Above the village of Port Charlotte, on the Rhinns of Islay, there is a hill with a farm on top of it. It is called Octomore, from the Gaelic Ochdamh-mòr, the big eighth: the name of an old division of common land. From up there you can see Loch Indaal and, on a clear day, the coast of Northern Ireland. It is the name Bruichladdich gave to the peatiest whisky in the world.
This is neither a ranking nor a review. It is the story of where Octomore comes from, of what the numbers on the label mean, and of the bottles I have bought over the years: the 06.3, the 08.3 and the 11.1. One I still have not had the courage to open, one I bought in a hurry shortly before Brexit, the third I enjoyed to the last drop.
The farm that gives its name to everything
Octomore Farm sits two miles from the distillery, on an exposed, windy spot above Port Charlotte. It is run by James Brown, whose family arrived there as tenants when he was eight and bought the land in 1983; today it is passing to his son Graham, who worked as a bricklayer in Edinburgh before coming back to the island and taking a job on the stills.
The bond between the farm and Bruichladdich is not only about barley. The Octomore spring supplies the water the distillery uses to reduce and bottle its whisky, and the water for The Botanist gin as well: two ten-thousand-litre tankers, twice a week. The barley has been going down to the distillery since 2007, and it took a few more years before it turned into whisky in a bottle.
There is a distillery in that story too, but it no longer exists. From 1816 the Montgomerys distilled up there on a farm scale, a few dozen casks a year; the business died out around the middle of the century, and the sources disagree on the exact year (1840 for some, 1852 for others). What remains are the buildings around the yard, some collapsed and some turned into holiday cottages. Today’s Octomore is not a continuation of that distillery: it is a name brought back, and a piece of land that grows barley.
Jim McEwan’s idea
The rest was done by a man who had already spent 38 years inside Bowmore before crossing Loch Indaal. Jim McEwan came to Bruichladdich in 2000, with the distillery just bought by Mark Reynier and silent for years, and stayed fifteen years as master distiller.
The idea for Octomore, as the distillery tells it, came over a dram at the Port Charlotte Hotel: if the elegance of Bruichladdich spirit still comes through at 40 ppm, what happens if you push the peat further? The technical answer came from a local fish smoker, who explained that fish is smoked low and slow for days, not cooked. “You’re curing it. You’re not cooking it”, McEwan recalls. Applied to barley, that means long, slow smoke, with the malt taking on far more phenols without cooking.
The first distillation ran on 23 September 2002. McEwan retired in July 2015 and since then the series has been signed by Adam Hannett, who joined the distillery in 2004, starting in the shop. In 2017 McEwan went back to work at Ardnahoe, on the other side of the island.
What the ppm on the malt mean
The malt is made by Bairds Malt in Inverness, in Saladin boxes: the barley is steeped, germinated and kilned in the same box, while outside peat bricks burn for two or three days and the smoke is ducted in. For Octomore the barley is exposed for five days over lower heat, which is the fish smoker’s lesson exactly: more time, less heat, more phenols clinging to the grain.
The ppm printed on the tin are those of the malt. Bruichladdich says so itself, and points out that phenol levels fall through distillation and maturation. A large share of the phenols stays behind in the distillation residues, and only a fraction of them reaches the heart of the spirit. The number on the label is a statement of intent, not a measure of how much smoke you get. I went into it in more detail in the guide to what ppm actually measure.
Two details I did not expect, read on the distillery’s own site. The first: to hit the exact figure asked for, Bairds cuts the ultra-peated malt with unpeated malt. The second: Bruichladdich states that it does not adjust the cuts in distillation to claw back more phenols, and that below 80 ppm on the malt a whisky is not called Octomore.
How to read the numbers on the tin
The number before the dot is the series, released once a year: the 17 is the 2026 one, the 18 lands in 2027.
The .1 starts from Scottish mainland barley and matures in American oak, usually first-fill ex-bourbon: it is the benchmark of the series, the one where the spirit comes through best. The .2 uses the same barley as the .1 but goes into European oak, almost always casks that held wine. The .3 is the one with Islay barley: grown by James Brown on the hill, single field, single vintage, Octomore by definition from the grain to the bottle. The .4, introduced with the seventh series, is the most experimental and brings in virgin oak. In the sixteenth series the pair 16.1 and 16.2 starts from the same malt at 101.4 ppm and only the casks change, while 16.3 and 16.4 come from Church Field barley, malted to almost double that.
The .3 is the one I care about, and not out of snobbery: it is the only one where the barley comes from one specific field two miles from the stills, harvested in a single year, malted and distilled separately from everything else. As I said, Octomore by definition, at its purest. Terroir in a young, heavily peated whisky ought to be buried under the smoke. Instead you can taste it, and it changes from vintage to vintage.
Three bottles, “at random”
06.3: power and balance
The 06.3 is the first Octomore made entirely from Islay barley: harvested in the Lorgba field at Octomore Farm, malted to 258 ppm, five years in cask, 64%. It came out in 2014, with the tasting notes still signed by Jim McEwan.
Of all the bottles I have opened, this is the one that holds power and balance together. At 64% and 258 ppm it should land like a punch. Instead the peat does not come at you, it comes underneath: it carries the red fruit and the dark chocolate without ever covering them. This is not tamed peat, it is peat in balance: you can tell exactly how much of it is in there, and at the same time it never stops you tasting anything else. McEwan wrote “mesmerising in its potency, with perfect balance” in the official notes, and for once the producer’s line is not marketing: it is exactly what happens in the glass.
08.3: 309.1 ppm
The autumn of 2010 on Islay was wet and windy. The harvest came late, greylag geese and red deer ate through part of the fields, and James Brown was left with very little barley. Out of that little came the 08.3: 309.1 ppm on the malt, five years, 61.2%, 56% first-fill ex-bourbon casks and the rest wine casks: Pauillac, Ventoux, Rhône, Burgundy. It was released in September 2017 and is still the most heavily peated single malt ever declared.
I tried it at Lucci’s Whisky Bar at the Bowmore Hotel. Back then I knew relatively little about Octomore, even though I already had the 11.1. I had just met Peter Jnr and his bar, and on the last of those very few evenings on my first trip to Islay I asked him for a very peated whisky. He did not have to think twice before pouring me the 08.3.
I am the sort who noses a whisky for several minutes before drinking it. What came up was deep smoke, dense and clean. On the first sip I expected to be knocked over, and instead the first impression was hard to pin down. The second sip opened everything up: cherry, peach, dark chocolate, seaweed, and underneath a black cloud that would not shift. Delicate, clean, deep and sharp. The official notes call it “a thunderstorm of a dram”, and I cannot find a better way to put it.
A bottle of it I later won at auction. It is at home, unopened. Every so often I look at it and think I should open it, then I check what it does on the market today and put it back in its hiding place. I know it is the opposite of what everyone says, that whisky is made to be drunk: that particular bottle, for now, I cannot treat that way.
11.1: the first one, almost by chance
The 11.1 is from 2020 and is the benchmark of its series: Scottish Concerto and Propino barley from the 2013 harvest, malted to 139.6 ppm, distilled in 2014 and left for five years entirely on Islay in first-fill casks that had held American whiskey (Jim Beam, Heaven Hill, Jack Daniel’s). It is bottled at 59.4%, in 30,000 bottles.
It was my first Octomore, and I bought it on the distillery’s website a few days before Brexit stopped the shop shipping whisky to Italy. That is not a figure of speech: in the spring of 2021 Bruichladdich’s shipping page listed Italy among the countries it could send non-alcoholic products to only. That list has grown since, and Italy is still on it.
In the glass it is the palest of the three, lemon in colour. The nose opens on lemon and wet peat, with a salty minerality underneath; on the palate brown sugar arrives first and then the heat of the strength carries the peat all the way, turning earthy, tarry and bonfire-like on the finish. It is the easiest of the three to read: mainland barley, American casks only, no wine in between. What you taste is the spirit with the peat on top.
And then there is the tin
Something unromantic has to be said about these bottles: they are very tall. The narrow, long metal cylinder does not fit in a normal drinks cabinet. Or rather it does, as long as you give up the space on the shelf above. And even then it is a tight squeeze. Mine now live on top of the cabinet, out in the open, lording it over the other whiskies.
It is a slightly silly detail, but it says something about the project: Octomore is built to be noticed, from the shape of the tin to the numbers on the label to the price. After six years of drinking them, what still surprises me is not the ppm record, but that a five-year-old whisky never tastes young.
Octomore today
The series on sale now is the 17, out since 1 September 2026, and it goes the other way from the records: 81 ppm for the 17.1 and 17.2, 132.1 for the 17.3 from Irene’s Field. The 18 series, with the labels already revealed and release in 2027, goes back to 309.1 ppm: the 18.3 comes from the same lean 2010 harvest, distilled in 2011 like the 08.3, but it will spend fifteen years in cask instead of five.
It will be the most interesting comparison of the next few years: same harvest, same field, same figure on the malt, ten years apart inside the cask. If my 08.3 stays shut a little longer, I may well end up opening them side by side.
In the meantime, if someone wanted to start: the .1 shows you the spirit, the .3 with a few years behind it is where the hill above Port Charlotte comes through most. The rest of the range, Port Charlotte and Black Art included, I covered in the Bruichladdich distillery guide.
