Glen Scotia 2013-2021 - 8 Year Old - SMWS 93.173 - Racks Your Brain & Rocks Your Mind

Glen Scotia is often overlooked, being the ‘other’ Campbeltown distillery, but there has been renewed interest in the brand in the last few years following the successful slimmed-down 2015 range and tasteful design revamp by Exponent Equity (now owned by Hillhouse Capital) which revived Glen Scotia’s fortunes after various unfortunate decisions by the previous regime. 

Glen Scotia’s former obscurity was due to a string of owners uninterested in marketing the distillery as a single malt during the crisis years of the 1970s-’90s, when the distillery was twice closed for five year periods and official bottlings were both difficult to find and variable in quality. Thankfully, independent bottlings of Glen Scotia have always been relatively easy to obtain, with high quality examples from reliable sources including the SMWS, Malts of Scotland and Signatory Vintage.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) began in late 1970s Edinburgh when founder Pip Hills persuaded a group of friends to chip in for a cask of Glenfarclas, and was officially formalised in 1983. Today the SMWS has two venues in Edinburgh, a London bar and a string of international partnerships serving its 35,000 members. 

The Society’s whiskies are known for their unique SMWS coding system. Each cask bottled is assigned two numbers, representing the distillery and the bottling number, so 1.45 is the forty-fifth cask bottled from the first distillery and 33.27 is the 27th cask from the 33rd distillery.

Glenmorangie bought the Society in 2004, but sold it in 2015 to a private consortium who floated the SMWS on the stock market in 2021 via their holding company Artisanal Spirits Co.