Craigellachie 2006-2021 - 14 Year Old - North Star Spirits - Cask Series 015 - Single Cask

Craigellachie distillery was founded in 1890 by Sandy Brown and Peter Mackie and was absorbed into Diageo forerunner DCL in 1927. Craigellachie was expanded to four stills in 1964 but still uses worm tubs to condense its spirit. In 1998 Craigellachie was one of five distilleries sold to Bacardi along with the Dewar’s blend in order to gain the Monopolies & Mergers Commission’s blessing for the merger that created Diageo.

Craigellachie’s whisky was so important for the White Horse & Old Smuggler blends that DCL never bottled it as a single malt. DCL successors United Distillers released a 14-year-old Flora & Fauna bottling and a Rare Malts Edition in the 1990s shortly before the distillery was sold. After bottling a rather lacklustre 14-year-old around the turn of the millennium, Bacardi/Dewar’s relaunched Craigellachie properly in 2014 to great acclaim. Independent Craigellachie used to be rather rare but is now abundant and generally excellent quality.

North Star Spirits is an independent whisky bottling company founded in Glasgow in 2016 by AD Rattray alumnus Iain Croucher. North Star quickly established itself as one of the most popular of the recent wave of Scottish independent whisky bottlers thanks to a prolific series of top class whiskies released in eye-catching packaging at sensible prices. North Star Spirits was named Independent Bottler of the Year at the Scottish Whisky Awards in 2020 and 2021.

Besides their excellent single cask and small batch single malt releases, which are bottled without colouring or chill filtration and are usually at cask strength, North Star have also released several outstanding blended malt and blended Scotch whiskies alongside occasional bottlings of rum, gin, bourbon and Pedro Ximenez fortified wine.