Glenrothes 1966-1998 - 31 Year Old - SMWS 30.25 - Liquid Mahogany

Glenrothes is a much-loved Speyside distillery with a couple of notable claims to fame, namely that it was the keystone malt for Berry Bros & Rudd’s Cutty Sark blend from its launch in the 1920s and in the 1990s became the first distillery to specialise in vintage single malt releases. 

Founded in 1879, Glenrothes was expanded three times between 1963 and 1989, bringing the total number of stills to ten with a hefty production capacity of over 5.5m litres per year. The spirit seems to perform best with medium to long term maturation in sherry casks.

After sporadic old vintage releases in the 1970s under Highland Distillers (later fully acquired by Edrington), Glenrothes launched a core range of vintage single malts in 1994. A string of terrific vintage releases followed, including some astonishing 1960s casks. Although the vintage range has now been dropped, Glenrothes is remarkably consistent - just about any sherried release over 15 years old is likely to be terrific whisky.

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.