Bruichladdich Distillery

The Free Bacchus Story

Whisky is made from water, yeast and barley. Of the three, only the barley grew in a field — and on Islay, the island whose entire identity rests on tasting of where it comes from, that barley arrived by ferry for most of the last century.

There were good reasons. Islay is wet, wind-battered and blanketed in peat bog, which is exactly what makes its whisky taste the way it does and exactly what makes cereal farming hard. When Bruichladdich persuaded a local farmer to plant a malting crop in 2004, he was the first person to do so on the island in living memory. Two decades on, roughly twenty farming families grow barley for these stills, supplying something close to half of what the distillery uses.

The estate is candid about the limits. Its certified organic barley is grown at Mid Coul near Inverness, on the mainland, because the mainland climate permits what the certification requires. When it went looking for biodynamic barley, no farm in Scotland grew malting barley to that standard at all, and the certifying body found them Richard Gantlett at Yatesbury House Farm in Wiltshire, whose 2010 harvest became the first whisky in the world to carry the Demeter mark. English barley, stated plainly on the label rather than blurred into a general impression.

The distillery did not find a certified supplier so much as create one. It asked Richard Gantlett at Yatesbury House Farm to certify biodynamic and guaranteed a market for the barley before he did.

The same instinct runs through the sustainability reporting, which reads more like a lab notebook than a brochure: a failed anaerobic digester recorded as a failure, an unresolved green hydrogen study, a renewable fuel reported at nine percent of production in its first year, and a decarbonisation target moved from 2025 to 2030 in public. Note our own caveat too: the organic and biodynamic certifications apply to specific expressions, not the entire range. The Classic Laddie is very good whisky. It is not organic whisky.