Twelve years in the middle of nowhere: Ardnamurchan Distillery sits on the farthest West Coast of Scotland, where everything has to be thought through with exacting detail.
Connal Mackenzie has been Sales Director at Ardnamurchan and Adelphi for eight years. He was in the warehouse the fortnight they didn’t see daylight, picking the casks that became the inaugural single malt. He came through Christchurch last week, back to the country his daughter holds a passport in, back to Whisky Galore where he used to work before he went home to Scotland. We sat down at the Howff to talk about adventures in whisky.
Ardnamurchan is four hours from Edinburgh. Four hours from Glasgow, four hours from Inverness. “Ardnamurchan is four hours from Ardnamurchan,” Connal says, because anyone who’s driven the single-track road out to the peninsula understands what exactly what the geography means and costs. But it also gives back in delightful ways. Lorries come and go on roads really better suited for sheep. Power, when it goes, doesn’t come back quickly.
What the geography gives back is the freedom to start the way you intend to continue. Ardnamurchan started distilling in 2014, released their inaugural single malt in 2020 (listen for more shared trauma). We talk about pricing and structures for understanding earning trust with whisky lovers.
Twelve years in, the things they decided early are the things that now look prescient. Solar in the warehouse, hydroelectric off the river, a Swiss biomass boiler that cost 1.2 million pounds and is quietly delivering a cost-per-litre of alcohol that’s, in Connal’s words, “maybe quite sharp” compared to the rest of the field during an oil crisis. He isn’t boasting but you can’t help noting that the ROI on a sustainability decision made for the right reasons in 2013 looks different in 2026. A clipboard person told them last year they could go off-grid if they wanted to. For a site Ardnamurchan’s size, that’s an extraordinary achievement.
The blending team is made up of four or five noses across different backgrounds: a single Master Blender can be a brand asset, a face and a consistency of vision, and that’s a real thing. It’s also a narrow filter on what gets into a bottle. The committee model is less heroic but it produces whisky that passes the compounding demands of groiup assessment, which is what you want when you’re trying to become someone’s third bottle on the shelf after their favourite Islay and their favourite Speyside. That’s Connal’s stated ambition for the brand. The reliable Highland coastal dram that needs replacing when it runs out.
We talk about cask provenance in one of the most interesting cask programmes currently operating. Most distillery sales directors, asked about cask provenance, will give you the line. Connal gave the actual breakdown. Around 75 to 80 per cent of fills are ex-bourbon, mostly from Old Forester, direct relationship. Sherry casks come direct from Jerez, one of the best suppliers plus a small bodega, bought in Spain and not (and this is the aside that earns its keep) imported via France, which apparently is a thing some distilleries now do because the maths works out and the geography evidently doesn’t matter to them. Paul Lanois Champagne casks, fifteen to twenty-five barriques a year, bought direct from the family.
Port, Madeira, Mizunara, Tokaji, Mezcal. They know the cooperages and the people moving the wood, as much as possible. But we’re also in a long, gentle inflection where transparency to that degree isn’t something we talked about as aggressively twenty years ago.
This matters because the new-distillery marketing playbook of the last decade has been to lean very hard on provenance language while quietly running the same broker calls everyone else runs. Ardnamurchan saying “we have direct relationships on the casks where we have direct relationships, and we don’t pretend on the ones where we don’t” is a more useful kind of transparency.
Cask costs, while we’re here. Bourbon barrels peaked at 250 US dollars last year and Connal calls that frightening, rightly. The relief, eight years in, is that Ardnamurchan is now reaping the second-fill, third-fill, sometimes fourth-fill yields off the casks they bought in the early years.
The 2020 balloon, and what it cost the industry to mistake it for growth
If there’s a single argument worth carrying out of the conversation, this is it. Connal and the Adelphi team were in Christchurch for Dramfest in March 2020, then crossed to Australia. Cancelled cricket games, a phone call from the chairman, last flight out via Dubai, house-bound for two and a half months. Standard 2020.
What happened next is what matters. Furlough money, locked-down consumers, bored, cashed-up. Every new release sold out instantly, anything new an instant seller, anything new an instant seller. The entire industry read those numbers as a category in ascent. It wasn’t. It was a balloon.
The reasonable thing, and Connal’s word here is “potentially”, would have been to base next year’s gross-profit forecast on 2019, not on the spike. Plenty of brands didn’t. Plenty built capacity, built inventory, built marketing budgets and crowdfunding rounds against numbers that were never going to repeat. Then Brexit landed for the UK side. Then two wars affected barley pricing and freight. Then UK duty went up twice. Sure, the calculation shifts at different volumes and price points, and global premium-spirit demand isn’t dead. But for a lot of mid-range single malt brands trading on that 2020-21 hockey stick, the curve they’re now trying to explain to a board is the curve of a normal year against an abnormal comparable. That’s a different conversation than a downturn, it’s a correction.
Ardnamurchan kept production flat. Same volume they made three years ago, same volume they made last year. The bet is that there’s a stock lull eight to ten years out and the boring decision to keep distilling through the wobble pays off then. Whether that’s right is unknowable. What’s defensible is that the call was made on what was actually happening in 2020, not on what the spreadsheet wanted to be true.
Price discipline, in a category that’s lost its head about price
Forty-five pounds in 2020. Two and a half UK duty increases later, still under fifty quid. Ninety-nine dollars on the shelf at Whisky Galore. No relabelling, no relaunching, no “now with extra story” repricing.
For a category that has spent five years aggressively premium-positioning everything in sight, including a lot of nine-year-old single cask releases priced like they’re surely crafted from solid gold, Ardnamurchan’s pricing discipline is … disciplined. The proposition is liquid to dollar. The bet is that a drinker who buys the bottle at a reasonable price three times comes back for the cask-strength, comes back for the Tokaji release, comes back for the Mezcal cask when it lands. Loyalty is built on the second purchase, not the first.
Most of the loud premium-launch playbook of the last few years has been built on the opposite assumption. Extract margin on the first bottle because there might not be a second. The honest answer is what Ardnamurchan has done, which is run the core range honestly and let the limited releases (quarterly, 8,500 bottles across 48 markets, gone fast) do the storytelling.
What he’s drinking
Ardnamurchan Cask Strength, when he reaches for his own stuff. The new Tokaji, which has “real funkiness to it” and lands here in the next couple of months. And outside whisky, because anyone who works whisky knows you don’t always pour whisky on a Friday, a Negroni with Old Raj Navy Strength gin from Cadenhead’s at 55.4 per cent, because if you’re making a Negroni you may as well really make one.
Listen to the whole chat for a solid dose of whisky business, banter and Scottish brogue.
