Balvenie 12YO Single Barrel

If you were to take a guided tour of The Balvenie distillery, you’d be able to draw whisky directly from a cask in Warehouse 24. With The Balvenie Single Barrel First Fill, you can essentially enjoy a similar ‘straight-from-the-cask’ experience. That is because each bottle of The Balvenie Single Barrel First Fill has been matured exclusively in a single first fill American oak ex-Bourbon barrel for 12 years.

American oak barrels are very popular in Scotland, it’s estimated that up to 90% of all Scotch is matured in American oak casks, because they impart beautiful notes of vanilla and spice to the maturing spirit. The “first fill” part comes from these barrels being used to mature Scotch whisky for the first time, after that they’ll be known as “second fill” and later yet, as “refill” casks and first fill casks impart the strongest amount of flavour to the new malt spirit. Each bottle is drawn from a single cask of a single distillation run, with each cask yielding no more than 300 bottles. No two casks, even of the same wood type and filled with spirit from the same distillation will produce identical single malt, making each Single Barrel bottling unique and unrepeatable. The process is completed when each bottle is hand-numbered with the number of the cask in which it was matured.

Stewart samples hundreds of casks using his exceptional nosing skills, refined throughout his remarkable 50-year career, and selects for Single Barrel bottling only those casks that share a consistent character of sweetness and subtle vanilla oak. Speaking of the process, he said. “There are very subtle differences from cask to cask and it gave me great satisfaction to sample these casks to find the finest ones. Each cask is unique and that is what makes each bottle of the Single Barrel First Fill 12 Year Old so exceptional.”

The Balvenie Single Barrel First Fill 12 Year Old is a non chill-filtered release with an ABV of 47.8%.