Arran 1998-2007 - 9 Year Old - SMWS 121.21

Founded on the Isle of Arran in 1993, with the first distillation in 1995, the Lochranza distillery was the first of the new wave of Scottish distilleries and blazed a trail for the explosion in small ‘craft’ distillers this century. Lochranza distillery has four stills and makes both peated and unpeated whisky - the unpeated malt is bottled as Arran, while the peated spirit is released as Machrie Moor.

The early releases of Arran single malt were often small batch or single casks, the vast majority of which were finished in wine casks. The distillery’s first core bottling was Arran 10-year-old, which launched in 2006 and has since been joined by age statements up to 25 years old alongside a plethora of limited editions and single cask releases. Independent Arran is abundant and usually excellent quality.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) began in late 1970s Edinburgh when founder Pip Hills persuaded a group of friends to chip in for a cask of Glenfarclas, and was officially formalised in 1983. Today the SMWS has two venues in Edinburgh, a London bar and a string of international partnerships serving its 35,000 members. 

The Society’s whiskies are known for their unique SMWS coding system. Each cask bottled is assigned two numbers, representing the distillery and the bottling number, so 1.45 is the forty-fifth cask bottled from the first distillery and 33.27 is the 27th cask from the 33rd distillery.

Glenmorangie bought the Society in 2004, but sold it in 2015 to a private consortium who floated the SMWS on the stock market in 2021 via their holding company Artisanal Spirits Co.