BEN NEVIS DISTILLERY Hepburns Choice 11yo

Hunter Laing & Co was established in 2013, when the brothers Fred and Stewart of Douglas Laing & Co decided to split the company assets and operate their own independent bottling operations. While Fred Laing was joined by his daughter Cara, Stewart Laing’s two sons Andrew and Scott were recruited to the new firm.

As a young man Stewart Laing learnt about the whisky business at Bruichladdich distillery on Islay when it was in the ownership of A&B Grant & Co, then working for Stevenson Taylor & Co, a wine and spirits company, gaining greater experience of the commercial side of the Scotch whisky industry.

He then joined the family company of Douglas Laing & Co, initially being involved in the bottling side of the operation, before accompanying his father Fred on sales trips to the firm’s key blended Scotch markets in Asia and South America. Following the death of Fred senior in 1982, Stewart and his brother Fred ran the business until 2013, moving away from the export blend market to concentrate on specialised single malt bottlings.

In 2016, Hunter Laing & Co. revealed plans to build its own single malt distillery on Islay to meet rising demand for peated Scotch whisky. Ardnahoe distillery, situated on the island’s east coast, filled its first cask of whisky on 9 November 2018, and opened to the public the following April.

It became part of the Peter Mackenzie blending house in 1886, but like many distilleries suffered during the economic troubles of the 1930s and fell silent between 1932 and 1949. In the interim period however Mackenzie (and its estate, which also included Dufftown distillery) had been bought by Perth-based blender, Arthur Bell & Sons.

By the 1970s, Bell’s was being built into the UK’s top-selling blended Scotch and, as a result, Blair Athol was doubled in capacity. Guinness (which bought Bell’s in 1985, and after further mergers evolved into Diageo) opened a visitor’s centre in 1987.

In an attempt to tap into the then infant single malt market, Bell’s bottled it as an eight-year-old in the 1980s, but in the Diageo era it has only appeared as a member of the Flora & Fauna range (at 12 years of age), matured in first-fill ex-Sherry casks.