With the arrival of 28 uncommon Macallan expressions, we take a minute to explore the abundant background of most likely the most renowned distillery in Scotland, otherwise the world.
The purchasers at Master of Malt have been using their outfits recently (they do have special outfits for whisky sleuthing). They have uncovered a stockpile of rare Macallan set 1-6 that will certainly have enthusiasts salivating. There are further details below, yet we believed this was as great a justification as any kind of to look at a distillery that does permission using that tired word, legendary.
Macallan dates back to 1824, when a distillery was founded. Several distilleries were built (as well as lots of prohibited ones that went legit) around this time due to the 1823 Excise Act, which liberalized licensing regulations. The distillery travelled through different proprietors until 1892, when Roderick Kemp acquired it, a titan of whisky that at one factor had Talisker, though not at the same time as The Macallan. He completely rebuilt the distillery and also relabelled it Macallan-Glenlivet. It was a common technique to include ‘Glenlivet,’ the location’s best-known whisky, as a suffix to your distillery. Nowadays, several distilleries would like to put Macallan after their names, though Macallan’s attorneys would have something to claim regarding that.
The business went public in 1966, but the family members preserved a controlling risk. The distillery expanded quickly from six stills in 1965 to twenty-one in 1975, mirroring a growing whisky market. Yet Macallan itself remained fairly unknown. It isn’t easy to picture currently when Macallan is an international phenomenon, a lot of its whisky would have gone into blends such as Peter Thomson’s Old Perth.
But the market was changing. The long-time whisky boom ended in the 1980s, so the need for blends decreased. Macallan had already begun to relocate its company towards single malts.
They placed The Macallan as a luxury item ahead of their time. The 18-year-old Macallan series, which has become extremely prized by collection agencies, was introduced in 1984. The first expression? A whisky distilled in 1965. And Macallan was the initial distillery to do old single malts: a 50-year-old was launched in 1983—a similar container sold at auction in New York for $46 500. In 1996 The Macallan 1-6 price released 1874 (we have one bottle available for sale listed below), a recreation of a surviving bottle from that year. Unusual Whisky 101’s 18-Year-Old index, which tracks the cost of this expression, has increased by over 11% in 2015 alone.
How to specify the Macallan design? It’s an effective decline, oily and heavy, that reacts well to aging. The distillery always uses sherry barrels of both European and American oak. When supplies of sherry butts began to dry in the 1980s, Macallan was just one of the initial distilleries to obtain its barrels skilled to order. It’s generally unpeated, though the distillery used some peat in the 1940s when coal supplies were scarce. We have 18-Year-Olds dating back to 1966 plus 17-year-olds from 1964 and 1965, so you can open the bottle to discover any peat in there.
