BenRiach Single Cask Bottling – Batch 13 37 Years Old 1978

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 13, the modern programme of small-outturn cask releases. Cask #3114, distilled in 1978 and bottled in 2016, yielded a small outturn of 222 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 cask strength of 48.8% ABV.

The ex-Tawny Port pipe previously held a fortified Portuguese wine aged oxidatively for years in seasoned cask. Tawny Port carries forward oxidised wine compounds and residual sugars, producing dried cherry, fig, walnut and orange peel notes against a backdrop of warmer, less tannic European oak.