Hazelburn 1998 - 25 Year Old - Single Cask 22 - Private Bottling

Hazelburn is the name given to the triple-distilled, unpeated single malt whisky made at the Springbank distillery in Campbeltown. Springbank produces much less whisky than their theoretical capacity and Hazelburn makes up around 10% of the distillery’s output, so usually fewer than 100 casks of Hazelburn are filled each year.  

Hazelburn has been produced at Springbank since 1997, with the first general release official bottling being an 8-year-old that was launched in 2005. A 12-year-old was bottled from 2009-2016 and the core range today comprises a 10-year-old ongoing bottling with manifold small batch and single cask releases. The first 21-year-old Hazelburn appeared in 2019 and small batches of Oloroso sherry-matured Hazelburn have also been bottled in recent years.

A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery. 

Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.

Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.