Port Ellen Distillery: Rebuilt for a New Century

You’d think that after spending £185 million rebuilding one of whisky’s most storied ghost distilleries, Diageo might be content to stick with the original blueprint. Make some classic-style smoky Scotch, sell a few limited editions, call it a win. But Port Ellen Distillery is doing something far more ambitious.

Rebuilding the myth

With its 200th anniversary in 2025, Port Ellen is pushing forward. It’s not just a distillery, it’s an R&D lab too, with smoke as its pet obsession. The team aren’t just making whisky. They’re poking it, prodding it, and asking what else it can be.

Getting there wasn’t exactly simple, though. Unlike Brora, there were just a few existing buildings left at Port Ellen that could be used. All the equipment was gone. The team pored over old factory records to try and build a distillery that could recreate the spark, bringing in former workers to help replicate the original process.

Construction was overseen by Islay-born Alexander McDonald, a man with experience at Lagavulin, Caol Ila, and Kilchoman. The stills were rebuilt to spec, based on the 1967–1983 set-up. The white-painted warehouses remain, standing proud on the seafront. And the maltings still pump out peat-rich barley for most of the island.

From ruins to revival

Let’s talk specs. Full capacity is 1.7m litres per annum. Port Ellen’s new production setup includes a full lauter mash tun that handles 5.5 to 7.5-tonne charges. Fermentation takes place in six wooden washbacks, and depending on who you ask, times range from 86 to 130 hours. The Phoenix stills (so-called because rising from the ashes wasn’t subtle enough) run low and slow to maximise reflux. The spirit is lightly peated to around 12ppm.

That’s the conventional setup. Then there’s the fun part.

In the same stillhouse sits a second, smaller set of stills, about a third the size of the Phoenix pair. These feed into the one-of-a-kind Ten Part Spirit Safe. While most distilleries make three cuts (heads, heart, tails), this bit of mad science lets the team make multiple cuts from within the heart itself. It’s like dissecting a rainbow to see what’s really in the middle of green. 

The Atlas of Smoke

This tech supports the distillery’s flagship experimental initiative: the Atlas of Smoke. It’s a long-term deep dive into how different variables affect smoky whisky. 

That means everything from peat source to cut points, fermentation to condensation, and beyond. Leading the charge is master blender Aimée Morrison, backed by a team of distillers, scientists and slightly obsessive nerds. The goal isn’t just to make smoky whisky, it’s to understand smoke as a flavour in all its variations, textures, and weird little surprises. To break smoke apart, figure it out, and reassemble it in new ways.

The research isn’t staying hidden in lab notebooks either. Ini Archibong (whose art accompanied that million-dollar cask in 2022) is back, creating a permanent piece for the distillery that interprets the sensory language of smoke through design. There’s also a one-off sculpture/whisky hybrid being donated to the Distillers One of One charity auction later this year. It’ll be expensive. And weird. It’ll be Port Ellen.

The whisky and the way forward

Then there’s the whisky. The Gemini release is the big one for 2025: two 44-year-old expressions from 1978. One’s been in European oak butts, the other in a remnant cask from the original site. It’s a statement piece. A flex, really. But it also sets a tone. Port Ellen is here to mix reverence with experimentation, to honour the past while actively dismantling it.

And if you want to see it all in person, you can. During Fèis Ìle 2025, Port Ellen hosted a small number of deeply nerdy tasting sessions. Attendees tried the early results of the Atlas of Smoke experiments, sipped rare old bottlings, and walked through the process with the people actually making it happen. 

If the 20th century gave us Port Ellen, the cult whisky, the 21st might give us something better: Port Ellen as a creative force. The rebuild might have started as a response to a dwindling market and may have been fuelled by nostalgia, but Port Ellen has evolved into a statement of intent. Beyond recapturing magic – it’ll be about discovering new ways to bottle it.

This is part two of a two-part special on Port Ellen. If you missed the first, Port Ellen: Too Big to Die, go read it for the full backstory on how this cult Islay distillery went from closure to legend to resurrection.

You can buy Port Ellen whisky from Master of Malt.

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