We have a  celebrity 'distiller'  on the stills on Wednesday 6th August.

Our guest has come to experience a somewhat unusual spirit inspired by a 1695 tasting note.   Martin Martin on his trip through the Hebrides discovered usquebaugh-baul, translated as  perilous whisky, which "at first taste affects all the members of the the body; two spoonfuls is a sufficient dose, and if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life."

It's a bit of a mouthful - usquebaugh-baul - in more ways than one; at 90% ABV off the still - in those days it would have been drunk at that mind-boggling strength - you can see where Martin was coming from. Of course it depends on how big your spoons are.

The young Harvey brothers, in their late teens and early twenties, certainly knew a thing or two when they built Bruichladdich. Robert Harvey, calling on the family's century of Glasgow-based distilling expertise, designed  a truly avant guard set up, expressly to produce the purest spirit possible. As opposed to an adapted farm, the basis of most earlier distilleries, he harnessed all the latest thinking for his purpose built distillery. The testament to this design is that nothing has changed since, and the same, gloriously simple layout still produces what is recognised as the purest new spirit around. Ok, it may not be as quick as today's modernised plants, but speed is not everything for the purest spirit.

Quadruple distil that purest spirit and it becomes even more refined.  Put it into the finest new oak casks and the extraction of flavours is startling as the super high strength alcohol immediately  leaches out of the oak's celluose, hemicellulose and lignin all the flavour compounds - the oak lactones, vanillins and other volatile compounds etc. that react with the spirit during maturation.

We call the resulting spirit by it's code name X4. Last year's distillation, after only a year in cask (though of course technically not yet classed as whisky),  it is quite simply extraordinary.