Ardnamurchan 2015-2022 - 7 Year Old - Little Brown Dog Spirits - Single Cask

Ardnamurchan is a small Highland distillery owned by the independent whisky bottlers Adelphi, one of whose co-owners, Donald Houston, is the laird of the Ardnamurchan estate in Western Highlands where the distillery was constructed in 2014. Ardnamurchan has one pair of stills making both peated and unpeated spirit and has a capacity of around half a million litres per annum.

After a series of limited work-in-progress bottlings, Ardnamurchan’s first single malt whisky was released in 2020. The inaugural single malt whisky bottling, Ardnamurchan AD/09.20:01, in common with most subsequent releases, was a combination of the distillery’s peated and unpeated spirit matured in both sherry and bourbon casks, and has been met with general acclaim.

Little Brown Dog Spirits is an Aberdeenshire-based independent bottler and micro distillery run by Andrew Smith and Chris Reid. Smith had started labelling his cask projects Little Brown Dog from 2013 in tribute to his canine companion, Banksy. Little Brown Dog Spirits was registered in 2018, when Smith brought Reid on board and the company began small distillation projects on a 10-litre pot still and a 100 litre Alembic still used for rectifying grain neutral spirits for the company’s series of experimental gins.

Little Brown Dog’s first independent whisky bottlings appeared in 2020; the company has a small but extremely eclectic portfolio of releases so far, with single malt and grain whiskies joined by the Wee Mongrel small batch blended malt whiskies and adventurous bottlings such as the Petit Chien Brun Calvados and Li’l Brown Dawg rye whiskey. The company switched from 50cl to 70cl bottles for their products near the end of 2022.