Story serves up Badger Juice for Ardbeg House

To coincide with the grand opening of Ardbeg House (Ardbeg Distillery’s fabulous boutique whisky hotel on Islay) we’re proud to reveal two finishing touches concocted by Story’s creative team.

Ardbeg House has been designed to offer visitors and locals an extraordinary opportunity to experience world-class whisky and hospitality, while being immersed in Ardbeg’s legendary brand world. So we were delighted to bring our brand knowledge and storytelling to the ultimate Ardbeggian abode.

Badger Juice at the Islay Bar

The idea of naming a whisky ‘Badger Juice’ (badger being an anagram of Ardbeg) has been floating around for years, and it finally came to fruition with this project. Served to hotel guests every day at 18:15 – a nod to the Distillery’s founding year – Badger Juice is small batch whisky made to a secret recipe known only to the Distillery team. 

Story designed the identity for this rare whisky, turning the brand logo upside down to create a badger head and ensuring the anagram in the name was understood. 

And we turned the cask into a conversation piece – a hand-painted badger firkin to sit in pride of place in the Islay Bar. 

Bespoke bedroom booklets

To bring guests even closer to the Ardbeg brand, we wrote, designed and produced a suite of bespoke booklets, one for each of the hotel’s 12 uniquely themed rooms. Telling tall tales about the Distillery and the island, they make irresistible bedtime reading. Highly tactile, highly entertaining, highly stealable.

Header image courtesy of Sim Cannetty Clark