Braes Of Glenlivet 1989-2020 - 30 Year Old - Single Cask 983

Braeval, also known as Braes of Glenlivet, is a modern Speyside distillery founded in 1973 by Chivas Brothers. Pernod acquired Braeval as part Chivas Brothers during the breakup of parent company Seagram Distillers in 2001 and mothballed the distillery the following year, but recommenced production in 2008. Braeval distillery has two wash stills and four spirit stills which give it a capacity of over 4 million litres per year, almost the entirety of which goes into Chivas Brothers blends. 

Braeval’s first ever official bottling - a single cask 16-year-old available only at Chivas distilleries - was released in 2017, over 50 years into the distillery’s lifetime. Chivas bottled two more single casks as Braeval before reverting in 2019 to the Braes of Glenlivet name for a new core range of long-aged Braeval malts in the Secret Speyside Collection. Both the Braeval and Braes of Glenlivet names have been used by independent bottlers for many years.

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.