Bowmore The Making Of A Legend How Islay’s Oldest Distillery Became A Scotch Whisky Icon

What's the recipe for a legendary whisky? Some say it's all in the ingredients, like floor-malted Scottish barley, clear spring water, aromatic peat smoke and the very best casts. Others say the magic's in the place. Old wooden washbacks, tall copper stills and centuries-old stone walls caressed by sea air. But perhaps it's all down to the people. Masters of their craft drawing on knowledge passed down through generations. Risk-takers who believed a small island community could create exceptional single malt and visionaries who had the determination to make that dream a reality. All of these elements can be found in the story of Bowmore Distillery. Nestled at the heart of Islay, a small Hebridean island off Scotland's west coast, Bowmore is loved by whisky fans for its uniquely tropical and elegantly peated flavour. But it's also on its way to becoming one of the world's most desirable and collectible Scotch whiskies. Join me, Christopher Coates, as I meet the experts, makers, visionaries and locals who know Bowmore best to uncover the story of Islay's oldest distillery and how it became a Scotch whisky icon. To understand how Bowmore became what it is today, we first need to understand Islay and why whisky making is so ingrained in the local culture and economy. No one knows this story better than whisky educator Rachel McNeill, founder of Islay Whisky Academy. We're meeting at the Islay Gaelic Centre, a community venue, research hub and museum dedicated to Islay's cultural roots. It's a great place to begin learning about Islay's early inhabitants, how they lived and why they began making whisky here. People have been living here continuously, Christopher, for 9,200 years. I would describe Islay culture as authentic, old style, rooted in the land, fishing, farming and whisky making. The people of Islay are humorous. We enjoy a good ceilidh. We enjoy a good dram, obviously. And the farming here is excellent because of the fertile land, because you know Islay's called the Queen of the Hebrides. She's also called the Green Isle because of the fertility of the land. So out of that comes our whisky. Whisky fans have probably heard about the Lords of the Isles and the fact that they were headquartered here on Islay. Who were they and why did they have their base here? The Lords of the Isles, Christopher, were really kings because the Gaelic name is Ban Rhi in Siogal, which means kings, because their power was equal to kingdom. The Gaeldom was a power. And from Finlagan, we dealt with the crowned heads of Europe directly because it was a sea kingdom. You have to look at the map like a negative photograph and you understand how history is because it came from the sea. From Finlagan, you could go out the Sound of Islay, then you go up the Western Isles, you turn left, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, America. You turn right, you're going Scandinavia, there's a warm water port, you're into Russia. Come down Lochendal, you go out Lochendal, down the Irish Sea, down the bottom there, past Portugal, round into the Mediterranean. Next thing you know, you're in Constantinople. Islay was like a centre point with a connection to all these different places. They had control at a strategic point, so any other movement of shipping had to pay taxes to them. And the Loch of Finlagan, it was like Holyrood or the White House. So there's many, many people, so they needed a lot of supplies. Because this island is very fertile, we're very lucky. Other islands up the west coast are very, very beautiful, but they're very rocky and stony. Barley can grow in inhospitable circumstances. We've got 3,000 miles of the open Atlantic. All the rain is coming from that Atlantic, dropping down very salty. You can feel it on your lips in the wind. The barley can grow in that kind of environment. Peat smoke and the smell of the peat reek is obviously incredibly important to anybody who's got a taste for Islay whiskey. But peat is more than just something that's used for making whiskey. It was a domestic fuel source. So can you tell me, why did people use peat here? Everything is location specific. We had a lot of peat. We have a lot of peat. That's why people use that. Different layers of peat in the bank have different consistencies. So at the top, it's not so decomposed. It's drier. There's maybe more roots. It's lighter. Further down you go, it's more compressed. So you use the different levels for different requirements. For example, if your husband was out working in the fields and he was coming in for his cup of tea, you would wish to make the fire very fast so you could boil the kettle. So you would take a peat from the top because it would boil your kettle of water quickly. At night though, when you were going to sleep, when you wanted to leave your fire in, you would use peat from the bottom because you would bank the fire. You would use the heavy peats that wouldn't burn fast. And then they would just stay there, smouldering away, keep the fire going all night for you to keep you warm when you slept. And especially a peat fire because the smell is just delicious. So they had the barley, they had the water, they had the peat banks. So really, it only takes putting those things together to make whisky. Tell me about the origins of whisky on Islay. So everybody made whisky because it's an agricultural thing to do. You stored milk and cheese. You stored berries and jam. You stored barley and whisky. I think the whisky really thrived here because it got a footing when other places maybe didn't. After the Lords of the Isles were vanquished, the Campbells came in and were in control of Islay. And Campbells were the king's men. So they were able to collect the taxes. They paid the excise to themselves. So it wasn't in the records from outside. We had no extraneous excise. It was personal excise. Whereas in other places, extraneous people came in and extracted the excise money. So Islay got established because of this practical fact. Ownership of much of Islay later passed from the Campbells of Cawdor to Daniel Campbell of Shorefield, who likely bought the land using money received as compensation for damage done to his mansion during the infamous Glasgow Malt Riots of 1725. As a Member of Parliament, Shorefield's home was targeted because he'd voted in favour of an unpopular malt tax and this might explain his decision to relocate his family to Islay. Though unpopular in Glasgow, the Campbells of Shorefield were progressive landlords responsible for modernising Islay's economy and improving its infrastructure. Their most important achievement was the creation of Bowmore Village in the late 1760s, which was designed to be Islay's new residential, economic and religious centre. But what the village's new inhabitants really needed were steady jobs, and the answer was to be found in whisky. The story of Bowmore Distillery officially begins in 1779, but records suggest its founder, David Simpson, began distilling at the site at least a decade earlier. Simpson was an experienced farmer, distiller and merchant and had the blessing of the Campbells of Shorefield, who hoped whisky production would create demand for local barley, provide employment and bring in much-needed revenue to the island. In 1837, the distillery passed to the Mutters, who significantly expanded and renovated the distillery. Notably, the Mutters bottled Bowmore as single malt and sold it at home and abroad, a feat made possible by the company's private steamship and extensive warehousing in the arches at Glasgow's Central Station. After 55 years, the Mutters sold Bowmore to John Bell, Sheriff of Campbelltown, but it was only in his hands for a few years. The distillery was then bought out by a London consortium led by Joseph Robert Holmes. Interestingly, Holmes continued to sell Bowmore as single malt and even offered an unpeated variant called Bow Spey. However, the war years were not a good time for the whisky business and the distillery was soon up for sale again. By 1925, J.B. Sheriff was back at the helm and ran the business successfully as Sheriff's Bowmore Distillery until production came to a halt in 1940 on account of government restrictions imposed during World War II. William Grigor and son of Inverness, a broker and bulk supplier of whisky, bought Bowmore in 1950. However, by 1963, the distillery was put up for sale again and was very nearly sold to Spanish distillers D.Y.C before being snapped up by one of Scotland's most famous whisky families. It was the Morrison family who literally made the distillery what it is today, relaunching Bowmore as a brand in its own right and building its reputation internationally. But this part of the story is one best told by someone who was there. There are few people with more experience in the Scotch whisky business than Tim Morrison. Working closely with his father, Stanley, and brother, Brian, Tim was integral to the development of Bowmore from its purchase by the Morrisons in 1963. Today, he's the chairman of bottler A.D. Rattray and Clydeside Distillery in Glasgow. Tim is a true font of knowledge when it comes to Bowmore and his family's multi-generational links to the Scotch whisky industry. So your family has incredible links to the whisky industry and your father, much like yourself, is one of Scotch whisky's most famous figures. But I understand it was actually your mother's side of the family that was in whisky first. How did that come about? My father had joined William Walker, who subsequently turned out to become his father-in-law as my father had married his eldest daughter. That side of the family had been in the wine and spirit industry for probably about five or six generations. He honed his skills buying and selling bulk whisky, building up the stocks for William Walker and Company, which was my grandfather's company. They were also agents for Glenn Farkless at that time, which brought them a closer contact with the actual distilling industry, as well as just the blending and bottling side. When my father then started his business, Stanley P. Morrison, Fetter Cairn, we were agents for as well. And a lot of the whisky that he was brokering at that time would have been to supply the big blends, right? Oh, totally, yes. I mean, you didn't have a single malt market at that time at all. He had close contacts with distiller's company at the time, Arthur Bell, Highland Distilleries. And famously, your father's business then went on to own three distilleries, perhaps the most famous of which being Bermore. But do you think your father sort of had his eye on owning a distillery one day before that opportunity came along? I don't think so. I think I was as surprised as anyone when he came back, having had lunch at the Mar Maison in Glasgow, and said that he had overheard the Spaniards discussing the possibility of buying Bermore from the Gregor family. He didn't like the idea of an integral part of the whisky industry going abroad and to Spain. And also, I think maybe at that time, it triggered something in his mind and thought, well, perhaps let's have a go at this. So he met with Kay Gregor that evening, and they hammered out a deal between them. And lo and behold, we became the owners of Bermore. James Howard was our finance director saying to him, well, Stanley, how are we going to pay for this? And he said, that's your problem, not mine. I like that way of operating. It's the beg forgiveness rather than ask permission approach. And I'm right in thinking that perhaps Islay as a place was also attractive to your father, because I understand that your family had links to Islay already, right? My mother's family owned Foreland Estate. Basically, I suppose from the ages of two or three up to about seven or eight, would spend the summers on Foreland. Islay wasn't something that was new to me when I arrived at Bermore for the first time. And what was the reputation of that distillery at that time? Because you mentioned that your father might have felt it would have been sad for that integral distillery to sort of leave Scottish hands and go to the Spanish. But was it quite well known? I think it was quite well known within the industry. It certainly wasn't known outwith the industry. It didn't have a great reputation. I actually have a picture of the distillery that was taken shortly before we bought it. And it's certainly not a picture of the classic photos you have of distilleries nowadays. In the distillery, it had two sets of stills. We had a group of five stills in one still house, and then a group of John Doar stills in another still house. Primarily, they just pumped out whisky without a great thought as to what the spirit was really like. You mentioned the John Doar stills. Were they copper pots with swan necks? Yes, but they were very large ones. We were very fortunate fairly soon after we bought the distillery because Bannerhaven was being shut down for renovation. Highland asked us if we would basically make up their production from the John Doar stills, because they reckoned that the John Doar stills were more akin to the spirit that Bannerhaven produced as opposed to the other five stills in the other still house. Am I right in thinking that both sets of stills at that time would have been directly fired? Yes. There was a movement in the industry at the time away from direct firing. The stills that we had were not particularly efficient, so we took the decision that we would upgrade the stills, we would improve the efficiency of the energy within the distillery. So we employed a company called Cowan & Lynn, who were major engineers in the distilling industry at the time, and we had a boiler designed to our specifications. The big question then was, well, how are we going to get this lot over to Islay? Because we couldn't go to CalMac, there was no other shipping people, so we went to the army and they thought it would be a very good exercise for them. And so a tank landing draft was commissioned and we put two stills, the boiler, and about three or four vessels onto this ship. Prior to that, our manager, James McCall, had said that the operation is going too early because the idea being that the tank landing draft would go right up the slip at the distillery and just unload everything into the distillery. And he said the tide is not going to be high enough to allow the vessel to do that. However, the military, in their wisdom, decided that James McCall didn't know what he was talking about and that they would go ahead as planned. We arrived the next morning, it was misty, we could hardly see the island, but we sailed up Lochendal and we made for the distillery and stopped about a mile and a half from it. It could go no further because the tide wasn't high enough. The ship's captain decided what they would do. They had a great big army vehicle, it was like a tractor, an enormous tractor, and they would send it off and into the distillery. They would then use a horse and pull Big Beanie, which was the boiler, into the distillery. Unfortunately, Big Beanie stuck in the middle of the Lochendal, so then they had to winch Big Beanie back into the ship, which they did. It took another three or four days before we actually then got Big Beanie back into the ship. Fortunately, the tide had risen and we were able to get a lot closer to the distillery. We then had another go at it, got Big Beanie into the distillery, parked it and then moved the stills and then the tanks into the distillery. And we were very fortunate that McKelvey's were the contractors and they had a fantastic foreman who directed the operation and a lot of our thanks had to go to the way he controlled the whole thing, basically took over from the army and told his own workmen what to do and then the army did as they were bid. With the renovation complete, the modern era of distilling at Bowmore began, though the Morrisons continued to tweak the production process over the following decades. This gradual evolution has continued under the stewardship of present owners, who bought a stake in Morrison Bowmore Distillers in 1989 before taking full ownership in 1994. But that's the history done for now. To really understand how Bowmore became what it is today, it's time to look under the hood and see how its whiskies are made. That's why I'm heading to meet a man who's been part of the Bowmore story almost as long as Suntory. Distillery manager David Turner has worked at Bowmore since the 4th of June 1990 and nobody is better placed to talk us through each step of the process. We're one of the seven distilleries in Scotland that have still got their own floor maltings. We believe that the tropical fruit notes and the flavours from the malt barns get carried right through to the end product. We've got three malt floors in the malt barns, each hold 14 tonnes of barley, so we steep 42 tonnes of barley a week. At 13% moisture, the barley won't germinate, it won't grow, so we have to soak it in water for 27 hours. So after the 27 hours underwater, we've raised the moisture content from 13% to about 42% moisture. We lay it on the natural concrete floors, it germinates in its own natural heat. After about 24 hours and the temperature's got to about 16, 17 degrees centigrade, we have to turn the barley by hand every four hours, day and night, to control the temperature and the rate of germination. After the starch is well broken down and we're happy that it's well modified, we call it green malt. Because you malt your own barley, that means using peat in your kiln. So can you tell me a bit about how you source your peat and maybe even talk me through the peat cutting process? How does that work? People think of Islay whiskies as really peated whiskies. Traditionally, in the north of Islay, Bonahabin, Brook, Laddie, Cleel are very, very lightly peated. On the south, Lafroig, Lagaville and Ardbeg are very heavily peated. Coincidentally, Bowmore sits in the middle of Islay and our peating levels are in between the north and the south. I would call ourselves a middly peated or a perfectly balanced Islay whisky. So we own our own peat moss. It's about six miles along the road from Bowmore. We cut our own peats there. We use an Irish style of cutting peats. It's like a chain that cuts into the ground. It extracts the peat so we don't leave exposed peat banks. We just leave a small slit in the ground like that. Once they go to take the peats off when they're dried, the tractors kind of push the slit back and there's still growth after we've taken our peats off. But we're doing a lot of restoration peat work on the peat mosses. Up to 2030, our aim is to restore the same amount of volume of peat bank as the peat we're using. And by 2040, our ambition is to restore twice as much as we are currently using. I know that running the kiln properly is a real art. What are you looking for when you're loading the fire and setting it and then maintaining it throughout that smoking process? What are you trying to do? Well, you've got to have a heart of a fire to get the smoke burning, but we don't want any flame at all. We load the fires about every hour. We can use what we call peat calf in it as well. Peat calf is broken up peat that's moist, so it's only smoke that's coming out the fire. You can see the flame at the bottom, but we don't want to see the flame. We burn the peat purely for the smoke, purely for the flavour, not as a heat source. The kiln floor is a finely meshed floor, so the barley doesn't fall through, but so the heat and smoke rises up from down below. We peat our green malt for 10 hours at the start of the kilning when it's high in moisture, so it absorbs the peat reek. After 44 hours, we've taken the moisture in the grain down to under 5.5%, where we then take the malt and store it in a bin. We let it cool down, mellow out in the bin for about 7 to 10 days, and then we're happy that it's cool, and we're ready to take it on to the mashing process. When you're mashing, you look for a good mix of water to grist. We grind the malt down into three parts. We look for 20% husk, 70% middles and 10% flours. We're looking for the right water to grist ratio when we're mashing in. We're mashing at 64.5. 64.5 wakens up the enzymes we've created in the germinating process of the malt barns. The enzymes attack the starch at 64.5. We convert about 85% of the starch into sugar in the mash tun. The remaining 15% is converted in one of the washbacks. We call that secondary conversion. When we're mashing, we only turn the steer in the mash tun about three times for a whole mash, so it's a semi-clear warp we're looking for. It'll take all the fruity flavours and the flavours we're looking for in the warp before we ferment it in the washback. We've got seven wooden Oregon pine washbacks. We believe wooden gives a better character, better flavour fermentation. We're quite unique. We use two different types of yeast. We use 25% of a Kerry yeast and 75% a Maori. The warp's slightly different, give off slightly different flavours. The Maori yeast tends to work at the start of fermentation, where the Kerry's a wee bit slower working. We do 16 mashes a week and they're all 70 hours. We believe that's the optimum time where we're fermenting properly and we're getting the flavours in the wash we're looking to carry on to the stills. The purpose of distillation is to separate the alcohol from water. We can do this because pure alcohol boils at 78.15 degrees, whereas water boils at 100. We've got two wash, two spirit stills. We're a batch balanced distillation. One washback gets split between the two wash stills through to the spirit stills. Our linen arms slightly point up the way when we're on middle cut of the new make spirit. We run each still about 16, 17 and 18 litres per minute, so only the finest and lightest of vapours go up over the neck of the still. We believe you need good quality spirit and put it in good quality casks and further down the line you'll have top-notch Scotch whisky. Right now we're standing in the number one vaults, the longest running maturation warehouse in the whole world of Scotch whisky. What's special about this warehouse? So this dates back to 1779. You can see the big thick stone walls. It's cool and it's damp. Right behind us is the sea. The sea comes up and lapses on the wall in the winter, but it's cool and damp. All year round the temperature doesn't really change here. It's six, seven, eight degrees all year round, but the waves come up and splash on the wall. The casks we use are slightly porous, so they take in flavours from the surrounding areas they get matured in. Beaumont's quite a light and delicate new make spirit. It works well in bourbon casks. It also works well in sherry casks. To me, in a bourbon cask you get the true distillery character that shines through. You'll be looking for light, fresh, kind of tropical fruit notes coming through, whereas a sherry cask is much darker, richer. Like a sherry monster to me would be Bourbon is a good dram for drinking in the summer. Sherry is more a Christmas, a winter dram. Beaumont Distillery is undoubtedly one of the most famous distilleries on Islay, which in itself is one of the most famous whisky making regions in Scotland. Why do you think Beaumont Distillery has developed such a cult following? I think it's because we've got good old age stocks. Many years ago, through the peaks and troughs of the whisky industry, through the 70s into the 80s, I think some distilleries were closing, some were kind of flat, working three days a week. The Morrisons family, which owned us back then, they wanted to keep work in the community, so Beaumont worked five days a week. It's good luck, or a bit of insight by the guys back then, that we've got good stocks dating back to 1967s, the oldest casks we've got maturing Islay. The Morrison family invested in good casks, and they were buying good first, second, third fills. We were putting good spirit into these good casks, and we've got good stocks of the vintages that were going on as well. But making great whisky is only part of the story. Though we all know Beaumont as a prominent single malt brand today, it was largely unheard of in the 1970s. So how did this tiny distillery become recognised around the world? It's time to speak to Tim Morrison again to learn about the distillery's tentative steps into the world of single malt brand marketing. As you've mentioned already, the single malt category was very embryonic at this stage, and most malt whisky that was produced was being used for blended scotch whiskies. Was that the case for Beaumont at the time? Totally. Everything was going to the blenders. We had capability of producing about 700,000 gallons at that time, and we didn't fill anything for ourselves at all. Your family then took the decision to bottle Beaumont as a single malt, which at the time wasn't very common. What do you think the attraction was of launching the distillery as a brand? Well, actually, we've got to go back to the mid-60s. Sam Bronfman had come over, and my father and I were invited for lunch, and the subject of seagrams representing Beaumont in America came up. My father said to him, what sort of volume would you be looking for? I think at the time they said, if you can provide something like 3,000 cases a year, that would be the base from which we could start to build the brand. We went back to the office, and we couldn't do 300 cases at that time. There, if you like, was an opportunity gone, but at the same time, that's when obviously seagrams recognised that things were beginning to develop in the single malt field. We asked my father if we could bottle up a Beaumont, and he said, by all means, if you can find the stock. We actually bottled up probably about 30, 40, 50 cases or something like that. We got hold of the Sheriff's Beaumont, as it was then, the letterhead. We started cutting it apart, moving it around with the little logo of the distillery, the various other bits of lettering, and pasted it, photocopied it, and that was the first Beaumont label. It was only after he died in 1971 that we then determined that we would invest in that field, and then the real investment started with the ship bottle. But the ship bottle didn't last for long either. Shortly after, the Morrisons began a joint partnership with Remy Martin. Under this agreement, the Morrisons were responsible for the supply of the whisky and packaging, while Remy would look after the marketing and distribution at home and abroad. Remy Martin had a designer, Andre Fourmet. We met with him on a number of occasions, and he came up with the concept of the brown bottle. Within this package, he had introduced the design of a sea lion, which reflected the geographic position of the distillery by the sea. That became synonymous thereafter with our packaging. This was very different from the very understated, traditional labels that were more common at the time? Absolutely. I mean, if you go from the Beaumont of the ship package to this, it's night and day. I mean, completely, utterly and absolutely different. Having made this investment in the new bottle and the new label, I believe it didn't quite make the impact commercially that you'd been hoping for, but you didn't let that keep you down, and you continued to see a future for Beaumont as a single malt in the market. Yes, because I think we were very fortunate at the time that the single malt market was taking off and we were moving with it. I think at the same time, there was a policy switch in the company itself to move away from bulk blend into our own bottle products, and that's where we saw the future for the company. The following decade saw several more releases that continued to build Beaumont's reputation. This began with the Bicentenary release in 1979, which drew on stocks distilled in 1964, a year that would become immensely important for Beaumont collectors, though some releases draw on even older stocks, such as the 1957 Wave decanter. However, it was 1993 that marked arguably the most important turning point in the distillery's history, the release of Black Beaumont. Now one of the most sought-after bottles of Scotch whisky in existence, Black Beaumont and its subsequent editions helped define the luxury whisky category as we know it today. To learn more about these iconic releases, I'm heading to meet Beaumont hotel owner and village local Peter McClellan. Peter is the font of knowledge behind his hotel's whisky bar, Loochies, and knows a thing or two about rare bottlings like Black Beaumont. It was a very unique release, which we hadn't seen before from Beaumont, but also it came at a time where whisky was just starting to take off. It wasn't at the pinnacle yet, it wasn't even halfway there. I remember my dad saying when it first came out, people going, what? £100 for a bottle of whisky? Away! And you look at the prices now, what they are is night and day. That's the one that everyone talks about. That's the one that everybody asks you about. Do you have it? And I'm like, do you realise if I had that, I'd be charging £3,500 for a dram. Fortunate I've been able to try it, and it is, it's probably one of the best memoirs I've ever tried. It's got that, it's the Darko Larosso sherries, and as I said, that's when whisky really started. Slowly, but surely, it escalated. Black Beaumont is undoubtedly the most famous of the collectible whiskies from the distillery today, but there are some other really iconic historic bottlings. Can you tell me about a few of your favourites? Well, this bottle right here from Beaumont, which is a very hysterical bottle, this one here, also from the same era as Black Beaumont, 1964, we're looking at. And this one was bought from 19, I want to say 1979, and it's called the Bicentenary Bottle. The reason it's so unique, as you can see, it's a funny-looking wee bottle. All the bottles were handcrafted, so they're all different. None of them look the same. The spirit in this, and also the whiskiness is unreal. This one's Bourbon II sherry, a finished-in sherry, but it's extremely unique, extremely soft and gentle. The peat, even in it, is hardly there. There's something from that era, 1964 has a fantastic era for Beaumont, and that is a very unique bottle. So that's an older famous bottle that you think people should also be aware of, but what about modern classics? Has something come out in the last few years that you've sort of gone, yeah, that is going to be a whisky that in 10, 20, 30, 40 years' time, people are still going to talk about. One of the most recent ones they did from Beaumont was one that they did in 2019, they did for the festival, actually, was this one here, which is called the Devil's Cask, because the cask number is cask number 666. Number of the beast. And obviously, Beaumont Distillery has a long history of releases that have links to the devil, right? Yeah, basically, Beaumont brought out the Devil's Cask batch one and two and three, and the reason they called the first ones the Devil's Cask, because at the top of Beaumont, at the road, there's a big round church, and do you know why they built the church round? To stop the devil hiding in the corners. So that was the whole reason. So Beaumont took that story of the church and were like, if he couldn't hide in the corners of the church, where did he go? Well, he must have hidden Beaumont number one vault, because there's loads of corners in there. And then we've got the cask here that we're just talking about, cask number 666, and it's the most recent thing they've had, or closest thing they've had, to Blackburn Moor. It's 22 years old, fully matured, and all of us are sherry. And not just for the quality, but for collectors and for value. This vault was about 280 pounds. The first one hit the auction and went for about 1,800 pounds. The stuff that they're, obviously, the bourbon casks they're using for a lot of the core range stuff and that, it's good quality. But once you go that wee bit higher into the hand fills, I find the hand fills are some of the most spectacular stuff they've been doing. Even previous stuff to the 70s and whatnot. They've got a couple in particular that they did in their hand fills, which one was a 22-year-old single cask, first filled bourbon, and they did a 26 or 27. That's one of the higher aged ones, which is really unusual in these two drams. You do get the tropical fruits, and it's really tropical fruits, like kind of mango, that kind of flavor that you get from it. It's not so much citrusy, it's much more tropical fruits, very gentle. But then afterwards, this medicinal flavor comes through, which is unusual in Bermuda, and it's still very gentle. It's very well balanced, whether you go sherry, or whether you go to the bourbon. Bermuda, in its own style, is a very well balanced malt whiskey. You've talked a bit about the tropical flavor of Bermuda that you can find in some of the best examples of their whiskeys, and this is a character that they're trying to dial up now through various production changes. Can you find that in some of these older bottles as well? Yep, for sure. It's not as strong as it is now, I would say, the flavors. It was a much more subtler fruity flavor back in the 60s, the 70s, and even rolling into the 80s. But the actual spirit that they did at this time as well was really interesting, because roundabout this time was also similar. They're not far off apart, but I always get asked about the, what do we call it again? The palm of violet. Yeah, that kind of herbal-y flavor that Bermuda used to get, and it was unique, and it was different from Bermuda. And I personally don't think it was a bad thing. I completely agree. I also quite like the palm of violet style, and I think particularly when it's used for small batch releases kind of as a blending component as well in moderation with other casts that maybe don't have the flavor quite as pronounced. I think it can be a really useful sort of seasoning in a blender's repertoire, right? So in your opinion, do you think that palm of violet era is almost becoming its own sort of iconic modern classic? I would definitely agree with that, yeah. As I said, people still ask for it, and if it was that bad, it would be forgotten about by now. But they've gone back to the classical style that they were looking for. I've heard they want to push it a wee bit further to get more of that tropical fruit notes out of Bowmore. And so, yeah, no, it's really interesting. Now, we've talked about it. There are fans of Bowmore everywhere. It's one of the most famous, sort of most sought after single malt whiskies around. Definitely one of the most famous Islay whiskies as well. How has the distillery's success impacted the village of Bowmore? Not even just the village. I mean, Bowmore in general, for the whole of the island, it brings so many people here. So if it wasn't for Bowmore and some of these other distilleries, as I said, we wouldn't have anyone here because if it wasn't for people coming to have this stuff, they wouldn't be going elsewhere. All distilleries shut about five o'clock. So after distilleries are shut, these people need somewhere to go to relax, to have some food, to have some drink, somewhere to stay. So it really benefits the whole village and the whole island. To be honest, we've got a lot to thank to these guys for what they do. Because if they weren't doing what they were doing and they weren't as famous as they are now, people wouldn't be traveling. I mean, as I said earlier on, people travel from all around the world to come here to try this. Beautiful spirits and it helps everywhere else in the island. Bowmore's journey to becoming one of the world's most desirable and collectible single malts has been a long one. But the recent sale of its stack, 55 years old, for an incredible £562,000 is all the proof we need that the distillery has truly captured the hearts and minds of whisky lovers. But the story doesn't end here. Under the stewardship of Suntory, the distillery has recently unveiled a new look and two new sets of expressions, the Sherry Oak Cast Collection and the Bowmore Appalachians range. These new whiskies will be sure to keep enthusiasts coming back again and again to Islay's August Distillery. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed the film. Please leave us a comment and don't forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel.