Balvenie DCS Compendium – Chapter Five 17 Years Old 2001

Balvenie DCS Compendium - Chapter Five 17 Years Old 2001 is part of the DCS Compendium, David C. Stewart's fifty-year-career retrospective for Balvenie. The Compendium consists of five chapters of five casks each, twenty-five unique single cask releases personally selected by Stewart across his half-century as Malt Master. This bottling is a 17 year old expression, drawn from cask #9325, with a small outturn of 400 bottles, released in 2019, at 63.5% ABV.

Balvenie was founded in 1892 by William Grant on the same Dufftown estate as Glenfiddich, and remains family owned by William Grant & Sons into its fifth generation. The distillery is one of only a handful in Scotland still operating its own floor maltings, supplying around ten to fifteen per cent of its barley from the adjacent Balvenie Mains farm. Production runs on a single lauter mash tun, a mixed wash back fleet of Douglas fir and stainless steel on 65 to 68 hour fermentations, and an unusual setup of five wash stills feeding six spirit stills. The spirit stills carry the distinctive Balvenie Ball, a bulb on the neck that increases reflux and pushes the new make toward the honeyed, ester-rich profile the distillery is known for.

This expression matured in European oak, Fino casks, which carry forward their own residual character and oak compounds into the Balvenie spirit.