BenRiach 27 Years Old 1994 Cask #1857 (LMDW)

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 La Maison du Whisky, the Paris merchant and independent bottler founded in 1956 by Georges Bénitah. LMDW's long-standing relationships with distilleries and brokers give it early access to casks rarely seen elsewhere. It is part of the Cask Edition, the small-outturn single cask programme BenRiach has run alongside its core range since the Billy Walker era. Distilled in 1994 and bottled in 2022, the whisky was drawn from cask #1857 with an outturn of 646 bottles for the French 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 27 years in oak, the cask was bottled at cask strength of 53.7% ABV.

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. Typical tasting notes include leathery, smokey, cooked fruit, dried fruit, oily and plastic.