Ardnamurchan AD/ Heritage Barley (Release 2025) (59,2% - 700ml)

Ardnamurchan opened on 25 July 2014 on a remote peninsula on the Scottish west coast, the most westerly of mainland Scotland: around fifty square miles served by a single-track road. It was wanted by Adelphi, a long-established independent bottler, which for the first time moved from bottling other people’s whisky to producing its own.

The distillery has built its reputation on two fronts. The first is sustainability: the stills are heated with steam from a biomass boiler fuelled by timber from the local forests, the nearby river drives a hydroelectric plant, a recovery system drastically reduces water take for cooling, and completing the picture are solar panels and bottles with over 50% recycled glass, often without cartons. The second is transparency: every bottle carries a code that allows the full production history of the batch to be traced, cask by cask.

The AD/ Heritage Barley is the most radical release in the range. The idea is to subtract rather than add: no peated component, no finishing, no wine casks. Only the spirit remains, and the barley from which it is made. That barley is Golden Promise, the historic variety that in the 1960s and 1970s was the standard across Scotland (it is Macallan’s house barley) and which later disappeared because yields were too low. Those who still grow it do so for a precise reason: it produces a thick, oily and markedly malty spirit, with a density that modern varieties struggle to replicate. On a whisky of a little over six years, bottled undiluted, that texture is exactly what is felt first.

The Ardnamurchan AD/ Heritage Barley Release 2025 is a single malt Scotch whisky, distilled from 100% Golden Promise barley and filled into cask from 2018 onwards, matured exclusively in American oak ex-bourbon barrels, before being bottled at its natural strength of 59.2% vol. without chill filtration and without the addition of colouring.