Coldorak's whisky blog.
Speyburn remains a distillery I know little about, so this review explores its history first. Then it compares two Speyburn 15-year-old expressions: the official bottling against the SMWS single cask. We covered Speyburn once before, back in 2019, with just a quick introduction. This time, a full distillery overview precedes the detailed tasting notes on both whiskies.
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Behind the eleventh window of That Boutique-y Whisky Company’s 2019 Advent Calendar we will be reviewing each day until the 24th of December was hidden a Speyburn 10-year-old batch 3 single malt, bottled at 49.5% abv by that Boutique-y Whisky Company. Speyburn is a Spey… side distillery, easy to guess, and has been founded in 1897 by the brothers John & Edward Hopkins with their cousin Edward Broughton, and has been bought by its current owner, Inver House Distillers (the owners of Balblair, Old Pulteney and anCnoc) in 1991, Inver House being themselves owned by the Thai company International Beverage Holdings (what an imaginative name…). Speyburn is quite little known in Europe but a huge success in the USA, making it the best selling distillery of InterBev in front of Old Pulteney. In 1900, Speyburn was also the first distillery to move from floor maltings to pneumatic drum malting, though the malting closed in the late sixties, fortunately leaving the equipment there to see. This Boutique-y batch had an outturn of 1540 bottles and is still available on Master of Malt for the quite expensive price of £77.95.
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