Tormore 1992-2023 - 31 Year Old - SMWS 105.41 - Lemon De Luxe

Completed in 1959, Tormore was the first new distillery built in Scotland in the 20th century. Tormore's distillery buildings are endearingly incongruous neoclassical agglomerations of granite and glass with verdigris copper rooftops and a musical clock, in front of which some modest topiary and an almost apologetic water feature face directly onto the A95 a stone’s throw from Cragganmore. 

Tormore is one of the quietest distilleries in Speyside in terms of bottlings, with former owners Pernod Ricard reserving the vast majority of its output for their Chivas Brothers subsidiary’s portfolio of blended whiskies. Official bottlings of Tormore are scarce but in the last few years a string of strikingly good long-aged casks of late 1980s and early 1990s vintage Tormore have appeared from indie bottlers.

In June 2022 it was announced that Pernod Ricard had sold Tormore to Elixir Distillers, from whom they had bought The Whisky Exchange the previous November.

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.