Inverleven 27 Years Old 1977 Cask #3098 (Duncan Taylor)

This 1977 Inverleven is among the oldest vintages in the catalogue, drawn from a distillery that stopped making spirit in 1991 and was later demolished. Duncan Taylor, the Huntly independent with roots as a cask broker, bottled it in its Rarest of the Rare range. Single cask 3098 gave 167 bottles for Poland at 27 years old.

Inverleven sat inside the Dumbarton complex, a malt distillery built in 1938 to supply Ballantine's, its spirit light and grassy in the Lowland style. Matured in a single ex-Bourbon cask, the American oak worked slowly on a delicate spirit across twenty-seven years.

Bottled at its natural cask strength of 56.4%. The ex-Bourbon wood gives vanillin for vanilla and oak lactones for coconut, with furfural adding toasted almond. The light spirit has gone waxy and tropical, ripe fruit over soft oak. A finite relic of a lost Lowland name.