BenRiach 31 Years Old 1990 (SMWS 12.64)

BenRiach sits on the Elgin plain in Speyside, founded in 1898 by John Duff. Through much of the late 20th century the distillery operated quietly as a filler for Chivas blends, with single malt releases rare until the Billy Walker era from 2004 onwards. The casks from this period are now finite, held mostly by independent merchants who laid them down when the stock was originally destined for blending. This release was bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, the members-only club founded in Edinburgh in 1983. SMWS bottlings are single cask and cask strength, identified by a numerical code in which the digits before the dot identify the distillery and the digits after identify the cask. It is part of the Oh-so-orange series. Drawn from cask #12.64 and bottled in 2021, this 1990 vintage totalled just 112 bottles for the German market.

BenRiach distils on two pairs of copper pot stills, with ogee-shaped wash stills feeding onion-shaped spirit stills under steam heat. Fermentation runs between 48 and 100 hours in stainless steel washbacks on Mauri liquid yeast, with new make collected at 68% ABV before filling to cask. After 31 years in oak, the cask was bottled at 43.4% ABV, a natural cask strength reflecting the long evaporation.

Ex-Bourbon American white oak (Quercus alba) was charred for the original bourbon fill, breaking down lignin into vanillin and syringaldehyde and releasing whisky lactones from the wood. The fresh-fill bourbon strips extracted much of the most aggressive oak character, leaving the BenRiach spirit to draw on the secondary layers of soft oak, vanilla and coconut.