North British 25 Year Old 1991 The Octave (Duncan Taylor) #5913019 Single Grain Scotch Whisky (2017) 70cl
Bottle No. 1 of 55
An indie single grain Scotch whisky from the North British distillery, aged for a quarter of a century. This was distilled in 1991 and eventually bottled in 2017 after 9 months finishing in a octave cask. 55 bottles were independently bottled by Duncan Taylor for The Octave range.
Tasting Notes
Nose: Strawberry bon-bons, salted caramel, black pepper and nutmeg.
Palate: Nutmeg again, now leading into hot chocolate and treacle tart.
Finish: Candied orange peels, sponge cake, honey.
About North British
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.
About Duncan Taylor
Established in 1938, Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky Limited is a specialist independent whisky merchant with one of the largest privately held collections of aged single malt and single grain Scotch whisky casks. Today, the company releases these prized spirits via an impressive range of award-winning product brands, all bottled at its headquarters in Huntly.
52.8%
70cl
