BenRiach Single Cask Bottling – Batch 11 37 Years Old 1977

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. Heritage stock from this period is finite, with the distillery selectively releasing remaining casks under Brown-Forman. This release comes from BenRiach's Single Cask Bottling, Batch 11, the modern programme of small-outturn cask releases. Cask #1891, distilled in 1977 and bottled in 2014, yielded an outturn of just 181 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 37 years in oak, the cask was bottled at 43.2% ABV, a natural cask strength reflecting the long evaporation.

The ex-Rum cask previously held sugarcane spirit aged in tropical conditions, which had accelerated extraction of oak vanillins and esters into the original rum and concentrated tropical fruit congeners. The BenRiach inherits a softened, sweetened cask with banana, pineapple and demerara character pulled forward from the residual rum.