Articles

2026-10-08 — Billy Walker rebuilt BenRiach (2004), GlenDronach (2008), Glenglassaugh (2013), sold all three to Brown-Forman in 2016 for £285M, then bought GlenAllachie at 71.

2026-10-07 — Dunnage warehouses stack casks 3-high on earth floors at 85% humidity. Macallan racks 12-high. The maturation math differs.

2026-10-03 — Non-chill filtered whisky needs 46% ABV so C12-C18 fatty-acid ethyl esters stay in solution. Jim Beveridge, Ian MacMillan, John Glaser on skipping the chill filter.

2026-10-02 — Alexander Walker (1837-1889) learned blending in a Glasgow tea shop and used it to build Old Highland Whisky in 1865. The rule it set — same bottle every time — is still the shape of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

2026-09-25 — Redbreast 12 review: Barry Crockett pot still, unmalted-barley mash from Ireland's 1785 Malt Tax, bourbon and oloroso, 40% ABV.

2026-09-18 — Balvenie 12 DoubleWood review: David Stewart's 1993 two-cask design — 12 yrs American oak, then 9 months oloroso, 43% in the US and 40% in the UK.

2026-09-10 — Aberfeldy 12 vs 21 review: same 40% ABV, wider ex-sherry share at 21. Stephanie Macleod has held the flagship steady since 2006.

2026-08-31 — Four Roses ships 10 bourbons: 2 mashbills × 5 yeasts. Jim Rutledge kept the grid alive as Seagram closed four distilleries around him.

2026-08-25 — Bunnahabhain 12 (46.3% ABV, non-chill filtered, ~2 ppm phenol) is Islay's unpeated flagship. Ian MacMillan's 2010 decision to stop chill-filtering and adding E150a, in one bottle.

2026-08-16 — Masataka Taketsuru filled 3 notebooks in Scotland 1918-1920: Longmorn, Bo'ness, Hazelburn. 16 years later, Nikka's Yoichi was built from them.

2026-08-14 — John Glaser founded Compass Box in 2000, disclosed full cask breakdowns in 2015, was flagged by the SWA, and lost the 2017 transparency vote.

2026-08-11 — Glenlivet 12 is drier citrus-almond, Glenfiddich 12 sweeter pear-vanilla. Both 40%, same ¥5-6K. Which to pour first, by use case.

2026-08-10 — Kavalan Solist Sherry Cask: 58% Oloroso butt, Ian Chang's Yilan maturation. 4 Taiwan years ≈ 12 Scotch years — subtropical shortcut through sherry.

2026-08-09 — Lagavulin 16 (35 ppm Islay) vs Talisker 10 (20 ppm Skye). Shell-and-tube vs worm tubs, 43% vs 45.8% — Diageo's two peats share zero flavor.

2026-08-08 — Lagavulin 16 review: 35 ppm Islay peat, refill sherry casks, 43% ABV, unchanged since 1988 — Iain McArthur's 50-year phenol curve.

2026-08-07 — Clynelish 14 review: waxy mouthfeel from refill bourbon casks at 46% non-chill-filtered. Core malt of Johnnie Walker Gold.

2026-08-02 — Bowmore 12 at 25 ppm malt (~10 ppm in glass). Aged below sea level in the 1779 No.1 Vaults, Scotland's oldest warehouse. £30 / ¥4,500 entry Islay.

2026-08-01 — Sandy Hyslop was Ballantine's fifth master blender (2005–2025) — stewarding Chivas Regal 25 and Ballantine's 17 for twenty years.

2026-07-29 — Coffey still vs pot still compared: 94% vs 65% ABV in one pass, 1830 patent, and why blended Scotch exists at all.

2026-07-22 — Bill Lumsden's ten Glenmorangie Private Editions (Sonnalta 2010 to Allta 2019) each isolated one variable — cask, barley, mash, yeast — against a fixed 5.14m still.

2026-07-21 — Ardbeg 10 vs Laphroaig 10: try Ardbeg first — 55 ppm, purifier, 46%. Then Laphroaig — 40 ppm, no purifier, 40%. Plumbing decides.

2026-07-17 — Phenol ppm measures the malt, not the spirit. Frances Jack's SWRI HPLC method: Ardbeg 55 ppm malt lands at ~12 in the glass.

2026-07-12 — DMS is whisky's meaty sulfur note. Copper turns it to odorless DMSO — unless worm tubs cut contact. Cowie kept it at Mortlach in 1897; Winchester on the modern trade.

2026-07-10 — Worm tub whisky: a 40m copper coil, not shell-and-tube. 16 Scotch distilleries keep it for heavier, DMS-rich spirit — 20:1 less copper area.

2026-07-08 — Jimmy Russell joined Wild Turkey in 1954 and held its barrel entry proof at 107 for forty-four years. In 2004 it went to 110 anyway. What he actually got to decide.

2026-07-07 — Bowmore hired Eddie MacAffer in 1966 to dig drains. Fifty years later he retired as master distiller. What hand-turning barley for half a century kept in the bottle, and what it cost.

2026-07-06 — Fettercairn is the only Scotch distillery to cool its spirit stills from outside — a copper collar dripping cold water since Alexander Menzies fitted the first in 1953.

2026-07-03 — Alligator Char (Char #4) is the deepest bourbon barrel char at 55 seconds of flame. Jimmy Russell and Chris Morris explain char #1-#4 and oak chemistry.

2026-07-02 — Ben Nevis 10 tasted against Highland Park 12 and Glenlivet 12: a 46% non-chill-filtered Highland malt from stills Nikka has left unchanged since 1989.

2026-06-30 — In 1949 Sam Bronfman bought Chivas Brothers for £85,070 and Strathisla for £71,000 a year later. The Speyside supply chain he built still anchors Chivas Regal 12.

2026-06-29 — Mortlach's 2.81 is a weighted average of three asymmetric still lanes, with the Wee Witchie as a partial-reflux filter. Cowie, 1897.

2026-06-28 — Bushmills Black Bush tasted next to Redbreast 12: triple-distilled malt at about 80% of the blend, Oloroso and bourbon casks, 40% ABV, around £25-32 in the UK.

2026-06-27 — Matt Hofmann started Westland in Seattle in 2010 and found a fourth whisky oak: Quercus garryana, a Pacific Northwest tree that lost 95% of its range. The chemistry, the 21% blend ratio, and the fallen-tree-only supply ceiling are all in the bottle.

2026-06-26 — John "Long John" MacDonald (6'4") licensed Ben Nevis distillery in 1825 and died bankrupt October 1856. Brand: Pernod Ricard; distillery: Nikka.

2026-06-25 — John Teeling built Cooley Distillery in 1987, ending Ireland's whiskey duopoly. Sold to Beam for USD 95M in 2011; sons opened a new Dublin distillery in 2015.

2026-06-24 — Johnnie Walker Blue Ghost & Rare: Jim Beveridge blended Brora and Port Ellen into Blue Label in 2017 — closed-distillery editions designed to never taste alike.

2026-06-23 — Buffalo Trace's Warehouse X isolates evaporation across four climate chambers. What Harlen Wheatley learned about the angels' share.

2026-06-22 — In 1882 William Sanderson lined up nearly 100 numbered vats of blended whisky in Leith and let a blind panel choose. They picked vat 69, and the name stuck.

2026-06-20 — Pattisons Ltd of Leith stopped payment in December 1898, exposing a £500,000 asset gap. About ten firms failed with it, and the whisky loch followed.

2026-06-19 — Three years before Aeneas Coffey, Robert Stein patented the first working continuous still at Kilbagie in 1827. It was the cleverer machine. It lost to the simpler one, and his name went with it.

2026-06-18 — Wort clarity in whisky: the 2:7:1 grist ratio (husk:grits:flour) makes a filter bed in the mash tun. Clear wort runs fruity, cloudy runs nutty new-make.

2026-06-17 — GlenDronach 15 Revival: 46% ABV, full-term PX + oloroso. Billy Walker's 2009 recipe, 2015-2018 gap, Rachel Barrie's 2018 rebuild.

2026-06-16 — Elizabeth Cumming inherited a Speyside farm distillery as a pregnant widow in 1872, tripled it, sold its cast-off stills to the man who built Glenfiddich, and in 1893 sold the whole thing to John Walker & Sons. She traded independence for permanence, and it worked.

2026-06-15 — In 2010 The Glenlivet built six new stills and grew 75% to 10.5 million litres. Alan Winchester's engineering decision was to freeze every variable, even the ones nobody can explain, because still geometry sets the spirit and you cannot prove which curve matters.

2026-06-14 — Amrut Fusion: 4 years in Bangalore ≈ 12 in Scotland. 25% peated Scottish + 75% Indian barley, 50% ABV, 11-12% angel's share.

2026-06-13 — Malt Mill: the Islay distillery Peter Mackie built inside Lagavulin in 1908 to clone Laphroaig — same stills, same peat, closed in 1962.

2026-06-12 — A pot still is the one piece of the distillery you slowly drink away. The copper that strips sulphur from the spirit is consumed by the same reaction, and Richard Forsyth's family in Rothes has spent four generations hammering replacements. This is the chemistry, the lifespan, and the economics of a catalyst that erodes.

2026-06-11 — Glenmorangie Original (10 Year, 40% ABV): 5.14m stills — Scotland's tallest — strip heavy oils, leaving peach and citrus. First-fill bourbon adds the vanilla.

2026-06-10 — The whisky spirit cut splits every run into heads, heart, and feints — only the 75-60% ABV heart reaches the cask. Here's how Glenturret still calls it by eye.

2026-06-09 — Alistair Cunningham spent fifty years at Ballantine's and is remembered for the blend. The thing he actually invented — a pot still you could tune like an instrument — was rejected because nobody could clean it. The two survivors threw the plates away.

2026-06-08 — Ardbeg 10 review: 55 ppm phenol — Islay's highest — yet lighter and more citric than its neighbours. Mickey Heads kept the purifier pipe running for 13 years.

2026-06-07 — Glengoyne runs its spirit still at ~4 litres/min. Manager Robbie Hughes calls it nursing the vapour: slow reflux + copper contact → sulphur-free, ester-led new make. The trade-off is throughput.

2026-06-06 — Mortlach bookkeeper William Grant paid £119 19s 10d for Cardhu's used stills in 1886 and built Glenfiddich with his family; first spirit ran Christmas Day 1887.

2026-06-05 — Miyagikyo Single Malt beside Yoichi: one man, two distilleries, two opposite engineering decisions. Steam instead of fire, soft water, the tallest pot stills in Japan, and why the spirit comes out pear instead of driftwood.

2026-06-04 — Clynelish 14 waxy: fatty acids built up in the feints tank for 50 years. Jim Beveridge used that residue as Johnnie Walker Gold's spine.

2026-06-03 — Suntory 1929 Shirofuda — Japan's first whisky, too peated for local palates. Shinjiro Torii's 1937 rewrite became Kakubin.

2026-06-02 — Three bottles of Mackinlay's malt sat frozen under Shackleton's Antarctic hut for a century. Richard Paterson and a team of chemists reverse-engineered the recipe by gas chromatography, only to find the original distillery, Glen Mhor, no longer exists to taste the result.

2026-06-01 — Arran 10 review: 46% ABV non-chill filtered single malt, ~£40. Harold Currie's 1995 bet on Lochranza — Arran's first legal distillery in 158 years — shaped since 2007 by ex-Bowmore James MacTaggart.

2026-05-31 — Loch Lomond's straight-neck rectifying stills let you choose where to draw the spirit. Master blender Michael Henry, a distilling scientist, runs them like a control problem.

2026-05-30 — Benromach 10: a lightly peated Speyside that Gordon & MacPhail reverse-engineered to rebuild a flavour spec the 1960s threw away, with the Urquhart family and a manager who started as sweeper.

2026-05-28 — Anthony Wills built Kilchoman in 2005 — Islay's first new distillery since 1908 and its only farm-to-bottle one, running two phenol specs through one stillhouse. Barley-to-glass as engineering.

2026-05-27 — Joseph Hobbs installed a Coffey still at Ben Nevis Distillery in 1955. Nikka bought the site in 1989 and still runs that column.

2026-05-26 — Octomore malt is 300 ppm phenol, Port Charlotte 40, same tall stills. Adam Hannett sets the peat on the malt, not the still.

2026-05-25 — Glen Scotia 15 review: 46% ABV Campbeltown single malt from Iain McAlister, bourbon-led with an oloroso finish, non-chill-filtered.

2026-05-24 — From 1991 to 2009 John Ramsay signed off up to 600 samples a day across Macallan, Highland Park, Glenrothes and Famous Grouse — keeping them the same for seventeen years, inventing none.

2026-05-23 — Glenmorangie's honey-citrus profile is half made in the fermentation tank, not the 5.14m still. Brendan McCarron watches it — long fermentation, ester chemistry, and Allta wild yeast.

2026-05-22 — Aberfeldy 12 review: heather honey, baked apple, 40% ABV, from a 72-88 hour Perthshire fermentation. Signed by Stephanie Macleod.

2026-05-21 — Alfred Barnard visited all 162 UK whisky distilleries between 1885 and 1887 (129 Scottish, 29 Irish, 4 English), recording stills, washbacks and annual output.

2026-05-20 — Stuart MacPherson spent a decade as Macallan's Master of Wood choosing which forest each cask came from — the lactone math behind three oak species and why Mizunara needs fifteen years.

2026-05-19 — Kilkerran 12 against Springbank 10: the Mitchell-family chairman who bought back a distillery silent since 1925, then waited twelve more years to bottle its own twelve-year single malt.

2026-05-18 — John Haig licensed Aeneas Coffey's 1830 patent still at Cameronbridge in the 1830s, distilling grain to 94% ABV. The distillery now makes 105m litres a year.

2026-05-17 — Caol Ila 12 review: 35 ppm peat, 43% ABV. Tall stills at Diageo's largest Islay strip sulfur — citric smoke, not oily.

2026-05-16 — Pagoda roof — Charles Doig drew Dailuaine's kiln vent on 3 May 1889, never patented. 56 Scotch distilleries copied it: Highland Park, Talisker, Laphroaig.

2026-05-15 — Glen Grant has run a water-cooled purifier on every still since 1872. Major James Grant retrofitted rather than rebuilt; Dennis Malcolm spent 63 years deciding not to remove it.

2026-05-14 — Cragganmore 12 and its worm tubs: a 22-stone distiller who ran six distilleries before building his own in 1869, and a cooling-and-lyne-arm decision four corporate owners declined to undo.

2026-05-13 — Bessie Williamson owned Laphroaig 1954-1972. Her 1962 sale clause kept floor malting alive through four corporate owners.

2026-05-12 — Talisker 10 at 45.8% beside Oban 14 and Clynelish 14: five stills in a 2:3 ratio left from triple distillation, and worm tubs that survived the 1960 fire.

2026-05-11 — Rachel Barrie has been master blender for BenRiach, GlenDronach and Glenglassaugh since 2017 — how her sherry-cask matrix works.

2026-05-10 — STR means shaved, toasted, re-charred: 3-5 mm shaved off a used wine barrel, toasted at 180-220C, re-charred at 700C. Jim Swan ran it at Penderyn from 2004.

2026-05-09 — Highland Park 12 review: 4-6 ppm heather peat from Hobbister Moor (not Islay), 80/20 in-house/commercial malt, 40% ABV, Orkney honey over cool smoke.

2026-05-08 — Frank McHardy ran Springbank from 1979, the year it went silent. He revived Glengyle in 2004, retired to the Hall of Fame in 2014.

2026-05-08 — Glenmorangie's 5.14m wash stills are Scotland's tallest, a geometry fixed by second-hand gin stills bought in 1843. High reflux is why the spirit is light.

2026-05-08 — Why we read whisky like legacy code: an introduction to LegacyDram's people-first, engineering-literate take on whisky media.