The Clydeside Distillery 2018 Cask #075

The Clydeside Distillery opened in 2017 in the restored 1877 Pumphouse at Glasgow's Queen's Dock, the family project of Tim Morrison whose great grandfather built the dock and helped raise Loch Katrine, the loch that gives the distillery its water today. This bottling is a single cask, number 075, filled by hand at the distillery and sold only on site, the kind of release a visitor carries home from the Clyde. Hand filled releases like this let visitors take home a piece of the distillery, a cask chosen and bottled on the spot rather than through the trade.

Distilled in 2018 from Scottish barley in the distillery's single pair of copper stills, the spirit spent five years in ex-Bourbon oak with a period in an Oloroso sherry cask. The bourbon wood lays down vanilla and a soft sweetness while the sherry adds dried fruit, and the whole is bottled at its natural cask strength of 59.5 percent, without reduction.

At full strength it is bold for its age, green apple and pear and a citrus lift from the young spirit meeting raisin, brown sugar and a nutty warmth from the sherry, with vanilla running underneath and a peppery, fruity finish. A characterful hand filled cask from one of Glasgow's revived malt distilleries.