Oban 1989-2013 - 24 Year Old - Private Single Cask 748

Oban is a distillery whose profile has increased enormously since its inclusion as one of the representatives in Diageo’s Classic Malt series in 1987, but the west highland distillery’s small size means that official bottlings are thin on the ground. Most of Oban's spirit is destined for the Classic Malts 14-year-old and Distillers Edition bottlings, so other official bottlings are scarce but the 2002 Special Release Oban 1969 is a classic that's well worth hunting down.

Oban’s single malt, perhaps surprisingly for such a small distillery, had already been officially bottled prior to the creation of the Classic Malts, with a 12-year-old available from the 1970s onwards in distinctive decanter-style bottles. Recent official outings include a handful of limited edition NAS bottlings and the 2021 Special Release Oban 12-year-old, a nod to the distillery’s history. Independent bottlings of Oban are extremely rare, but well worth grabbing if you can find them.

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.