Blended Grain #1 Batch 3 (That Boutique-y Whisky Company)

This is Blended Grain #1, Batch 3, released by That Boutique-y Whisky Company to mark the bottler's tenth birthday. As a blended grain it draws on more than one grain distillery rather than a single source, here built around a 1976 vintage at 45 years old, with an outturn of 406 bottles. It carries no single distillery name because the liquid is a marriage of long aged grain whiskies.

Grain whisky from continuous stills is light and sweet when young, and only decades in oak give it the depth on show here. Forty five years in ex-Bourbon casks is well into the ethereal stage, where the spirit turns waxy and fragile and the strength eases toward the floor through long evaporation.

Bottled at 44.2%, it shows the soft richness of very old grain. As the lignin breaks down it gives vanillin and vanilla, coconut follows from the oak lactones, and the toasted staves' caramelised hemicellulose brings toffee and fudge. Slow oxidation adds beeswax, old polished oak and a gentle honeyed sweetness, the tannins quiet, the finish long, a fitting anniversary release of deeply aged Scotch grain. Released for the bottler's tenth birthday, it celebrates the kind of old grain stock that has become increasingly hard to find.