Macallan 26 Year Old - Darkness - 2018 Release

The grandest of Speyside’s blue chip distilleries, Macallan was founded in 1824 and carved a reputation for luxury single malt whisky in the 1980s with string of 18-year-old and 25-year-old sherry-matured vintage single malts distilled in the 1960s and 1970s, building on the renown of earlier highly-regarded licensed bottlings by Gordon & MacPhail and Campbell, Hope and King.

In the early 2000s, as the supply and quality of even the best sherry casks declined dramatically, Macallan introduced their Fine Oak series, an initially controversial range of bottlings that included bourbon-matured spirit in the cask recipe. While the Fine Oak series took some time to find its audience, Macallan’s status as the top Speyside distillery - particularly at auction - was already well-established and today a legion of eager Macallan fans ensure that each new luxury bottling from the distillery sells out immediately on release.

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, but bought it back in 2024.