Arran 9 Year Old 2000 SMWS Single Bourbon Hogshead 121.33 Gunpowder on Lemon Meringue Pie Island Single Malt Scotch Whisky (2009) 70cl
1 of 304 bottles from a single Bourbon Hogshead.
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.
About Arran Distillery
Once buzzing with over 50 whisky distilleries, until recently the island of Arran was home to only one, which claims its water, sourced from Loch Na Davie, is the purest in Scotland
As an island whisky, it might be thought that Arran would always have been peaty. Instead, it started life as a non-smoky ‘Highland-style' malt. Like any new build distillery, the equipment is in an easily managed single tier space with small semi-lauter mashtun, wooden washbacks and two pairs of small stills.
The character shows light cereal crunchiness behind a distinctly citric note. Arran has also shown that this distillate, allied to a quality-focused wood policy, has given single malt that is capable of extended ageing. These days, peated malt is also being run.
Although the Arran distillery is relatively new (production started in 1995), the island in the Firth of Clyde has a long history of whisky-making. A fertile place, the farmers in the south of the island had plenty of raw materials to work with, and when home distillation and small stills were effectively banned in the late 18th century, they simply went underground.
After all, demand for smuggled whisky was on the rise and Arran had excellent links to Glasgow. There is some evidence that molasses was also distilled here. When the law changed, a legal distillery ran at Lagg from 1825, but it closed in 1837 and Arran’s distilling heritage was seemingly lost forever.
All that changed in 1995 when a consortium, headed by former Chivas Bros MD Harold Currie, chose a site at Lochranza in the north of the island. The decision to move to a part of Arran that was previously unknown for whisky was a result of two facts: a good water supply and potential for tourism. Today, in excess of 60,000 people visit the distillery every year.
Further cash was made by selling casks of whisky to private individuals, but the scheme was halted when it was discovered that, though the money raised was useful in creating initial cashflow, it resulted in the distillery not owning a significant percentage of its own stock – a problem when trying to build a brand.
Bottling started with a limited edition three-year-old in 1998 and the range has continued to expand, although today there are fewer ‘finished’ variants than in the past. A peated expression, ‘Machrie Moor’, has also been introduced.
In 2017 an expansion of the distillery was completed with the installation of an additional wash and spirit still, more than doubling Arran’s capacity to 1.2m litres per year. To accommodate the growing number of visitors to the distillery, Arran added a second tasting room to its visitor centre, and built an adjacent facility with meeting room, tasting bar and blending room named Rowan House.
Parent company Isle of Arran Distillers opened a second distillery, Lagg, in the south of the island in 2019, then revamped the Arran range with clean, modern packaging plus the introduction of new core expressions Barrel Reserve and The Bodega – as the name suggests, a Sherry cask-matured whisky.
52.9% ABV
70cl
