Landscape photograph of Kilchoman distillery.

Distillery · Rank 99

Kilchoman

Kilchoman is a farm-based Islay distillery producing vivid peated spirit with citrus, cereal, and maritime energy, including whisky made entirely from barley grown on site.

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Common information

At a glance.

Region: Islay
Location: Rockside Farm, Isle of Islay (opens in a new tab)
Date opened: 2005
Volume: 1m LPA
Distillery Master: Anthony Wills · Founder and Master Distiller
Collection records: 0 records
Production rank: 99 of 141 by listed capacity

Production

Distinct house style

Kilchoman is a farm-based Islay distillery producing vivid peated spirit with citrus, cereal, and maritime energy, including whisky made entirely from barley grown on site.

Kilchoman combines a compact farm-distillery scale with peated spirit; its 100% Islay releases bring barley growing, floor malting, distillation, maturation and bottling onto the island.

Process

The useful details are physical.

Still shape, fermentation, condensation, peat policy and cask selection are treated here as production choices—not as guarantees that every release will taste identical.

House style

Character before marketing.

The distillery character describes the underlying make. Age, batch and cask history can move an individual bottling well beyond that starting point.

History

From its beginnings

Anthony and Kathy Wills established Kilchoman in 2005, the first new distillery built on Islay for more than a century. Its first cask was filled that December.

Kilchoman remains an operating Scotch whisky distillery at Rockside Farm, Isle of Islay. Its present identity joins the accumulated fabric of the site to an active production tradition, while discontinued bottlings belong to the range history rather than defining the distillery today.

2005

Foundation

The working chronology begins in 2005; later closures, rebuilding or ownership changes are part of the individual history rather than a reason to reset that founding date.

Present day

Continuity is not stasis.

Equipment, capacity and ranges evolve. The identity of the distillery is carried by its site, production knowledge and maturing stock rather than by one frozen historic specification.

Identity

The character

Kilchoman belongs to Islay, but region is only a map reference. Its more informative identity comes from the production decisions above and from the way its spirit responds to maturation.

This distinction matters when reading a bottle: the distillery name identifies the origin of the spirit, while the expression, age, cask recipe and bottling strength describe the particular release.

Place

Rockside Farm, Isle of Islay

Rockside Farm, Isle of Islay is the operating location recorded for Kilchoman; the map link above opens the site independently of any visitor-centre branding.

Region

Islay

The regional label is retained for navigation and comparison, not presented as a complete prediction of flavour.

Distillery details

Important facts

A distillery is best understood through its permanent site story, working methods and maturing stock rather than through an old award list or one discontinued expression. The range plate below records a particular moment in that longer life.

Distinctive record

One detail worth retaining.

When production began in 2005, Kilchoman was Islay's first new distillery for more than a century. Its farm model restored several stages of whisky making to one site.

Production signature

A repeatable house method.

Kilchoman combines a compact farm-distillery scale with peated spirit; its 100% Islay releases bring barley growing, floor malting, distillation, maturation and bottling onto the island.

Range context

A changing family of expressions.

The final image may include past expressions. It is a visual archive of the whisky family, not a promise that every bottle remains in the current range.

Whisky range

A group of Kilchoman whisky expressions from the editorial archive.

Scotch Whisky Collection

0 records.

Cataloguing in progress

No bottle records are linked yet

The distillery is present in the production catalogue. Bottle relationships will be refined as working image labels are verified.