Aberlour 11 Year Old - Royal Bank Of Scotland - Single Cask 101580

A much-loved Speyside distillery, Aberlour was founded in 1879 and was expanded to four stills in 1973, the year before the distillery’s parent company S. Campbell & Son was acquired by French drinks giants Pernod Ricard. Aberlour joined Chivas Brothers’ portfolio when Pernod bought Chivas in 2001, and in 2022 a major expansion plan was announced, with a new stillhouse that will double Aberlour’s capacity to just under 8m litres per year. 

Campbell & Son bottled official Aberlour single malts in the same chunky square bottle as their White Heather blend and these early bottlings from the 1960s and 1970s are still popular today, particularly those bottled at 50%. The acclaimed cask strength sherried Aberlour a’bunadh first appeared in the late 1990s and has been a mainstay of the range ever since. Independent Aberlour is occasionally bottled for the UK by Cadenhead’s, Douglas Laing and others.

A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery. 

Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.

Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.