Anthony Wills, Rockside Farm and a first cask in December 2005.

Kilchoman is a farm distillery on the north-west of Islay, close to Machir Bay. It was founded by Anthony Wills, who, the whisky reference Whiskypedia on scotchwhisky.com says, had run his own independent single-cask bottling company for eight years before he proposed a distillery based on a working farm. The company’s own timeline says he first had the idea in 2001, after some twenty years in the drinks trade, and that the company was incorporated that November.

Islay was not an arbitrary choice. Whiskypedia says the island was picked for the reputation of its malts and because the family of Wills’s wife came from there; the company says Kathy Wills’s grandparents have lived on Islay since 1937. In 2004, the timeline says, Anthony, Kathy and their three teenage sons moved to the island, and building began late that year at Rockside Farm, a site Whiskypedia says was chosen because it had suitable buildings and grew the best malting barley on the island. The plan was a small farm distillery making whisky from barley grown and malted on site.

The first cask was filled on 14 December 2005, a date given both by the distillery and by English Wikipedia. The start was not smooth. The company says the project ran late and over budget, with trouble in the maltings, the boiler and the pipework, and that a kiln fire in 2006 stopped malting for several months; even so, it filled 353 casks in its first full year of distilling. English Wikipedia, citing the book Whisky Opus (2012), calls Kilchoman the first distillery built on Islay since 1908. The whisky consultant Jim Swan advised on the new-make spirit in those early years, the company says.

From an inaugural three-year-old to a whisky made entirely on the island.

The first whisky reached the market in September 2009, when the Inaugural Release, a vatting of three-year-old spirit, went on sale, Whiskypedia and English Wikipedia both record. The company says its bespoke bottle was created the following year, in 2010.

The release that defines the brand came in 2011. That year Kilchoman put out its first 100% Islay bottling, made from barley grown on the farm, malted on the distillery’s own floor, distilled, matured and bottled on site. The company calls it the first single farm single malt from Islay in over a century, and says every bottle has been filled on site ever since. English Wikipedia notes that Kilchoman is one of six Scottish distilleries that still use traditional floor maltings, and that it is unusual on Islay in handling every step from growing the barley to bottling. Not all the malt is its own: the same article says the distillery also buys more heavily peated malt from the Port Ellen maltings, elsewhere on the island. Whiskypedia sums up the approach in the company phrase “from barley to bottle.”

A core range followed. The company says Machir Bay, named after the nearby beach, launched in 2012 as its flagship, and that the first Loch Gorm edition came in 2013, the same year the Conisby warehouses were built. Sanaig, which the company says is mostly matured in sherry casks, was launched first in France and then worldwide in 2016, both English Wikipedia and the company say. In 2023 Kilchoman released a limited 16 Year Old, the oldest whisky it had then bottled, and the company says Batch Strength became a third core expression in 2024. English Wikipedia, citing the distillery’s own news, says its bourbon casks came from Buffalo Trace from 2005 until 2023 and from Breckenridge Distillery in Colorado since then.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all new-wave whisky distilleries: Sullivans Cove, Penderyn, Mackmyra, Stauning, Cotswolds Distillery, Nc’nean and Kilchoman. New-wave whisky distilleries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family businesses that still carry a founder’s name to companies that have taken in outside investors or changed hands, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a distillery shop to a specialist retailer abroad.

A whisky distillery’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, moved its production 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.

A family distillery that bought its farm and doubled its stills.

Kilchoman has stayed in the hands of the family that founded it. Whiskypedia describes it as owned by Anthony Wills and his family, and the whisky site Dramface reported in November 2025 that it remains independent and is run by two generations: Anthony and Kathy and their sons George, James and Peter, who between them cover everything from production to global sales.

The family first leased its land. The company says it had rented the farm since 2005 and bought it in 2015, and Whiskypedia records that Kilchoman Distillery Co purchased Rockside Farm that year. Expansion followed in stages. A new malt floor and kiln were completed in 2018, the company says, and scotchwhisky.com reported in August 2019 that a new still house, finished at the end of that May, had brought the distillery to four stills and close to 480,000 litres of pure alcohol a year. Anthony Wills told the site the new stills were “exactly the same” as the originals, and the same report noted that Kilchoman keeps all its maturing spirit rather than selling it to blenders. In a post on the distillery’s site that month, Wills wrote that without the extra capacity the company would have been heading toward selling its whisky only by allocation, and that his three sons were heavily involved in the business. A visitor centre and café opened in 2020, the company says.

By its twentieth year the business had grown well beyond its first plan. Dramface reported in 2025 that staff numbers had risen from five to 50, that the whisky was sold in more than 70 countries and that capacity had risen from 100,000 to 600,000 litres of alcohol a year. To mark the anniversary, Kilchoman released a four-part 20th Anniversary Cask Series, each a vatting of five casks, and offered the first 20-year-old whisky from Cask No. 1, filled on 14 December 2005, through a prize draw that supported Islay charities.

For a design guide, Kilchoman shows how a young distillery can build its identity on a single farm and a short, checkable phrase — barley to bottle — rather than on age or heritage. Compare Bruichladdich, whose distillery Whiskypedia places near Rockside Farm, and Ardbeg, one of the island’s long-established peated malts. For this guide we use Atlantic slate, barley gold and peat brown with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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