Bladnoch 1988-2000 - 11 Year Old - SMWS 50.8 - Sunday Roast Pork

Founded in 1817, Bladnoch is a Lowland single malt distillery with a fragmented ownership and production history. Bladnoch was rebuilt in the 1950s and changed hands several times before ending up with United Distillers in the late 1980s. UD mothballed Bladnoch in 1993 and sold it the following year to Raymond Armstrong, who eventually won permission from Diageo to resume production in 2000. David Prior bought Bladnoch in 2015 after an internal dispute led to the liquidation of Armstrong’s business.

In the early 2000s Armstrong, who was only permitted to produce 100,000 litres of spirit a year, released several official Bladnochs from previous eras before bottling his own distillate, some of which was peated. Prior is under no such restrictions and the distillery now operates at its 1.5m litre capacity and releases single casks and a range of age statement whiskies. Independent Bladnoch appears regularly from Gordon & MacPhail, Wemyss and the SMWS, among others.

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.