That Boutique-y Whisky Company is well known for its excellent independent bottlings, and its much adored label artwork designed by Emily Chappell, which is celebrated here as one of Boutique-y's Label Editions! This limited edition 700ml bottle contains a spectacular single grain whisky from the North British distillery that enjoyed a nice long 35-year stay in a refill hogshead. The label features a character seen on previous North British Boutique-y bottlings. He usually looks a bit sinister with his eye patch and white cat, but the lovely lilac background has softened that evil air, so he now looks rather friendly and approachable after all.
A release of 329 bottles.
That Boutique-y Whisky Company bottles limited edition whiskies from a variety of renowned distilleries as well as producing award-winning blends, all adorned with cultish graphic novel-style labels. The brand won Spirits Bottler of the Year at the 2023 Spirits Business Awards, and Blender of the Year went to Sam Simmons, captain of the Boutique-y clan who oversees every one of these releases.
Tasting Notes
Nose : Rice pudding, milky tea, vanilla cream and wafers, with pineapple cubes and mellow, buttery oak.
Palate : That mellow oak leads the way on the palate, with a mix of sweet and savoury spices and creamy vanilla custard.
Finish : Gristly, with old oak, rusk biscuits and distant pepper.
Practically crowd-funded to provide an alternative source of grain, North British is today jointly owned by two of Scotland's largest distillers.
The North British (the archaic and somewhat disparaging term applied to post-Jacobite Scotland) distillery was founded in Edinburgh in 1885. Up until that point, Scotland’s blenders and spirit merchants could only buy their grain from DCL [see Cameronbridge]. In an attempt to break the monopoly, Andrew Usher, William Sanderson, John Crabbie and James Watson joined forces to build a new – and substantial – grain distillery in Gorgie, close to the Union Canal, the railway line, and the Caledonian distillery which had been absorbed into DCL the year before. A case of the last straw perhaps?
Production started in 1887 from a single Coffey. Within three years capacity had doubled to three million gallons a year. Whisky-making ceased during the First World War, but production restarted in 1920. It was nursed cautiously through the tricky period of the 1930s, but blossomed once more post-WWII. By the 1960s it was making six million gallons a year (a figure which would double by the start of the following decade), and for a period, North British was the largest grain plant in Scotland.
By the 1960s it was still being run as a kind of co-operative with its shareholders including Robertson & Baxter, IDV, William Lawson, Macdonald Martin, Seagram and William Teacher. In 1993 its management was taken over by Lothian Distillers, an equal partnership between R&B [now Edrington Group] and IDV. The result of the merger between the latter and DCL (by that time called UD) in 1997, meant that North British was being jointly run by the firm which it had set up in opposition to.
Ahh, the irony.
