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Ben Nevis 1996 - 21 Year Old - Private Cask - Single Cask 1407
Ben Nevis 1996. 21 Year Old. Private Cask. Cask number 1407. 70cl. 48.8%.
Founded in 1825 by ‘Long John’ MacDonald, Ben Nevis is one of the classic Highland distilleries. Ben Nevis was purchased in the 1940s by Joseph Hobbs, who fitted a Coffey still enabling the distillery to produce both malt and grain whisky. A mothballed Ben Nevis was sold in 1981 to Long John Distillers (Whitbread), who refurbished the distillery and restarted production before selling up in 1989 to the Japanese firm Nikka, under whose stewardship the distillery has thrived.
For much of its early life Ben Nevis supplied the famous Dew of Ben Nevis blended whisky and single malt official bottlings were sporadic. That all changed after 1989, when Nikka bottled a 63-year-old Ben Nevis 1926 and embarked on an impressive run of vintage single casks and small batches alongside a core range 10-year-old. The early Nikka bottlings of 1960s & ‘70s vintages are particularly highly sought after. Independent Ben Nevis is abundant.
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.