About Ardnahoe

Ardnahoe is located in the north of the island, facing Jura and near Port Askaig. “We think it’s the most perfect location from a scenic point of view for a whisky,” Andrew Laing from Hunter Laing told me back in 2019. It’s a family business run by Stewart Laing and his two sons, Andrew and Scott. The company, which bottles whisky and rum, has been going in its present form since 2013, though the Laing family has been in the whisky business much longer.

A distillery of their own was the inevitable next step. “We looked at a couple of options to buy distilleries, but it became apparent that for reasons of cost and for reasons of finding the right project, that we really needed to build one rather than to buy one,” Andrew explained. “ If you’re building a distillery, from our point of view, the only place to build one was Islay.” The Laing family has history on the island. “On my grandmother’s side, on my dad’s side, we have a family connection to Islay going back to the 1700s. More recently my father studied whisky making at Bruichladdich in 1966,” he continued. Pater familias Stewart Laing described having their own distillery as “a personal ambition of mine ever since I was posted to work on Islay at Bruichladdich back in the 1960s.”

Adnahoe officially opened in 2019 and has become such a fixture on the Islay scene that we sometimes forget that until now it had not released a whisky. The advantage of being a whisky bottler like Hunter Laing is that they have no shortage of things to sell to visitors.