between planning approval and building a
distillery, you know, but one of those
(08:33):
will certainly be built, which is a project from the
owners of Chivas, Chivas Regal. So they're going
to build a distillery near, near the dump, near
the dump on Islay. So yeah, lovely, you know, aroma in
the air down there. It's actually sandwiched between the dump and
(08:53):
Fantastic. So they're not going to
I'm not sure. I don't think they'll describe it in that way. They'll come
up with something much more. much more interesting. But if you're describing it
to someone in Islay, where the new Chivas distillery is, you would
say, go past the sewage works. And just after
(09:19):
So in theory, as you said, the planning approval is very different from
having something started, but that's up to 15, potentially. It's
an island of not a high population, really one
or two ways on and off by
ferry or by plane, and not a big plane. So,
you know, the island is certainly
(09:42):
growing to try to match the tourism that has
come over the last few years, the Feijial festivals and just
the immense whiskey tourism in general. But it's still,
as you said, fairly remote, not easy to do. And I know there's a
shortage of housing, there's all these things. How, right
now, kind of, and I know this isn't specific to Killholman, but how
(10:05):
is the island responding? And
I mean, the big the big challenge. Well, I should put it so
if we go back to my I remember my grandfather, you know,
20. No, probably more. Yeah. 20, 30 years ago, he
(10:25):
was part of a committee that were trying to bring
young people back to Islay, trying to
bring more visitors to the island, trying to diversify the offering from,
you know, basically, you know, an island tourist location
that had limited appeal. Since then,
the distilleries and whiskey tourism has
(10:47):
taken off, you know, so with that has come a lot more visitors, it's
come a lot, a lot more, you
know, money, it's been a good thing. It's been a good thing for the island, you know. And
then with the expansion of the distilleries as well, that's, that's created
more jobs and everything. So it but about probably five
or 10 years ago, it well less than about five years ago, it
(11:09):
really kind of reached breaking point a bit. There
are no houses, you can't really employ people
unless they live on Islay and that creates a
bubble where there's very, very
high competition for jobs, which isn't great as
(11:29):
an employer. And then as a resident of
Islay, there's extra pressure put
on the ferry service and the flights in that you can't get
bookings when you want to. The Scottish government
didn't help because they basically didn't renew a ferry for renew
the Islay ferries for about 10 or
(11:51):
20 years after when they should have. So the ferries break down a
lot. You know, so as a
as a family that run a
distillery on the island, we feel those pressures, both
in terms of employing people, keeping
people, getting whiskey off
(12:13):
the island, getting barrels and malt onto the island. And so
it's it's
improving, but not fast. And
then as a as people as residents of the island, island
that have nothing to do with the distilleries, necessarily, you
know, maybe you're a retired couple who live on the island,
(12:35):
or, or what have you, you know, you see another
distillery being built every year. And you go, really, is that really do
we really need that? Do we does the is the island going
to benefit from that? You know, so that it is, it
is still overwhelmingly positive. You know, people's
view of the whiskey industry is still overwhelmingly positive on Islay.
(12:58):
But it comes with a bit of a caveat now. So I
don't know if I explained that very well. But I've tried to give a
No, it's very useful. We recently spoke to Isle
of Harris distillers on the Outer Hebrides, similar
problems. in any of these more remote locations,
(13:20):
there's a similar problems of how do you get people there? How do you get people to stay there? Is
there enough housing for them? Are there enough jobs? Or
conversely, is there such competition for jobs because you can't get
people? These things tend to echo from place to
place. So I like to highlight those
echoes as themes, if you will, that go
(13:41):
Yeah. And to put it into context, it's a two-hour theory. to
Islay. So it's a two hour ferry to Islay. And
then it's a about a two, two and a half hour drive
to Glasgow, which is the next major city, you know, so it's
essentially a day trip to get to Islay
(14:02):
Right. And that's assuming, as you said, the ferry hasn't broken down or some
We had a terrible ferry captain recently, and
he almost got his, you know, he was chased out of town because
he refused to go in like, he refused to take the ferry
out of port, even if there was like even a what we would call
(14:22):
like a very mild breeze, which is like 20 miles per hour, and he
But anyway, gotta be harder than that. Gotta be stronger
than that. Alright, so focusing
in on on Kilohoman. So
you and I, quote unquote, met, or I
(14:44):
first got to hear you speak, at an August 2024 Drammers
event. This was a virtual event. It was
really great, because it was post-Faygiel. And Charlie,
as he is known to do, brought in some really crazy
bottles. I think you brought in,
you may have brought in a couple as well. so
(15:06):
many that I'm not going to go through all of them on the podcast today, just because that
would take up the entire time, but I'm going to reference a couple of
them. The first thing I want to talk about is
the barley. Being a farm distillery, having that as
your core ethos, if you will. You
talked about at the event that over the years you've grown Optic,
(15:27):
Publican, Concerto, Laureate, Diablo, Planet, Sassy,
probably others as well. In looking
at the varieties mentioned over the interviews in
the past and what you said at the event, you said Concerto
seems to be a tried and true favorite that works well in Islay.
It stands up to the winds. It's not too
(15:49):
big a head that it falls over. It seems to work. Laureate
can kind of go either way. It's sometimes better for spring, but
is kind of going either way. Have
there been varieties that you've tried that are
Not so far, but I'm sure there will be one coming. I
(16:12):
mean, there are, it's more Because you need a
whole number of things to kind of come together to get have a good crop, you know,
so you have to have a good sowing season, a
good ripening period. And then you know, the crucial period
is harvesting, you know, you have to get in and harvest it before maybe
the deer eat it all or the wind blows it flat, or, you
(16:32):
know, or you get a really wet period. So, you know,
taking that aside, you know, the barley varieties in
terms of like their success or failure in the fields have all
been, you know, okay. Some years are
better in terms of yield and other things than
others. We typically get about two tonnes an acre is
(16:56):
kind of success for us in terms of yield. And,
you know, we're not growing that heritage grains, whereas
they're very, very challenging to grow, you know, we're kind of pragmatists in that
regard, we don't, we don't go too far, too far into it,
you know, we want to make a reasonable amount of whiskey from the barley from the efforts that we make. But
in terms of the barley varieties, and how we look at it, from
(17:18):
my perspective, there's been no failures. There's been variable styles
that you get as a result at the spirit stage, you
know, before it goes into the barrel. And Laureate would be quite
a heavy style, very malty kind of style, whereas Concerto
was one of the ones that stood
(17:38):
out in my mind as being particularly kind
of fruity and floral, which is that
fruity floral element, kind of what makes Gilhom indifferent
in my eyes, you know, the marriage of the smoke and the floral sweetness.
So I guess like
(17:59):
sort of experimental cast types in a way, there's no real big successes
or failures. There's just personal preferences in a way. So
Do you often retry or rotate varietals on a set schedule or
(18:21):
I mean, there's one grain trader on Islay, so you have
to kind of work with him in terms of what he's willing
to bring to Islay or you have to go and get it yourself. And as
I said, we're a distillery which focuses on the detail of things.
We're not mad about like, marketing fad exercises,
(18:42):
you know, so we haven't experimented all
that much with barley varieties, you know, we've stuck within
like two row, spring barley, you know,
and generally speaking, the sort of more commercial end of
those barley varieties. So Yeah,
yeah, no, we we play around but it's not, it's
(19:05):
always with the goal of making consistent good quality whiskey at
the end of it. You know, we're not looking for anything dramatically different year on year.
Sure, sure. So, you know, one of the, as I said, one
of the synonymous things with Islay, rightly or wrongly, is
peat. Kilhom, from
the beginning, you've made a peated offering. And
(19:29):
We'll, we'll go a little bit into this, but for the,
there is a division between the Islay only Killhomad offerings
and the kind of broader core range.
So, for the Islay only,
like grown on Islay, fully on Islay range, you're
(19:50):
cutting peat from Loch Gorm, which is just three miles from the distillery.
So there's definitely a sense
of place that's even more microscopic than
Islay as a whole. something
that is a frequent topic whenever Pete is mentioned, particularly in Scotland, is
(20:11):
how much are you able to take? How much do
you have to bring in, whether it's conservation or
environmentalism? So
let's just start that, with Locke Worm, what does that Pete
Well, Locke Worm is is very close to the
(20:32):
ocean, you know, the Atlantic coast of Islay, you know, so it's
much more exposed to that salty spray,
essentially, because it is spray from the ocean that sweeps across
the ground. So it's more exposed to that than other areas of
Islay for sure. Yeah. No,
(20:54):
I mean, most of the peat on Islay, so
Lofroeg and Lagavulin and
others who cut peat on Islay. I
think Beaumont will use Islay cut peat as well with some of their stuff. But
most of that is cut from around the
airport, right in the centre of the island. It
(21:17):
sounds like I'm just describing the sort
of You know that the dump and
the sewage works in the airport is so beautiful. But there's a big, big
flat peat moss in the centre of the of the island, which
is kind of up from Lagan Bay, up
towards the hills from the big Lagan Bay in the centre of the island there.
(21:39):
And that's where most of the peat is cut. Yeah, and that's a quite
a different It's a different level of exposure to
the ocean. I mean, how that translates is
into the whiskey is up for debate because it's still, you
know, we're talking about nuance on nuance, you know. So
we're talking about different places on Islay to take Pete from
(22:04):
So you have the difference between the peat
taken from La Corme and peat that has, well,
I should really say malted barley that's been peated, gotten
from Port Ellen. So
the bought barley gets a 50 ppm measurement and
the grown barley is 20 ppm. Previously
(22:29):
on another interview, you said 20 PPM is pretty much a cap based on your in-house
on-site capabilities of how much you can get the peat in
there. I'm curious, was
going so much higher on the bought barley a choice
to go that much higher or was kind of what's available to buy
(22:51):
Yeah. So when we started, we were... we
were, I mean, we're a smallish distillery now that so we were producing about
50 to 100,000 litres of alcohol in the first couple
of years. You know, we now produce about 600,000 litres. So,
but even now, we're like, we're still between us
and Ardnahoe, we would be the smallest distilleries on the island. So even
(23:15):
though we're now a significantly bigger distillery, we're still pretty small.
And when we first started, we were, you know, we
were smaller again, you know, so we couldn't go
to the Port Ellen Maltings on Islay, which supply the
Diageo distilleries, as well as Ardbeg
(23:35):
and Kalina. Anyway,
so they supply a number of Islay distilleries, not all of them, but a
number of them. We couldn't, we had to choose someone else's
specification of barley, essentially, they wouldn't peat a
malted barley to our specific level of
of peating level whether we it might be 65 or
(23:59):
or 42 or whatever it might have been we had to choose essentially
someone else's specification so we chose uh
50 ppm which is Ardbeg's specification I
think they say it's 55 but um Yeah,
it's essentially that it's the same. It was the same,
you know, two tons went to Kilholman, 25 tons
(24:20):
went to Ardeg, you know, and it was it
was essentially the same. But people talk very precisely about
peating levels with malted barley, but
also in the Finnish whiskey, you know. So if you talk to the maltings, the
manager at the maltings on Islay, and you
look at the contract we have with them, they supply that our
(24:43):
contract with them would specify anything from like 35 to
60 ppm and the average being 50 essentially.
So you know as with all things in scotch whiskey we can get
slightly carried away with like things being absolutely
No, no, that's fine.
(25:06):
And like we said before, you know, that that's the green
PPM, that's not what's coming out in the final whiskey, that can be
as little as 10% of the PPM at
the final product. So I
know you said the other distillers are getting some
of their peat from Islay. There is kind of
(25:28):
a not so secret secret in the industry that as consolidation happened
and as malt houses closed, even on Islay,
there's plenty of peated barley that's used using
peat, not from Islay, but more so from mostly Aberdeenshire,
Aberdeenshire, excuse me, on the mainland. Even
if the end product, shall we say, like a bottle of Ardbeg,
(25:52):
Laphroaig, what have you, is identifiably Islay style.
That's to say, what are the major flavor
differences that you find in the profiles between the in-house
(26:16):
So the barley we grow and
goes into the 100% Islay range, so the ones
with the either clear or speckly white
labels. That barley is
grown and then malted using Islay peat to 20 ppm.
(26:37):
And then essentially, as you say, we produce a
separate style, which is made from malted
barley, which is grown on the mainland, and then pitted on Islay, using
Islay peat, but pitted to a higher level. So the differences between
the barley is where it's grown and the level of peat
that has been imparted into it, you know, so but
(27:01):
you get things in each
one that are unique to it. So the
100% Islay is very oily. It's more volatile to distill. So
it tends to have a higher husk to flour ratio. The
barley grains are flatter. So you get less, the ratio
(27:23):
between the flour and the husk is much higher,
I guess. And then, no,
sorry, it's much lower. There's more husk with
the barley that we grow on either. And then the barley that comes
in from the mainland is in more more
suitable, essentially barley growing areas of
(27:45):
Scotland, you know, so it's bigger grains, you
get more flour, and you get less
husk. So you have a chemically biologically
different grain of barley, and then you have the different peating levels. The
obvious difference is the smoke, there's the barley that we you know,
Macca Bay is more smoky than 100% Islay, Macca
(28:06):
Bay being the made from the 50 ppm malted barley we
buy. But also, as I said, the barley we
grow has this lovely oily, viscous texture
to it. It's more fragrant. And it
takes a little longer to mature. It takes a
little, you know, to come good in the cast. That might be partly just
(28:29):
to do with the fact that there is lower peat smoke, so it doesn't have the same structure
and sort of backbone at a young age. And
then the barley we buy in, heavier
peating level, but it's somehow slightly creamier, especially
with bourbon barrel maturation, it has this sort of creamy, malty
(28:51):
element to it as well. But not so thick, not
so viscous, not so oily. but obviously more
smoky and more
flexible in a way. We can take that
heavily peated malt and we can bottle it at three years old and
we can put it in a wine cask and mature it for 10 years
(29:13):
and it has more structure, it has more Backbone
is a good way. It can stand up to more flavor because it
has more peat, whereas a slightly more delicate 20 ppm,
So we'll, I have a couple of questions on maturation a
little bit later as well. I know you have a particular proclivity for bourbon
(29:35):
barrel maturation. We'll get into that. Don't
look scared. That's, it'll make sense. But so
before we leave the peat question, so one
of the, well, the first bottle we tried at that Dramers event
was an unpeated variety. It was a phase yield 2024 open
(29:55):
day bottling. It
was absolutely delicious. And I'll
have my taste notes for that in the show notes. Something
that was a little different about it for me was, I
had the same feeling drinking it that I get sometimes drinking Bruch
Latte's classic latte, which
(30:17):
is, it's an unpeated whiskey, But there's,
I still got Pete there, like, like there were hints
of it or like ghosts of it in the background. You know, it was from
nose to finish to like all nose palette finish. The
finish was particularly briny and smoky, long, long
finish, kind of sooty Pete on the back end. I
(30:40):
know I've asked Is
there something to this idea that you can have it unpeated from
a peat-making distillery and still have a little peat in there? Do
No, I think you're certainly not the only person to say that. And, you
(31:02):
know, there have been we've done some like Jack Rose, you
know, bottlings for, you know, the famous whiskey bar
down in Washington, D.C. We've done some single
cast for them in the past, which have technically been unpeated. But I
mean, I would say that that smoky element is
coming from the equipment residue within the equipment, essentially,
(31:24):
you know, use the same frying pan to make bacon
and then you know, cook some aubergines, there's
gonna be some bacon flavor in the aubergines, you know, so I
think it's as simple as that. And then also, you know, there is the four
shots and the feints, the spirit receiver, whether they clear that out, whether they
don't, you know, whether we did or whether we didn't, because that's
(31:45):
obviously, you don't
have a clean break when you switch from
I've always been a believer there's, you can't really get peat out.
Like you can, you'd have to chemically scrub a lot
So, no, that also they could be using some some refill
(32:06):
casks as well. Yeah, we could have used some refill casks that might not have
all been fresh, you know, so that there's lots
Sure, sure. Originally, the
founder, Anthony Wills, he said in multiple occasions that
he originally wasn't looking to do an unpeded version. But
(32:27):
there's an apocryphal story about one coming about
Yeah, yeah. It's become a bit sort
of run away with itself a bit this story. Yeah, I mean, essentially,
that did happen. We, back in
the early days, we had like two Stillman, that was my mom, my
(32:50):
dad, And there were some seasonal staff in the business center. And
then there were like me and my brothers, which kind of we
kind of came in and out on the breeze. And we
were, you know, either off the island chasing girls or we were there working
at the distillery basically. And one
of the jobs back in those days was we actually had a
(33:13):
we would peat the malt. So we would put it in
the kiln and burn peat for 10 to 12, oh,
sorry, 12 to 14 hours for the barley we're growing
ourselves. And that gives the 20 ppm peating level. But
after we'd burned the peat, we would burn coal to dry it,
which was a terrible idea. It didn't really work, to be totally honest,
(33:35):
and it was awful to do it, because you have to go on the kiln floor and turn
it. as it's, you know, so imagine a sort of five
by five metre room, completely dark. About
two tons, I think it was at the time, two, two and a half tons of barley, about
one foot deep. It'd be about 50 degrees Celsius. I
(34:00):
And we
would have to turn the bed of barley, get down
to the bottom and then turn it over. It would take about an hour. It was an awful job.
And one day we wanted to watch a rugby match rather than come
back halfway through the day and
(34:21):
turn it halfway through this rugby match. So
we built a slightly bigger coal fire than we should have
and we got a call from the
Islay fire brigade who told us that the kiln was on fire and we
should go back there. It was a particularly bad day
for my dad because he's an Englishman. My
(34:42):
mum's from Islay, she has a family from Islay, she's a
Scots lady. And so
when England plays Scotland, it's quite a big deal. And at that point,
Scotland hadn't beaten England for about 10 years. But this
particular day his, my dad's, you know, his distillery burnt
down and England lost to Scotland for the first time. And I
(35:04):
honestly I think it was 10 years. Yeah. So particularly bad day
for him. But
it gave rise to the unpeated stuff, because
we couldn't peat our own barley, so we
actually dried it using a
commercial grain
(35:27):
dryer, so what they use to dry grain when you
harvest the barley. So we malted it and then just
from the peat move on to production. So
you've said you've increased production over the years, started with 50 and
(35:48):
80 LPA, 15, 80,000 LPA, excuse me, now
up to a little over 600,000 LPA. But
you've made it clear in other interviews, like it's never at the expense of fermentation time.
You've added more washbacks as needed to allow
for fermentation time to continue being what you want it to be,
which is, exceptionally
(36:11):
long fermentation for scotch whiskey, and
even for Islay whiskey. In
2017, I think it was on One Nation Under Whiskey, your first visit there,
said the minimum was between 100 and 120 hours for fermentation. On
the website, you're listing at about 90. I know that's not a huge difference. I
know it's a nerdy question, but where are you at
(36:35):
It's still 90. It's 90. 90 is
probably what we've been at since. I
don't know, probably at least eight or 10 years now.
So initially, probably where that's
come from is we would have, when
(36:56):
we weren't producing 24-7, so when you're not on
a continuous cycle, and say you stop for night
shifts or weekends, you then have certain batches that
have a longer fermentation. So probably
what I was quoting there was up to 120 or
(37:17):
something like that, which was the fermentation
that we had if it was on a if it went over the weekend or
however it worked out, I guess it was maybe a Monday
shift or late shift and then it went over the weekend and was still
on the Monday or something. So yeah, that would
have been maybe, but we've always tried to, yeah, we've expanded a number
(37:40):
of times, I guess, but we've always tried to maintain
exactly what we're doing and not compromise on
And so with with 90 hours, you're getting almost four days, four,
four days, you're getting the normal esters, but you're also
getting that secondary level after a lot of the yeast has died,
cooled off of the fruitier esters. And as you said, that's
(38:04):
the light fruity style that you want the new make to be.
Yeah. Yeah, very, very little has changed since
Jim Swan said, do it this way. And my dad said, yeah,
No reason to change what's broken. It's worth
(38:29):
asking, because you have your own malt floor, how
many other distilleries in Scotland, let alone on Islay, still
I think it's eight. I
don't know exactly because new distilleries keep on popping
up and doing experimental batches and
(38:50):
other things. But I think, you know, I
think it's eight, you know, and I could try and name them if you like. Springbank.
Springbank, Belvini. I mean, well,
let me start on Islay. So Beaumont, Laphroaig, Kilchoman
(39:12):
on Islay. Anyway,
there's three on Islay, I think. And then there's Balvini
and Springbank, but that's only at five. I think there's three
or four others, but I can't remember who they are. But yeah, it's very, very small
number. And that's just a product of most of all of these older
distilleries have old malt floors. But, you
(39:35):
know, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, they would
have just outsourced it to a commercial malting facility.
for sure. And again, for reference, we talked a little bit
about that with Mike Bellet back episode 174 with
Pete and Whiskey about that consolidation. This is
(39:57):
a super nerdy question about your fermentation. So
I read that you wanted to keep the fermentation at
a relatively colder temperature since warmer
temperature barley is going to produce less alpha-amylase enzymes,
Oh, bloody hell. Here we
(40:18):
go. You heard that about us, did you? Yes. From
who did you hear that from? Give me a sec, I will find that. None
of, neither me or my brothers have a sort of
chemistry or biology degree or even
That's that one's that one's from Kuhoman's own
(40:48):
Yeah. No, no. I mean, it's true. It's just not
something that I've spoken about or or
I've heard my brothers or my father speak about. So I thought it
might have been someone Yeah,
No, no, that was basically the question. It's just something fascinating to point out. I hadn't come
(41:09):
across that before. There may be others doing it, just no one has outright
Yeah. I mean, there's so much to talk about in
terms of mashing, you
know, everything that brewers do, you know, a lot
of people put emphasis on distilling and the distillation process,
but there's so much that goes on around it, you know. So
(41:31):
the mashing and fermentation is very, very important. And we
do specific things and are aiming for a specific product
as a consequence of what we do. So yeah, the clear warts and
the cooler temperatures initially, obviously that builds up as
the activity increases within the
(41:53):
washbacks. But the end goal for us is,
with everything we do, having
is balancing the smoky character with clean, fresh, fruity
character as well. And so our 90 hour fermentation
isn't actually, it's long, and it's
(42:14):
roughly double most other Islay distilleries, but a
lot of mainland distilleries, particularly the new distilleries, they really focus on long
fermentation and getting a very, you know, fruity
spirit as a result. But for us, we want that We
want that heavier, earthier element in
the whiskey, but we don't want it to go
(42:36):
too far. So that one way of kind of tempering
down that influence from the pea is
No, no, no, there's no temperature control. So, you
know, distilling in the summer and or brewing in the summer and
(42:58):
brewing in the winter is, is different. It behaves differently. You
know, where you have warmer water, you will. Well,
sorry, actually, no, no, no, because obviously, it's temperature control at the at
the initial stage. Later on, I think it'll be a lesser, less of an impact on
fermentation. But water temperatures are an impact
more on on distillation and cooling
(43:21):
of distillation, it can be a that's, that's where things are
Gotcha. Gotcha. So, you know, in a weird departure
for this podcast, we're going to almost
skip over the distillation point a little bit. I'm
not entirely sure to be honest, why I am
(43:42):
doing so in the outline, but That's
just kind of how it happened. But I
really want to focus a lot on the maturation and the products you've got.
So yeah, we'll move over to that. So at
the Drammers event, this is where I'm getting this
(44:03):
from. You said that you like bourbon barrel maturation because while
you use Sherry, Sherry
can add, but it can also take away. I
don't know who asked this question, but it was specifically Sherry you mentioned as something that can
add but take away. I'm curious to hear what you may
have meant by that, and if that applies to other caste types
(44:28):
Yeah, so what I mean by that is like, So you have
the natural character of the distillery. So for
Kilchoman, it's the smoke, it's the saltiness, it's the sweetness,
the citrus, the tropical fruit. That is the
Kilchoman DNA of our spirit. when you
(44:49):
put that in a bourbon barrel, the characteristics and
the evolution in that bourbon barrel develop those characters
and add more to them in my eyes. Whereas
with the sherry cast maturation, they're adding, but
they're also kind of smothering some of that lighter
(45:10):
character flavors. So they do, you know, those flavors
like the citrus and the fragrant side
to the whiskeys, you can say that they're smothered, or
some people would say that they're just like evolve and transform into other flavors.
characters within that sherry cast. But so I
would say that personally, you know, those sherry casts are great. They
(45:32):
add a huge amount of flavour and very distinct, rich,
fruity flavour. But in some ways, because
they're so they're more of a dominating factor,
dominating influence on the whisky, you lose some of
that Kilhomian character. And I'm
very nostalgic about my whisky. I mean, I
(45:55):
pretty much, pretty much entirely drink Kilhomen. I
think that's, I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I
just enjoy drinking Kilhomen more than I do other
people's whiskey. Not that I don't enjoy their whiskey. I just enjoy drinking
our whiskey more because it, you know, I take more
from it. And whenever I drink Kilhomen,
(46:22):
Look, I can't argue with the results. The 2023 Maquia
Bay Cast Strength was one of my favorite pours of that year. Oddly enough,
I am without a Keelholman bottle at the moment, which
is weird. The closest thing I have, oddly enough, is a Bruklati Rockside
Farm bottle. But
(46:44):
no, I really have enjoyed, I mean, we tried 10 pours
through that event with Drammers and there wasn't a
clunker among them. They were all really,
none of them were even kind of meh. They were all really solid, some of them
extraordinary. So I can see
what you mean about, and one of the ones that we got to taste was one
(47:05):
that was kind of as close to new make as you can get with still being a
finished product. And it was beautifully
floral and fruity, the exact profile that you've kind
of talked about of wanting Kilchoman to be. So I understand that
want to not lose that profile. So
(47:26):
there was, this actually, this is another really nerdy question, but
your second visit to One Nation Under Whiskey in 2019, at
this point, you're getting close to having more 10 plus
year old stock. And you mentioned an
evolution that really piqued my interest. So
you've got this new make that's light, fresh, floral, fruity,
(47:50):
tropical fruit, and then about four
to five years in the whiskey becomes
it's big and bold and powerful, but you said it loses some
of the citrus and floral side. And then
around 10 to 12 years, the
lightness comes back. The fruitiness, the
(48:13):
floral notes. Do you have any kind
of guesses or explanation as to why that that
wave happens of having that flavor, then it
getting subsumed and then reappearing later
(48:33):
you know, the chemistry, the science of it. No, I don't. I
don't. I don't try and understand that to a certain extent. I just
enjoy the results of it. And try and learn in
what scenarios it happens in what scenarios it doesn't. But essentially, like
to me, and others would disagree, you know, whenever
I talk about our whiskey, I have I hear my dad on my shoulder saying
(48:55):
that's bollocks, you talking shite. But
essentially, for me, you know, the the Pete, if you take on taste
on you make, you know, on before it goes into the barrels, as
you said, as you described, very light and floral. in
the cask, the peat then comes through and peaks
at that 3-5 year period, so you've got maximum smoke
(49:17):
at that period. Maybe
it's a question of how the peat presents, maybe
more so than how the citrus presents. As
you go from that 5-10 year period, the peak is
then on that continuous downward curve
in terms of how dominant it is in the whiskey. So it's
(49:40):
probably just a virtue of the fact that, a result of the fact that
the peak has come up and then it's kind of going down a bit. So
at that four, five, six years old, you've got a lot of peat smoke
It makes sense. It was just, again, it was curiosity that I'd
heard before. So I Again, just had
(50:01):
to ask about it. In
sticking with maturation, in 2023, you guys had a major
shift. You'd always gotten barrels from Buffalo Trace, any
barrels from, they were bourbon barrels, but that could be anywhere from 10 to
51%, well, no, not 51%, 10 to 49% rye in the barrels. And they were sent over whole as opposed to
(50:22):
being broken down. Shipped
and then reassembled over there. So, you know, more expensive process, but
can't really argue with the results. But
(50:42):
in 2023, as you've said, Buffalo Trace
wanted to keep more of the bourbon barrels for themselves,
basically, to use. And so you
had to switch to a different source, and that ended up being Breckenridge Distillery. And
they've got a, rather than having a variety of mashables, you got a standard 56-38-6
(51:03):
bourbon recipe, corn, rye, malted
barley. With that, it's
only been a couple of years. First question I had was, does Breckinridge also send
Well, the Breckenridge thing lasted all of about eight
months, 10 months. I
(51:25):
mean, so essentially, yeah, the supply of bourbon barrels
became under massive strain in 2023. Because that
was the peak of, you know, COVID craziness in
terms of like, you know, demand for, for
premium spirits. So everyone in Scotland was
producing at maximum capacity. So bourbon
(51:46):
barrels just became very, very expensive. And that
was a large reason for Sazerac, the
owners of Buffalo Trace, deciding to keep them within their
group. So, yeah, we switched to Breckenridge.
And then since then, we've had to kind of get
direct supply where we can. and buy
(52:08):
through brokers where we can, but yeah, always, always try and get the
freshest cast we can. Always ship whole. And,
you know, hope that we're getting the best of what's available, really.
But that's the trouble if you're a smaller player, you know, things like
this can come around and bite you, you know, and
(52:33):
So, so let me alter my follow up questions that
a little bit being the You
know, having a relatively stable stock
of barrels coming in over the years from
Sazerac, from Muffler Trace, even though there was variation within that,
you had a certain profile that was created by those barrels.
(52:58):
Going to Breckenridge for about eight months or so, and then, as
you said, now, kind of whatever can come in, how
have you been managing the,
how do I want to ask this? whenever
you change a variable like that, there's gonna be some change of flavor, of profile,
(53:21):
and you can only control it to a certain extent. So
knowing what you know now of, okay, we're gonna have to pig
out wherever we can, try to get the best, et cetera, how
are you and the team managing or planning to manage to
keep the profile still identifiably Kilchoman with
(53:45):
I think not regardless
of what you do in terms of bourbon barrels, but to a point, Kilchoman
in a bourbon barrel will kind of always develop
in a certain way. To
a large part, it's about how quickly and when
(54:06):
they're at their peak and how consistently they do that. The
big factor, the big decision, the big reason why
we bought from Buffalo Trace was the consistency. You
know, so they're good cars and we could ship them home. We
got them very fresh. So those were all good things, but the consistency was
really the key thing. So what we're trying
(54:28):
to do is get a consistent supply again. And
the thing with scotch whiskey is it's not like, you
know, it's so many different variables, you know, so say
if you, you know, it might be that we just bottle them a little bit
later, but a bit older, you know, and that would be the natural progression
(54:48):
of what we're planning to do anyway. And also, you
know, any bottling is a vatting of multiple ages. So
provided this isn't a situation or we can't get consistent
supply for you know, four or five years,
it's not too much of a problem. So ultimately,
(55:09):
it's kind of a case of just rolling with it
and working with the spirit, working with the barrels, adjusting, you
got to be ready to change things, you know, you can't have a fixed recipe
and just, you know, work,
but purely based on, on, you know, on that recipe, you
have to be, there has to be a degree of flexibility. So, you
(55:31):
know, that's what that's what we've done. But hopefully, we
can, and we have had pretty consistent supplies
of bourbon barrels recently. So it's
a much better situation now. You know, the
cost of bourbon barrels went from mean,
it tripled, quadrupled in an
(55:52):
18 month to two year period. And the whole supply chain
of those bourbon barrels changed and both on the
American side and also on the Scotland side. So
it was a complete, we would call it
Oh, yes. And this is
(56:16):
in my mind, my interpretation of this as well. In
one way, you did have an advantage in that even though you're getting very consistent barrels
from Buffalo Trace and high quality, you had that range of
different mash bills. So you could get a
bourbon barrel that had, let's say, a little bit more rye influence
or less rye influence. I don't know if you ended up getting any weeded
(56:37):
bourbon barrels from them, but that would also be another factor. So you're already working with
Yeah. We got mainly, most
of them were Mashville number two, which I believe is their wheated
So that would still be Rye, but that would
(56:57):
be the Blantons and Elmer T. Lee.
But yeah, so you've already got experience working with a little bit of a spectrum rather than just
a single mash build, kind of absolute thing.
So last thing on maturation. You're
now at what I think is you're pretty close to a max capacity,
(57:21):
a little over that 600,000 LPAs per
year. And you're building a new warehouse every two years to
keep up with these stocks. So I'm seeing, I think
there are about eight at the moment, if I've counted
right, using a mix of dunnage and rack, you
know, earth floors, the newer warehouses could do up to 10 high. Are
(57:47):
there significant differences between the warehouses that you've noticed
so far like, you know, people can go a little crazy sometimes about, for
example, old forest or single barrels. In
the U.S. for single barrel bourbon, people will hunt for different warehouses. Warehouse
I is my favorite or J and whatever. Or
(58:08):
Wild Turkey is famous for that as well, for single barrels. But
that doesn't tend to be the case as much as I've heard for Scotland, for
Scottish whiskey. Are you noticing huge differences in
I mean, we have good warehouses and we have bad warehouses. Well,
we don't have bad warehouses, but we have good warehouses
(58:30):
that hold a much more consistent temperature. So
it depends what you want. It depends what you're looking for.
Someone's good warehouse is another person's bad warehouse. Someone's
cold warehouse is too cold and someone's warm warehouse is too warm. We
have a very cool couple of warehouses down at Connersby, which
(58:52):
is away from the Decidery. And part of
the fact that they're a couple of miles away and
the fact that they're very cool warehouses, a lot
of our older stocks go down there. We
have a pretty poor warehouse, which was
made using like concrete form panels rather than
(59:13):
block work with an air gap. And luckily, that was only a very
small one. And actually, we're going to change that into something else. And
the racked warehouses that we have, those are pretty new. So it's
kind of too early to say really. But
it's just the temperature variance isn't very big with the racks and the and
(59:34):
the dunnage in terms of the, you know, the
sort of mid temperature. But
the it's much drier atmosphere, because it's concrete floors.
whereas the Dunnage warehouses are very, very damp
and humid. So
it's a bit too early to say, really. I think probably
(59:57):
there's more emphasis put on warehouses in the US because
there are less factors in a way. When we're
putting together a Scotch whisky, we might use multiple
different cast types, fresh refill bourbon barrels, but then also
maybe some wine casts or some sherry casts or some, you know, rum
casts or pork casts, you know, so there's a bit more variance
(01:00:19):
there. And we play up the age variances of the Scotch whisky
tend to be bigger as well. So there's not the same like
direct line as might be the case with, you
know, well, Turkey or whatever where it's
new oak barrels, it's, you know, typically a
bottle of it younger. So, you know, so maybe just
(01:00:39):
in Scotch whisky, you're not able to draw that definitive
line in the same way. And maybe that's why it's not so, so much.
I think we don't quote it, maybe we don't put as much emphasis on
it as producers either. And also, I think There's
probably fewer single casts in the US of Scotch whisky
than there is of American whisky,
(01:01:05):
For sure. And that's actually a great segue into the
next question I have, which is more on the product side. So again,
there are several products from Kilchoman that are in-house products.
I have not had one that I have not enjoyed yet. So I highly recommend
them. There will be tasting notes in the show notes for as
(01:01:25):
many of them as I can put up before the episode goes live.
But talking about single barrels and
such works well for independent bottlers as
well. The
first time you went on One Nation Under Whiskey back in 2017, you
(01:01:45):
were talking about how at that point, at least, and keep in mind this is eight years
ago now, but Kilohoman was, you
know, you're maybe going to sell to IBs in the future. You had just
done one with, I believe, either ImpEx or Single
Cast Nation with Joshua basically at the time. A
few years later though, you're not giving it away by
(01:02:07):
any means, but you do sell some to independent bottlers. And
in 2021, your dad said he was, quote, really
excited about independent bottlers, talking
to Inside Whiskey. I'm curious what changed
in terms of that maybe becoming really
(01:02:31):
I've never heard him say that he was excited about it. Maybe he'd had a couple of
our openness to selling to independent bottlers basically
(01:02:51):
comes down to how much we want to make ourselves and keep ourselves
and whether there is any space between what we want and
our maximum capacity. So until 2020 or 2021 really, there
was no potential gap between
what we wanted and what we could make. We
(01:03:14):
were making the maximum we could, and we wanted it all. So
it wasn't really a question, to be honest. So when we expanded in
2019, 2020, we went up to 620, 630 as our maximum capacity. But know
(01:03:35):
that's a huge amount of whiskey so we probably don't need to always produce at
that level and so you know when in the years that we
don't we have a you know, five, 10% of
our capacity that we could, you
know, sell to independent bottlers. I think so
we have done that. And we're not going to tell people who
(01:03:56):
we've sold spirit to, I'm sure they'll be sort of telling people
in good time, even though we told them not. But you
know, so we have sold some spirit to independent bottlers as
as unnamed Islay, you know, because there's
no real downside to us, you know, if we're gonna, 640,000 litres
(01:04:17):
next redundant,
you know, so we don't want to do that. And the
only way to do that and do it in a sensible way is
potentially to sell to independent bottlers. So
(01:04:40):
yeah, we have done that. But you won't see Kilholman as
Sure, sure. That's a
factor for most islet distilleries, that independent bottle. Kalila is
pretty much, they'll put their name on any of them, but others,
Lafroigue is not known particularly for putting their name on any independent bottle.
(01:05:02):
So, no, but what is nice
about that is if you can at least say it's an islet distillery and
perhaps they'll put an age statement on there. Cause a lot of the independent bottlers do like to put an
age statement on there. Even if, if you guys don't for
your core ranges, um, I
enjoyed that game of trying to figure out where
(01:05:25):
it's from based on profile. And for me, at least I, I enjoy
the fact that Kilchoman is so unique in
the Islay spectrum. Let's say they're, you know, they're the 10 including
Ardenhoe that are even available with independent
bottlers. If
(01:05:45):
you know where to look, you can figure out maybe he was working with them, with Kilchoman, and
try to find some bottles that are from you guys. But
that's an exciting game for the consumer to do, rather than for the producer
Yeah. Independent bottlers do a great, great job. And my dad's
background was as an independent bottler. So he, he
(01:06:08):
sees what they do and values it, you know, and he sees that
they they can do things just as well as producers, you know, in terms
of maturation and stuff. It's just a question of us
wanting to maintain control over, over the Kilchoman name,
you know, and, and, and where
it's bottled, how it's bottled, what price it sits on the shelf at and everything
(01:06:29):
else. We want to keep that within our remit.
So this is going back a bit too, but it'll serve kind of the same
idea. It's a question of audience. On
both Kill Who Mania in 2014 and Whiskey Corner in
2015, so 10 years ago, granted, your dad said that at
(01:06:50):
that moment, the peat was popular in Europe and
North America, but Asia had yet to be won
over. Now, 10 years later, we've
had, you've had enormous expansion, product
launches, you've had COVID, all sorts of
things happening. But just in summation, have
(01:07:20):
I mean, it's interesting. So in probably
in like 2015, we were probably doing like, we were probably sending like less
than 500 cases to China. By
2022, that had become five or
10,000 cases, probably closer to 10,000 cases. Now
(01:07:41):
it's back at 500 cases. So
take from that what you will. I mean, we either cracked it and then they decided they
didn't like it. or something else was
at play, you know, but essentially, it's not it's
still not an established reliable single malt market, you
know, for Peter whiskey. The Germans are
(01:08:05):
crazy, like Germany is our biggest market. And
it keeps growing. And we're very, very strong in Germany.
And then, you know, Europe in general is a very mature
market for for isla single malt in general, you know, they.
So that's still the basis of of what we look
(01:08:26):
at as as reliable, you know, and the US,
I don't know, instead of Yeah, if you stop
buggering about with all the all the rulebook, you
know, maybe we'll look at it as a bit more reliable than ever at the moment, kind
That's completely fair. It's been described as 50 different markets, if not
(01:08:48):
more than that, because just in New York alone, you've got the metro market, upstate
market. Even
for domestic producers, it's a nightmare. For international producers, it's
even more of a nightmare. So I hear you on that front for sure. I'm
glad that we can get Killhuman releases here, I think
(01:09:10):
relatively easily. If you're in a market where you're
in that, you can find it. I know in New York, we've got plenty of stock,
which is great. But no, I understand
the, certainly understand. I've heard the German market is strong.
French market, I would imagine is pretty strong as well. They
love Scotch whiskey in general there. The German market, this is
(01:09:31):
just a quick aside because in just the last 10 or so
minutes, The German market is known for enjoying kind
of the extremes. Like they love the really peated stuff. They love the super
estuary rums from Jamaica. Um, I
was just curious to throw this to you and maybe I'll cut this out. Maybe we'll leave
it as a peated Scotch producer, peated
(01:09:54):
Scotch whiskey producer. Um, is there an attraction to the German market
or something, some insight you have as to why the Germans seem to love it
Quite often, the popularity of smaller brands is driven by
the established route to market. Do you
know what I mean? So in the UK, it's the
(01:10:14):
the route to market is dominated by supermarkets, um,
essentially, you know, so if you're, if you don't have a supermarket listing, you
know, in the UK, you know, if you compare that
to Germany, Germany has a very long established route
to market of independent shops and what
they put on the shelves is much more curated. So,
(01:10:37):
um, a brand like us who,
who, you know, um, is more
able to kind of get the products on the shelves and establish a
bigger distribution in
a market like Germany compared to the UK. So that's part of
it. But yeah, they like the extremes and they like, you
(01:10:58):
know, but we kind of roll with it. We
try and find distributors that understand what we're trying to do and
buy into that and we're
aligned with personally as much as anything. We
see these relationships as very long term relationships.
(01:11:21):
In the US, we've worked with the guys at Impex Beverages
for 15 years now,
and hopefully another 15 years. We
don't chop and change. We try and build for the long
It's wonderful. And I really thank the guys at Impex. They're a former sponsor
of the podcast, and I've been introduced to many, a great brand, Kilimanjaro
(01:11:44):
Included, because of the guys who work there. Sam, Joshua's no
longer with them, but Joshua, when he was there, the whole team, Chris,
all of them. All right. So, you know, I just
got a couple more questions in the last couple of minutes I've got you for, and I want to try
to get to all of them. We'll see. You
know, we kind of talked about the visitor experience in
(01:12:05):
that towards the beginning. So maybe I'll skip that question. Just go to the
last two. So I like to end these podcasts talking about legacy
and So the first question I have
for you is, your dad has, again, said
multiple times as recently as last year in an
interview that he never intended for
(01:12:27):
his sons to get into the business. That was never the point of the business necessarily,
that you guys would be exposed to the industry just by proximity fairly
early, but it
wasn't a purposeful path laid for you. if
you will. Now that's the perspective of
(01:12:47):
the father, the founder, the
distillery on what the next generation might look
like. I'm curious to throw that to you from the perspective of
the next generation of the child whose father has founded
a distillery, who has been in the spirits industry for
a long time before that, and what
(01:13:09):
your perspective and experience has been like in being exposed to the industry
Um, so, I mean, whether
my dad did, he might say he never expected us
to, but he wanted us to,
(01:13:29):
you know, so, um, what he says is,
you know, I, and I think as soon as we did start, he, it
made it more enjoyable for him. He, he kind of had more of a drive and,
uh, an ambition for the company because we were part of it.
So. You can't believe everything he says. But
(01:13:53):
also, you know, we have other shareholders as well. It's not like I
only answer to my dad, you know, we have other shareholders as well. So,
you know, there's more commerciality to it
than might appear on the surface. But
I mean, from the early age, I had no idea what
(01:14:14):
the whiskey industry was or what was involved in terms
of making whiskey, selling whiskey. But as soon as the stills
arrived and the stuff
started happening and we started making spirit, I mean, I was absolutely captivated by
that. And then it's just a never ending
journey of sort of like understanding the
(01:14:36):
spirit and how it develops. And so, you know,
If you're engaged by it, if it's something that that piques your interest, there's
just a whole, as I'm sure you've discovered, you know, you
can just go on and on and on and on and on with it. There's
always there's always more to learn with with whisky. And also the
(01:14:59):
industry is full of nice people, you
know, nice people who who are in it for the, you
know, because it's a job and and and it
pays the bills, but also, they love it. They
love traveling around the world and meeting people who are passionate about
what they're passionate about. So, you know, a combination of all those
(01:15:21):
things has meant that I can't really see myself doing
anything else, really. So, add
to that, you know, I enjoy working for my dad, you
know, I do work for him, he's, I say that Kilchoman is
not a democracy, it's it's a dictatorship. And I think I
think that's important for to a certain extent, you know, he He
(01:15:41):
knows what he wants, but he gives us the freedom to go and
kind of put our own stamp on things. So I enjoy working with him and
I enjoy working with my brothers, you know, and my
mum. I shouldn't forget my mum. It's
Great answer. Love it. So my last question for
(01:16:04):
you, James, is what do you
I don't think we've been around long enough to think that
we've got a legacy necessarily. In
terms of, if I think of it in the perspective of the 20 years
(01:16:27):
that we, you know, we're 20 years
now and, and look back on, on that 20 year
period, you know, it started off very, very challenging. You
know, my dad's first seven
or eight years of it was, it was, it
was terrible. You know, he did not enjoy it. It was a huge
(01:16:49):
amount of financial pressures and everything. But then all the
passion that people have shown for what he's done and
in terms of the whisky that he makes. And I
think the sort of maybe the way we go about it,
I don't know, really, but just generally the whisky seems to really
captivate people and the story and what
(01:17:11):
we do. You know, that's
the enjoyment for him, that's the enjoyment for me, you know. the
fact that people come to Islay, you know, from the
US and they're there to taste our whiskey
and look at our distillery. It blows my
mind every time, you know, so that
(01:17:34):
feels that feels like something very special. And as I say, I don't think
you can really have a legacy on an island where there's distilleries that have been
around for 200 years. You know, I think it's
I think it's tricky to talk about Guildholm and having a legacy just
yet. My dad and my mum have done a fantastic job
and we've got 45 people on Islay, you know, so that's a legacy in
(01:17:59):
Yeah, with the competition for jobs that you talked about at
the beginning, that's that's no small feat. So yeah, wonderful.
Well, James, thank you so much for coming on to talk about you home and it's been an
interview I really be looking forward to. I look forward to all my interviews, but
you know, this was one a long time coming. And I'm glad we can make it happen.
(01:18:21):
Yeah. So once again, it's been James Wills from Kilchoman
Distillery on the Isle of Islay, west coast of
Islay. I really encourage you to try the products that
you can find. There will be links to the show notes as always to
where you can find them and my tasting notes as well. Like,
rate and subscribe wherever you can. Thank you for listening to the Whiskey Ring Podcast. I'll
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