People interested in single malts need to get to know the merchant bottlers. Why? Because while there are roughly 120 different single malt distilleries in Scotland, only 40 or 50 of them bottle what they distil. Most of what they make goes into the various blended whiskies on the market, your Johnnie Walkers, your Dewars, Cutty Sark, Teachers, that sort of thing. That’s because most distilleries are owned by larger parent corporations, for whom the blends are bread and butter.

However, there is a large trade in casks of single malts. Distilleries sell them off and different bottlers buy them, trade them and bottle them. There are different schools of thought as to why distilleries will sell off casks. Some of them, no doubt, are just surplus product; the stills ran long this day or that. These casks can be quickly turned into cash and so they are. Sometimes, the cask is atypical of a distilleries production, and in the interests of a consistent whisky profile, they dispose of the odd cask. Some are just unsuitable for blends. Whatever the reason, we can become beneficiaries of this largess, because we will get to try malts that otherwise would not reach our shores.

The big players in the independent, or merchant, bottling industry are Cadenhead (although they no longer have an American importer), Gordon and MacPhail, Signatory, Duncan Taylor, Dewar Rattray, Murray McDavid, Black Adder and MacKillop’s Choice. All of these firms buy casks and bottle them one at a time. Many of these bottlers put everything into the bottle at cask strength. Depending on the age of the whisky, this can be ferocious, up to 120 US proof (60% alcohol by volume) or more. Obviously, you cut these whiskies with water. Still others bottle at 92 US proof, which means the whisky doesn’t have to be chill-filtered, and this gives you a richer whisky, with more of the flavor components still present.

One thing to understand is that each cask is unique. If you have a Signatory bottling of Clynelish, say, distilled in 1984 and bottled in 2006, it may be different from another bottle, distilled a month later and bottled a month earlier. Not just a bit different, but completely different. We once tasted samples from two barrels of Glenlivet with Lorne MacKillop of MacKillop’s Choice. The two barrels were distilled on the same day, aged in the same warehouse, just a few feet from each other, and drawn from the cask on the same day. These were two completely different whiskies, let me tell you.

So, when you’re looking for a single malt, you may be offered a bewildering array of bottlers, ages and strengths. Here’s when you have to rely on the expertise that we strive to provide here at D&M. We try as many of the different bottlings as we possibly can (although the responsibility is spread out among all of us). Of course, since many of these independent bottlings will be from distilleries you haven’t heard of, you might just take a chance. Wasn’t it Mae West who said, “When choosing between two evils, I opt for the one I haven’t tried before.”? Take a chance, it can be fun.