Ardbeg is big in the USA.

Perhaps not Big in a Johnnie Walker, global brand way. But, certainly, in a quirky, cult-ish sort of way.

The brand's irreverent, fun image has captured the imagination of American peaty malt whisky drinkers since the distillery was rescued from closure and the brand relaunched in 1997.

But Ardbeg is not new to the American market. It has a history there that stretches back to an era when Victoria had only recently been crowned Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and there were only 26 States in the Union. Ardbeg has been in the USA longer than California!

The story begins on the south coast of the island of Islay in 1837, where Ardbeg experienced the first of several serious downturns in its rollercoaster history. Despite the best efforts of its founder John McDougall and his brother Alexander, the distillery had been unable to ride out a recent recession and J&A McDougall was declared insolvent. The business was placed in the hands of trustees, who looked around for a new owner.

Up stepped Thomas Buchanan Jr. of Buchanan, Wilson & Co, commission merchants in Glasgow. We can only guess that the firm had already been involved in business with Ardbeg, because in 1838 Thomas acquired the lease of the land on which the distillery stood and purchased the buildings and plant. He then leased the distillery back to Alexander McDougall, who began trading as Alexander McDougall & Co with the Glasgow firm acting as his agent.

McDougall continued to make Ardbeg, selling some of it on Islay and neighbouring islands. Buchanan, Wilson & Co obtained orders and sold it to customers elsewhere in the UK and abroad for a generous commission. The firm traded all over the world and whisky was just one of the commodities it dealt in: it wasn't long until Ardbeg began to appear in Australia and New Zealand as well as the USA.

In November the following year, the importer George Brown of Whitehall Street in Manhattan placed an advert in the New York Herald for Scotch ales as well as "Scotch whiskeys from the celebrated distilleries of Drummin, Glenlivet and Ardbeg". Ardbeg - along with the brand we know today as The Glenlivet - had arrived in New York.

During the 1840s, New York wholesalers such as John Caswell & Co of Front Street and Davis & Henriques of Wall Street continued to advertise parcels of Ardbeg, usually sold by the puncheon. During the 1850s, the brand appeared sporadically in newspaper adverts in other cities in the state, including Albany and Buffalo, as well as in Chicago, Galveston. It subsequently appeared in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis and others.

Ardbeg was sometimes advertised alongside another famous Islay whisky of the day, John Ramsay's from Port Ellen, but it seems unlikely that the two shared an agency. Indeed, adverts placed by the New York importers Lawrence Myers & Co stated quite clearly that they stocked 'Buchanan, Wilson & Co's celebrated Ardbeg Islay'.

While sales of Ardbeg were never large by modern standards, the whisky had clearly found a steady market by the 1880s. It grew much faster after that, when Culbert & Taylor (subsequently W. A. Taylor & Co) became the brand's US agency for The Ardbeg Distillery Company - a company name unknown in the UK but probably created for US market activities.

The Ardbeg Distillery Co joined a stable of well-known firms at Taylor's. The New York firm listed John Jameson & Co, Charles Tanqueray & Co, Gonzales Byass & Co and Martini & Rossi among the companies it represented. C.W. Craig & Co of San Francisco were Taylor's distributors on the West Coast.

Taylor's continued to represent The Ardbeg Distillery Co until the end of the First World War, but we have yet to find adverts for the brand placed by them during the period. There is, however, a series of intriguing notices placed by the Manhattan grocer L.J. Callanan from 1901 until 1910, for Ardbeg he had bottled himself at a variety of ages: the oldest, distilled in 1888 and bottled in 1907, was for sale at $4 a bottle, or $45 for one of the 19 cases in stock.

The surviving records from Ardbeg include correspondence discussing exports to the 'Harrisburg Clubs' in New York (under the brand name 'Shenila'), as well as a growing trade with Canada, Uruguay and Argentina. Exports continued after the outbreak of the First World War, to New York, Boston, San Francisco, Coney Island and Philadelphia. But then came a British Government instruction to close malt whisky distilleries to conserve barley stocks. When they reopened in 1919 the USA itself was closed to business, with the introduction of Prohibition, and Ardbeg exports ceased.

The story of Ardbeg in the USA is just one of many which seem to contradict the hoary old myth, that Americans did not discover single malt Scotch until the 1960s. In fact, there was clearly a small but long-established market for Islays such as Ardbeg and Port Ellen in particular. As happened in the rest of the world, single malts fell out of favour in the USA for much of the 20th century, as the Scotch whisky companies concentrated on marketing blended Scotches, and it took some years before American whisky drinkers rediscovered a taste for peaty single malts like Ardbeg. They've been thirstily making up for lost time ever since...