Arran Lochranza 2012-2024 - 12 Year Old - Single Cask 1311 - Private Bottling

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.

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.