70+% alcohol and no sensible explanation.
As independent bottlers, we buy cask parcels blindly. Often, we don’t know the what the ABVs are or how much liquid is in the casks. That’s how we ended up with a large cask parcel of Glengoyne and very little idea of what we’d bought.
After the casks were in our hands, we had them re-gauged (when you measure how much whisky is left in each cask and check its alcohol strength). Four of the them came back above 70% ABV.
We are often asked what we did to get them that high. Absolutely nothing. They were already like that when we checked.
We spoke to one of the distillers at the fabulous Glengoyne distillery, who was pretty sure the spirit would have gone into cask at 69%. Assuming that is correct, those four casks had managed to get stronger over the 15 years that they matured.
Overtime, for whatever reason, the ABV went up instead of down. Both water and alcohol evaporate during maturation. If a cask loses a greater proportion of its water than of its alcohol, the whisky that’s left goes up in strength. This can happen in other countries typically with warmer and drier climates. So it's not unseen, but it is certainly unusual in Scotch Malt Whisky as legally this has to be matured and bottled in Scotland. Here in Scotland, our cool, damp conditions pretty much always see the ABV go down.
There was less liquid left in those four casks, too, which made us wonder if they’d leaked at some point which maybe affected this too.
We still don’t know why the strength ended up where it did.
Either way, we found this extremely interesting. We even think it may be the highest known Scotch Malt Whisky ever to be bottled! Please correct us if we are wrong, but we looked and couldn't find one. Maybe we should be contacting the Guiness World Records people after all?
I remember sitting with Woody and tasting the 73.2% sample. It was good. It was like nothing I’d tasted before, actually. Intense, as you’d expect, but with surprisingly little burn. Woody said we should release it. I was sitting there thinking, is this ridiculous? Are people going to hate it? Is this is a huge reputation risk? We liked it - but would others?
We decided to release it, and it actually went down a treat. Phew.
When Scottish Field invited me to judge, I was asked to nominate a number of whiskies for the competition and could put forward one Woodrow’s bottling, provided it was a wildcard. I wasn’t entirely sure what counted as a wildcard, but I felt fairly confident that a 73.2% Glengoyne would qualify.
It seemed like a bit of a risk, as all these whiskies had been nominated and the standards of quality would be very high, and this whisky may seem a little silly in amongst them. I almost retracted the entry, but I’m glad I didn’t as it was the overall winner in the end.
For me, all four of these casks have a similar profile. Lots of toffee, nuts, baking spices, red fruits and chocolate. The moment it hits the tongue it’s intense flavours, but if I didn’t know how concentrated, I wouldn’t know why. There isn’t a lot of alcohol burn in my opinion - definitely tastes cask strength, but I wouldn’t have guessed 70+.
With many of our whiskies, there’s work to do before we’re happy to put them in a bottle. With these four, we got lucky. They were already pretty special when we found them - and we knew better than to mess with them.
I’m glad we decided to release it, despite my nerves about it.
If you went looking for a bottle and missed out, we are genuinely sorry. We’ll do our best to share out the next release fairly, and hopefully more of you will get the chance to try it.
Two casks down, potentially two more to go!
Anyway, back to the warehouse for us to obsess over bloodtubs and ex-peated quarter casks (it’s our thing at the moment).