The Making of a Classic

“It feels like a lifetime ago,” says Julie Chalmers, HR Business Partner, of the first appearance of our all-aqua-coated Laddie Classic Edition 01. Julie is now our Human Resources Business Partner. Then, she was a few months into a role in the Laddie Shop Team.

Cast your mind back to 2009. Obama was sworn in for his first term as US president. Culturally, Minecraft entered the video game scene. Michael Jackson’s posthumous double album topped the charts in many countries after his death in June. Philips invented the 10W LED lightbulb; Dyson launched a fan with no blades.

Meanwhile, at Bruichladdich, the team of 42 had hit its stride - changing what whisky tasted like, looked like and how it was talked about. We had begun to announce ourselves on our packaging and around the place as "Progressive Hebridean Distillers”.

Our new all-aqua bottle would find itself in a forest of our other offerings. There were whiskies made from distinctive barleys, methodical series matured in a sequence of French or Italian wine casks, small batch age statements and single casks reflecting the limited stocks we had inherited, non-age statement thematic bottles… Julie calls it a “fascinating but overwhelming range”.

Simon Coughlin, one of our founders, explains how necessity was the mother of such invention. “The [pre-Renaissance] 10 year old was just getting older and our new make wasn't really ready to use yet… So we started creating things like Rocks, Waves and Peat, all the non-age blends...”

The first heavily peated Port Charlotte had come out in 2006, the first super-heavily peated Octomore in 2008. Meanwhile, “Bruichladdich” whisky could be unpeated or semi-peated or even called “Peat”. 

THE LIQUID
So the concept of a new, non-age-statement, unpeated, core cuvée would help to clarify our identity. “Bruichladdich was everything to everybody, it was all sorts of different things…” says Simon. With the new Laddie Classic, “We were saying, if you really want to know, try this. It's classic Bruichladdich and you should be able to tell the whole story of Bruichladdich through the Classic Laddie.”

Julie expands on this. “The release of the Classic gave our visitors our signature style within an island of peaty flavours… It was the go-to dram: no frills, no fuss—just the pure, classic Bruichladdich unpeated spirit matured in ex-bourbon casks. It was the perfect dram to appreciate the light spirit crafted from our tall copper stills and quality wood.” 

THE LOOK
“I remember it being quite a showstopper at the start,” says Julie.

Lisa Matthews, our new Assistant Blender, worked with Julie in the Laddie Shop team from 2011 - 13, around her university studies. She recalls, “After I had left, I remember I used to feel so chuffed when I spotted that iconic aqua bottle in a shop or bar back. Even abroad on holiday!”

“We’ve always wanted to challenge old ideas around what whisky can be,” she adds. “We’re not your classic, twee, tartan, shortbread, kilt-toting Scotch whisky brand.” The bold, non-nonsense typeface, from a German industrial font family, which we started to use around 2008 was part of this.

We had previously pioneered fully-coated bottles with some success. (We had to check the fill levels in our bottling hall on Islay with a special torch.) 2006, 2007, and 2008 saw Blacker, Redder, Golder Still. In 2009, came the original golden Organic, the charcoal Infinity third edition and the first Black Art.

But none of these coated bottles accommodated what had become our signature colour. Inspired by the colour of the Islay sea in the bay in front of the distillery, aqua had been used in various shades since day one - on the distillery gates, or as a feature colour on some previous labels, capsules and tins. We even had a distillery boat “The Laddie” which had an aqua cabin.

Simon remembers, by 2009, “There were quite a few people saying, 'Where's the aqua gone?'"

The reaction was, “Right, if people want the aqua, we'll give it to them in spades… So that's when it was born, the full Aqua thing. And there was a huge debate about it at the time, internally…

“I mean, it was out there! It was so out there, but it was so us."

In fact, the fully coated Classic bottle, and its immediate predecessor in 2008, the limited edition The Renaissance Dram (2001), were what prompted us to codify the exact shade that was to be Laddie Aqua evermore.

The design did come in for some criticism; “At the time, people said it looks like a perfume bottle!” Simon remembers. “But we were trying to make a statement. We wanted people to ask, 'Well, what's going on with that then? Who are these people?'"

The word “Laddie” had become firmly part of the distillery culture since the reopening. For native speakers, the “ch” of Bruichladdich isn’t sounded, so the youthful nickname was a natural fit. The Dictionaries of Scots has its usage listed as referring to a boy or youth "usually with familiar or affectionate force”. A good, folksy, counter-balance to any pretensions implied by the naming of our newest product “Classic” on day one, perhaps?

You might notice that the official name “The Classic Laddie” was actually a few iterations in. Back in 2009, already on the quest for greater transparency in Scotch whisky, “We used to put editions on everything,” says Simon, “because we didn't think we could match it all the time. Because you had a different profile of the liquid and different ages. So we thought, well, if we can't, then we can go edition two and edition three, as we did with the original 15 year old…”

But the next few years was a period of intense metamorphosis at Bruichladdich, from a startup to a sustainable force in the world of single malt whisky. In Simon’s words, “For years we were just a selection of bottlings, which were great and the market loved them! Well, they hated them and they loved them… Whereas we were starting to think, right, okay, now we need to get some order into it.” 

We were well into this journey towards a better realisation of what “Bruichladdich” signified, when the sale was agreed with Remy Cointreau in the summer of 2012. Before we became part of their comprehensive distribution network, Simon and our bottling hall team, and our warehousing team, and right back up the chain to Master Blender Jim McEwan, had had to get whisky ready reactively to meet specific orders from specific distributors in specific territories. “We were always chasing our tails,” recalls Simon.

Within the new system, there was a process of working out which lines were here to stay. The decision was taken to rationalise the Classic as “Scottish Barley” in 2013, so it could sit alongside a Bere Barley, or an Organic, or an Islay Barley. “It was educational,” says Simon, “but with hindsight, I think it got in the way a little bit.”

So from 2015, the language was reshuffled and phased out - Scottish Barley was relegated and Classic got the headline. To Simon’s mind, “When it became The Classic Laddie, I think you're making a statement - we’re saying this is the definitive us.”

THE LEGACY
Over the last decade, The Classic Laddie has continued to be our standard bearer, representing both our stocks of spirit and our values.

In 2016, we led a campaign for more transparency with it, publishing the recipes for all vattings since 2012, exposing the limits of the law. Lisa describes working on the recipe creation as “a privilege". Upwards of 80 casks of various sizes, previous usage, and barley types are vatted together to make it. “As a blender, I love the transparency of cask trace and that using the rotation numbers you can see every cask used in that particular batch,” she says. (The new system contains all recipes since 2018.)

In 2023, following our B Corp certification, we radically redesigned Classic Laddie’s packaging to cut CO2 emissions. A case of six bottles now weighs 7.5kg rather than 10.6kg. Read the full story of the bottle changes here. 

Since the summer of 2025, thanks to many years of consistent productivity, we’re able to say that all the stock used in The Classic Laddie going forward will be a minimum of 10 years old. If there was ever any prejudicial tension between age statement whiskies and non-age statement cuvées in the past, it has now been fully dissolved. Anyway, like the Classical Roman poet Horace, we would argue that it’s never purely the age of something that makes it “a classic”. Is there something in its power to endure, though, that earns the accolade?

Certainly, from backstage, The Classic Laddie seems limitless. Interesting but straightforward. More sustainable than ever, in all senses. Refreshing, in all senses. It’s fulfilling the destiny it was always meant for - expressing what Bruichladdich is, even as we evolve.