Balvenie DCS Compendium – Chapter Four 18 Years Old 1999

Balvenie DCS Compendium - Chapter Four 18 Years Old 1999 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 an 18 year old expression, drawn from cask #9304, with an outturn of just 132 bottles, released in 2018, at 46.8% 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.

American oak (Quercus alba) is high in whisky lactones (cis- and trans-beta-methyl-gamma-octalactone) and breaks down under charring to release vanillin and syringaldehyde from the lignin. The expression draws coconut, vanilla and honeyed sweetness from the oak against the Balvenie spirit's natural ester-rich character.