From Hector Henderson’s 1846 venture to the Distillers Company.

Caol Ila takes its name from the water it faces. English Wikipedia explains that the name comes from the Gaelic Caol Ìle, the “Sound of Islay,” the narrow strait between Islay and Jura, and the distillery stands on that shore near Port Askaig. It is a single malt Scotch whisky distillery owned today by Diageo.

The distillery was founded in 1846 by Hector Henderson. Writing in Whisky Magazine in January 2023, the whisky writer Gavin Smith noted that Henderson also owned the Camlachie distillery in Glasgow, and that his firm ran into financial difficulty. The sources differ on the date of the next sale: English Wikipedia gives 1854 for the takeover by Norman Buchanan, owner of the Isle of Jura distillery across the water, while Smith dates the sale six years after the founding. In 1863 the business passed to Bulloch Lade & Co, Glasgow traders in whisky stocks, English Wikipedia says.

The twentieth century brought it into the industry’s largest group. Bulloch Lade went into voluntary liquidation in 1920, and a consortium of businessmen formed the Caol Ila Distillery Company. According to English Wikipedia, the Distillers Company took a controlling interest in 1927, and in 1930 its subsidiary Scottish Malt Distillers obtained all the shares. The distillery was silent for much of the 1930s and closed again from 1942 to 1945 because of wartime limits on barley for distillers. The Distillers Company was later taken over by Guinness, which merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo in 1997, and Caol Ila came with it.

Its whisky had long had a regular customer. Smith wrote that the malt first appeared in the Johnnie Walker inventory in 1897.

A modernist still house behind a Victorian warehouse.

The Caol Ila that visitors see today is mostly a building of the 1970s. In 1972 the old distillery was demolished; Smith wrote in Whisky Magazine that everything except the stone-built warehouse came down, and that the site was replaced by a modernist structure over a two-year transformation. English Wikipedia credits the new distillery to the architect George Leslie Darge, built in the same style as many of his other distilleries, with his trademark glazed curtain walls to the still house, and says production resumed in 1974.

The result gives the brand two faces. The travel guide Undiscovered Scotland describes the surviving three-storey bonded warehouse at the southern end, with the distillery’s name painted in large black letters just below the roof, and the huge glass-fronted still house that dominates the view from the Jura ferry. English Wikipedia lists six stills, three wash and three spirit, and gives the water source as Loch nam Ban.

Size has become part of the story. Smith wrote that Caol Ila was already the largest distillery on Islay by capacity before Diageo announced a further expansion in November 2011; work in 2012 raised its potential output from 5.7 to 6.4 million litres a year. Diageo’s own visitor site describes it more modestly as one of the island’s largest producers of Scotch whisky.

Most of that spirit is not bottled under the Caol Ila name. English Wikipedia, citing Dorling Kindersley’s Whisky (2008), says around 95 per cent of the distillery’s production goes into blends such as Johnnie Walker Black Label. Distillery manager Sam Hale told Whisky Magazine in 2023 that in the blend “it provides the smoke.” Since 1999 the distillery has also made an unpeated spirit when Diageo’s stock needs call for it, Smith wrote, and unpeated bottlings have been released at ages from eight to 18 years.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Scotch whisky names: Monkey Shoulder, Whyte & Mackay, Auchentoshan, Old Pulteney, Glengoyne, Bunnahabhain and Caol Ila. Scotch whisky brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from distilleries that still carry the name of the place where they stand to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a hotel bar.

A whisky brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, rebuilt its distillery or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its whisky is actually distilled, matured and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its whisky is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The Islay home of Johnnie Walker.

In recent years Diageo has tied the distillery’s public face directly to the blend it supplies. Scottish Construction Now reported in April 2019 that Argyll & Bute Council had granted planning permission for a new visitor experience inside the shore-side warehouse, with a bar looking across the Sound, a footbridge onto the warehouse roof and new parking on the hill above; the plans said Caol Ila would become the Islay home of Johnnie Walker, linked to a new Johnnie Walker attraction in Edinburgh. The distillery was closed to the public from 2019 until August 2022, Whisky Magazine noted.

The Spirits Business reported on 26 August 2022 that the new visitor centre had opened after four years of work, the seventh of Diageo’s distilleries to be transformed. It completed the set of four that the magazine called key ingredients of the Johnnie Walker blend: Glenkinchie, Cardhu, Clynelish and Caol Ila. Diageo’s visitor page says arriving guests will know they are in the right place when they see the blue Johnnie Walker Striding Man sign. The distillery marked its 175th anniversary in 2021, and The Spirits Business reported in February 2022 that it had released a 24-year-old whisky for the occasion.

The name needs a little care: Caol Ila is also simply the Gaelic name of the strait, and the brand’s official pages sit on Diageo’s malts.com site rather than a standalone domain.

For a design guide, Caol Ila shows how a distillery that sends most of its spirit into blends can still build a recognisable identity from its place: a Gaelic name for a strait, a lettered Victorian warehouse and a glass still house facing Jura. Compare Johnnie Walker, the blend it has supplied since the 1890s, and Bunnahabhain, its neighbour on the Sound of Islay. For this guide we use sound teal, peat brown and limewash with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Caol Ila’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.