Glen Elgin 1991-2016 - 25 Year Old - Master Of Malts - Single Cask 16060

Founded in 1898, Glen Elgin distillery was taken over by Diageo forerunners Distillers Company Limited in 1930 and was immediately licensed to their recently-acquired subsidiary White Horse Distillers, where it has been one of the keystone malts for the White Horse blend ever since.

Glen Elgin’s importance to White Horse, one of the world’s biggest Scotch whisky brands, has meant that official bottlings of the distillery’s single malt have always been thin on the ground. A 12-year-old edition bearing the White Horse logo was bottled in the 1970s and 1980s, and a pair of famous Manager’s Dram sherry casks followed in 1988 and 1993.

Today, as in the ‘70s, the only ongoing official Glen Elgin is the 12-year-old, although there have been three Special Releases outings this century. Independent bottlings of Glen Elgin are widely available and generally very good quality.

Master of Malt began life in 1985 as a mail order whisky business, before opening a whisky shop in Tunbridge Wells in 1990. When the founders decided to sell up in 1996, the company was taken over by local businessman Stefan Petszaft. Petszaft’s son Justin joined the business in 2006 after leaving university and following a major cash injection in 2009 the company began a period of rapid expansion. 

The original Master of Malt company bottled their own whiskies sporadically from the 1980s onwards; the new Master of Malt followed suit on a much larger scale, spinning off brands including That Boutique-y Whisky Company and Darkness and branching into other spirits. The Petszafts sold Atom Group to Budweiser brewers AB-Inbev in 2018.