Bruichladdich 1964-1993 - Cask Strength Miniature

Founded in 1881, Bruichladdich was taken over in 1968 by Invergordon Distillers, who expanded the distillery to four stills in 1975, but allowed the otherwise unmodernised Bruichladdich to decline in the 1980s. In 1995, with Invergordon now under Whyte & Mackay’s shaky stewardship, Bruichladdich was mothballed. Thankfully the distillery was revitalised under a consortium led by Murray McDavid’s Mark Reynier, who bought Bruichladdich in 2000. 

With the effervescent Jim McEwan on board as distillery manager, Bruichladdich’s fortunes swiftly improved. Bruichladdich's whisky had traditionally been unpeated, but McEwan soon began experimenting with higher peat levels and embraced the wine finishing trend with gusto. In 2012, the revived Bruichladdich was sold to Rémy Cointreau.

Invergordon bottled unpeated Bruichladdich at various ages and strengths from the 1970s onwards, with the earlier bottlings far outshining the later ones. The Murray McDavid regime issued a blizzard of mostly wine-finished casks and introduced the heavily peated Port Charlotte and Octomore malts, which have found an avid fanbase. Independent Bruichladdich is widely available and generally high quality.

Founded in Elgin as a merchant grocer and wine and spirits wholesaler in 1895, Gordon & MacPhail are one of the oldest independent whisky bottlers in Scotland. Co-founder James Gordon owned shares in Longmorn, Strathisla and Glen Grant, and Gordon & MacPhail were soon bottling officially licensed single malts from several distilleries and sending empty casks from their wine business to be filled with new make spirit and returned for maturation in their Elgin warehouses.

Gordon & MacPhail pioneered high strength single malts at 100 proof (57%) in the 1950s, and in 1968 the company launched Connoisseurs Choice, one of the first integrated ranges of small batch independent whisky bottlings. After finally becoming distillers themselves with the purchase of Benromach in 1993, in 2010 Gordon & MacPhail bottled the first 70-year-old single malt whisky (a Mortlach 1938) and in 2020 the company released the first ever 80-year-old whisky: Glenlivet 1940.