North West Hutton 20 Year Old - Platform 20th Anniversary 1983-2003

Undisclosed bottlings are whiskies bottled independently without using the distillery’s name on the label. This can occur when an independent bottler releases a cask of whisky from a distillery that has expressly stipulated as a condition of sale that its name be withheld when those casks are bottled. Macallan, Glenlivet, Glenmorangie, Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Glenfarclas and Highland Park are among the most famous, if not necessarily the most frequently-encountered, of the distillers who regularly go unnamed.

Other common reasons for a distillery’s single malt whisky not being named on the label include independent companies simply choosing the flexibility of not naming the source distilleries for their proprietary brands in case they wish to use multiple source distilleries or to change their source distillery at a later date. Bottlings from Undisclosed distilleries are always cheaper than their official distillery counterparts and are generally excellent value in the secondary market.

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.