Craigellachie 2007-2021 - 13 Year Old - Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers - Single Cask 1826

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.

Alistair Walker started in the whisky industry straight out of university in the late 1990s when he worked for several years with his father Billy Walker at Burn Stewart. After returning to university for a Masters degree, Walker rejoined the trade in 2004, again working with Billy Walker, who had purchased Benriach distillery in the meantime. 

Walker remained with Benriach Distillery Company until its purchase by Brown Forman in 2016, and founded The Alistair Walker Whisky Company in 2018. The company has since released several dozen single cask malt and grain whiskies under its Infrequent Flyers label, bottled at cask strength without colouring or chill filtration. Walker is an advocate of cask finishing and a significant proportion of the Infrequent Flyers releases have had a secondary maturation.