Some people insist that Octomore is a Latin play on ‘80.5’ the mighty peating level of this new whisky. It is actually a farm near Bruichladdich, whose name is derived from the medieval  division of a davoch  - or common ground  into eight workable, self-sustaining units.  In this case the ‘Large Eighth’. 

Dirty Dotty’s well is on this farm - James Brown's invigorating spring which supplies the crystal clear water from 1.8 billion year old rock that we use at bottling.

There was once a distillery there. In 1816 the distillery  was built by the farming brothers George and John Montgomery along with 15 year old John MacMorran. It was to be a short-lived, tragic affair.

The distillery was a small scale set up, probably only a single still operation, which had a capacity of a mere 270 litres - not much more than a hogshead. It appears to have been scaled to use their 50 acres of own-grown barley. In it’s second year, 1817- 1818, it produced just 4491 litres or 18 hogsheads. A decade later in 1826-1827 it produced 16,140 litres  - or about 65 hogsheads. This was clearly not going to make any one rich.

At that time Octomore supported an extraordinary 175 souls in 30 houses. With such poor quality land, the people must have been living on a knife edge.

It started to go pair-shaped when John Montgomery  died in 1839. His three sons William, Donald and Alexander squabbled with each other over their share of the distillery and with ‘co-partner’ John MacMorran. There was   ‘a misunderstanding’ about  the running of the business as well as ‘several other transactions relating to our accounts’.  Arbitration was sought on 28th December 1839.

Then 8 months later, on 7th August 1840, in order to ‘effect a complete settlement of all matters of a  doubtful nature amongst us and to prevent litigation’, the three brothers again sought arbitration - this time over their father’s will. Clearly an agreement could not be reached and as a consequence, the distillery was shutdown in the  autumn of 1840, just 24 years after it was started.

George Montgomery died soon after. Then things went from bad to worse as the potato famine struck in 1846, lasting for a decade. Life as a farmer was already hard, but during those difficult years it became impossible to sustain the population. Donald and Alexander appear to have fallen out irreconcilably with William and John MacMorran. Along with many others they chose to emigrate to Canada, never to speak again. By 1851 Octomore was home to a mere  51 people in 12 houses – less than a third of the total from a decade earlier.

In 1854, 14 years after the distillery closed,  Charles Morrisson, the new landlord, having bought the island from the benevolent but bankrupted Sir Walter Campbell, was  keen to regain control of the now derelict and run down farm. He agreed to pay the equivalent of  £9,782 to William Montgomery (now 61, a widower  and ‘starving’)  and the 40 year old ‘labourer’ John MacMorran for the several distillery buildings which had been, after all, illegally built. Within 5 years, William and his remaining family had gone.

Today at Octomore there are just 5 souls and one house. You can even stay in the distillery buildings where this story played out:  www.octomore.co.uk.

Octomore the whisky, was no more. Until, that it is, we had the idea of distilling the most heavily peated whisky the world has ever seen.

It started out as a philosophical discussion: would the spirit from Bruichladdich’s tall-necked stills be as elegant, fruity and floral if we used an exceptionally heavy peated barley? What about the most heavily peated malt ever?

Only one maltings, Bairds, was able to rise to the challenge producing a staggering 80.5 parts per million of phenols after a week of malting. This most heavily peated version of Bruichladdich was born on Thursday 3rd October 2002, Christened Octomore in memory of a sad Hebridean tale of a long forgotten distillery.

 

Bruichladdich’s tall, narrow-necked stills  have produced a remarkably unique spirit:  those stills, run so slowly even without condensers, have produced an exceptional Islay hybrid: extraordinarily pure peat aroma on top of an incredibly refined spirit, devoid of the medicinal flavours associated with heavily peated whiskies.  This is a new Islay experience.

200 casks of this first distillation were laid down. Of these, the first 800 cases worth, actually distilled on the 3rd October, were reserved for those who had the courage to purchase a ‘futures’ case of the world’s most heavily peated whisky – with out even knowing what it was going to taste like.

The  full bottling will be released next month.