Kilchoman 16yo
Kilchoman Distillery has just announced the release of its new whisky, its oldest edition to date.
Kilchoman 16yo is a limited edition, a compilation of the contents of 21 casks, mostly bourbon, with a small admixture of whisky aged in sherry casks. The whisky was bottled as a beverage with a strength of 50% vol., without cold filtration and without caramel coloring - which has already become the norm for this one of the youngest distilleries on Islay. The barley malt used in the production of this whisky was smoked with peat smoke to a level of 50 ppm.
According to Anthony Wills, the distillery's founder, the release of the 16-year edition is a real milestone in the development of the distillery, which in less than two decades has grown from a small farm-run venture to a sizable distillery with a reputation among whisky lovers around the world.
The new whisky's aroma is expected to offer rich, creamy accents of citrus sweetness, baked apples, pears, plums and nutmeg. On the palate we should get notes of Christmas spices, fresh vanilla, tropical fruits and peat smoke. The finish will reveal notes of dried mango and apricot, barbecue-like smoke and lingering touches of honeyed sweetness.
Kilchoman Distillery was founded in 2005 and was then the eighth malt whisky distillery located on the island of Islay. At the same time, it was - and still is today - the only distillery on the island that is not located directly on the seashore, although a short distance from it. The basic premise behind the launch of Kilchoman was to restore the traditional model of whisky production, where distillation is an integral part of the work of a local farm, in this case Rockside Farm located near Bruichladdich. The plan was to base all production on barley grown on fields owned by the farm, but this rather quickly proved unrealistic due to the scale of whiskey production. Here the malt house in Port Ellen, owned by Diageo and producing malt for all distilleries operating on Islay, came to the rescue.
Kilchoman is one of the few Scottish distilleries that carry out independent malting of barley. This malt is sufficient to meet about 25% of the distillery's needs and is smoked to a level of 20 ppm. The remaining 75% of the barley malt needed to make whisky at Kilchoman is still imported from Port Ellen. This malt, however, is smoked to a level of 50 ppm, and it was this malt that was the raw material for the whisky mentioned above.
The capacity of the distillery, which is currently the core of Rockside Farm's operations and which has been expanded and doubled in recent years, is 650,000. liters of pure alcohol. Work is underway to expand Kilchoman's production capacity even further, hitting about one million liters of alcohol per year. Irrigation work is also underway to prepare more land for barley cultivation, thereby increasing the cultivated area serving the distillery.
The release of a whisky with a 16-year age declaration marks the reaching for the oldest casks, containing distillates produced in the early years of Kilchoman's operation. Understandably, the distillery has accustomed consumers to bottling primarily whiskeys without age statements, labeled primarily with geographical names from the immediate vicinity of the farm. And so, the basic editions of Kilchoman are Machir Bay, Sanaig, Loch Gorm, or Saligo Bay. The distillery also releases regular editions of its whisky based 100% on local raw materials. Kilchoman 100% Islay premieres once a year.
It is worth recalling in passing that the Kilchoman 16yo described above is not the first 16yo in the distillery's portfolio. Back in 2022, on the occasion of the Feis Ile festival, fans of the distillery were given the opportunity to purchase a strictly limited festival edition of Kilchoman 16yo Feis Ile 2022. There have also already been private bottlings of 2006 and 2007 single barrels aged 16 years. However, the 21-barrel Kilchoman 16yo described above is the first major globally distributed edition to have such a high age statement.
In the current offer of the House of Whisky Online you can find a wide selection of whisky from Kilchoman. We invite you to visit and follow the news. After all, it cannot be ruled out that in the near future a batch of the new Kilchoman 16yo. At least.
[07.11.2023 / photo: Kilchoman]