Welcome back to the blog! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Blended Malt whisky category, with a focus on the Blended Malt term itself alongside a quick look at the curious and occasionally contradictory classification rules associated with teaspooning and cask finishing. The term Blended Malt refers to the product of two or more single malt whiskies blended together without any grain whisky content - a rare type of whisky that was formerly known as Vatted Malt or Pure Malt and remains probably the most niche category in the (Scotch) whisky world. The two older terms Vatted and Pure M ..read more

The third and final instalment of Billy Walker’s 50th Anniversary Trilogy is almost upon us! Glenallachie Future Edition concludes the series celebrating owner and Master Distiller Billy Walker’s half century in the whisky business with a bang, and is a big departure from the previous editions Glenallachie Past and Glenallachie Present. While both the Past and Present bottlings were 16 years old, Glenallachie Future Edition is a 4-year-old; and while the two previous editions were either full sherry-matured or a mix of sherry and Mizunara oak, Glenallachie Future Edition was matured predominan ..read more

Available to pre-order from today. News today of a truly amazing find - a one-off bottling of 1958 vintage Japanese single malt whisky from the Shirakawa distillery, which was closed and dismantled in 2003. Buckle up, because this is quite a ride. Shirakawa distillery is not a familiar name to most whisky fans - even Japanese whisky fans. The distillery was founded in the Fukushima Prefecture north of Tokyo in 1939 by Daikoku Budoshu, a subsidiary of the Takara Shuzo company, and only made Japanese single malt whisky for a brief period that began in 1951 and ended in 1969. Much of the rest of ..read more

There’s been some controversy in the last few months over at Glendronach, where the 2021 editions of the Glendronach 12 Year Old Original and Glendronach 15 Year Old Revival have removed the Non Chill Filtered statement from their packaging. It’s fair to say that this particular tweak to what is a much-loved bottling has not gone over very well in some quarters. Having seen the strong reaction to the change on various social media fora, we thought it might be interesting to talk a little about the history of Glendronach 12 year Old to put the current furore into context. We’ll also discus ..read more

We’re excited to tell you about the arrival of some brand new expressions of Black Bottle blended whisky - the Black Bottle Alchemy series! There's two new editions to tell you about: Black Bottle Alchemy Batch #1 Double Cask and Black Bottle Alchemy Batch #2 Island Smoke. Black Bottle is a historic blended whisky brand with roots going back to the 19th century, when the three Graham brothers took up tea blending at an Aberdeenshire merchant.  Thankfully for us, the brothers soon diversified into blending whisky as well, and Gordon Graham began producing a high quality blended Scotch ..read more

We’ve all seen the worrying reports in the news recently about the effects we’re having on the planet and the need for serious, immediate change in the way that industries work in order to protect the environment and mitigate the effects of global heating and climate change. We were delighted, therefore, to receive some fantastic news from our friends at Nc’nean distillery this week - Scotland’s first fully organic distillery is now the UK’s first Net Zero Emissions distillery! Nc’nean take their environmental responsibilities incredibly seriously, committing themselves to releasing regul ..read more

We’re delighted to announce the imminent arrival of the first flight of releases from new independent single malt whisky bottlers Pendulum Spirits! Pendulum have created a Fable series of independent bottlings, which will be released as Volumes relating to atmospheric tales from Scottish folklore. More importantly, there’s some very promising single malt Scotch whisky in each of their very snazzily-designed bottles. Pendulum have organised the Fable range into a series of Chapters, with each whisky in their first batch of releases bearing a label related to one aspect of their first Fable, The ..read more

We like to think we’re a broad church here at Whisky-Online. Sure, we’re all about whisky - but we love other spirits too, especially malternatives like brandy and rum. Timmy R especially is fond of a rum, so he’s very excited about the latest smooth sipper to arrive on our shelves: it’s the first batch of a new rum called Cabal. Cabal 1513 Batch 1 is the first release from a new independent Scottish-based company called Harpalion Spirits and it’s a rum with a difference. Every single facet of the creation of this rum evolved from an extensive process of consultation and experimentation: the c ..read more

We thought we’d do a little feature on Brave New Spirits, one of the new wave indie bottlers we’ve recently added to our virtual shelves. In this blog we’ll have a quick look at the Brave New Spirits range and taste some of the drams now available in our Whisky-Online Shop. Brave New Spirits were founded in 2020 and are based in Glasgow, where they bottle several ranges of single and blended malt whiskies, alongside proprietary bulk whisky brands for wholesalers and supermarkets. We’re currently featuring two of Brave New Spirits’ whisky ranges on Whisky-Online: the Rebels Guerilla Casks and t ..read more

This is not a drill - the arrival of the long-awaited Daftmill 15-year-old Cask Strength is nearly upon us! The existence of a forthcoming official 15-year-old cask strength Daftmill has been known since early 2022, and the whisky made its public debut back in March for lucky punters of the Fife Whisky Festival, giving plenty of time for the anticipation and hype to build. Now that the time has finally come, here's everything we know about Daftmill 15-year-old. Daftmill 15-year-old Cask Strength has been assembled from a relatively large batch of 28 first fill ex-bourbon barrels fill ..read more