BenRiach 34 Years Old ElD The Single Malts of Scotland Director’s Special (Elixir)

BenRiach sits on the Elgin plain in Speyside, founded in 1898 by John Duff and operating on the same site as its sister distillery Longmorn. Mothballed for 65 years after the Pattison crash, the distillery reopened in 1965 as a blending malt for Chivas, and was reborn as a single malt focus under Billy Walker from 2004 onwards. Brown-Forman acquired BenRiach in 2016 with Dr Rachel Barrie as Master Blender, retaining the cask-diverse house style and the three distillate styles (classic Speyside, peated, and triple-distilled) alongside reactivated floor maltings. This release was bottled by Elixir Distillers, the Whisky Exchange's bottling arm that grew out of the Single Malts of Scotland and Elements of Islay ranges, and is now building its own Portintruan distillery on Islay. It is part of the Single Malts of Scotland - Director's Special series. The release had an outturn of just 164 bottles for the European 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 34 years in oak, the cask was bottled at cask strength of 46.7% 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.