Macallan 18 Year Old 2002 SMWS Single 1st Fill Bourbon Cask 24.145 Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky Canada Exclusive (2020) 70cl

Macallan 18 Year Old 2002 SMWS Single 1st Fill Bourbon Cask 24.145 Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky Canada Exclusive (2020) 70cl

1 of 207 bottles produced from a BOURBON barrel of all things for a Macallan. That is rare as rocking horse S.....

Traditionally Macallan use spanish sherry oak to make all their whisky so finding a bourbon casked Macallan is a needle in a haystack affair. 

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by Phillip 'Pip' Hills who, while travelling around Scotland in the 1970s, fell in love with whiskies drawn straight from the cask. After he expanded his syndicate the Society was purchased by Glenmorangie PLC in 2004. In 2015, the Society was sold back to private investors. In June 2021, the private owners floated the holding company The Artisanal Spirits Company plc on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange.

It has a unique code system where the first number refers to the distillery and the second refers to the cask from which the bottle comes. SMWS also offers the largest range of distilleries of any independent bottler. These curiously named drams really do have something for every whisky lover!

The SMWS are one of the Britain's most revered independent bottlers with a worldwide network of partner bars with one mission of getting as much whisky at natural cask strength without water to different nations including USA, Canada, Switzerland, UK, Austria, Germany and many others.

These older labels from the first runs are mostly with distillation methods that include direct heat which was replaced with steam for many distilleries for environmental reasons changing the taste of whisky forever. It'll get real interesting when nuclear fusion is used to distil whisky. We might glow green for a few weeks after we drink the stuff. Who knows.... but all we know is that the old stuff has a musky taste that is VERY welcomed by people nowadays trying to time travel through whisky's past.

TASTING NOTES

The nose gave us a cornucopia of fruits – stewed apples, sultanas, cantaloupe and orange. Mellifluous sweetness – honey, marzipan, treacle tart and deeper aromas of cinnamon, star anise and vanilla. The palate offered a balanced duality of full-on seductive sweetness; spun sugar, butterscotch, marrons glacés, Nutella, baked bananas and more platonic teasing hints of wood spice, mahogany, aftershave and tobacco – definitely complex. The reduced nose discovered beeswax furniture polish, pralines, foamy shrimps and raspberry sauce on ice-cream. The palate became somehow even more complex and more interesting – brown sugar, baklava and fruit syrup; then sweet oak, old leather and warming spices.

57.8% ABV

70cl