Speyburn 1980-1993 - 13 Year Old - SMWS 88.2

A large Speyside distillery with a low profile, Speyburn produces a clean, straightforward single malt whisky, the vast majority of which goes to blenders. Official bottlings in the last few decades have generally been safe to the point of anodyne, leading to Speyburn’s rise as a meme - an ironic but affectionate in-joke within certain quarters of the whisky nerderati.

Independent cask strength bottlings of Speyburn, however, are a very different matter, with sought after classics including 1970s vintages by Cadenhead’s and the SMWS, and a famous 1967 bottling by Moon Import. Speyburn themselves defied their bland image with a pair of superb 1978 vintage 21-year-old casks released in 1999 and the later Speyburn 25-year-old Solera, which won Best Highland Single Malt at the World Whisky Awards in 2012 - a fantastic, old school style, elegant whisky that still goes for very reasonable prices.

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.