Loch Lomond 12 Year Old

Set up to be totally self-sufficient, Loch Lomond Distillery is one of only two remaining “dual” whisky distilleries in Scotland, distilling both grain and malt whisky in the same facility. While this was common practice in the 19th century, consolidation and efficiencies during the 20th century meant that distilleries nowadays are either one or the other. Loch Lomond’s set up is totally unique, featuring a set of traditional pot stills, three sets of Lomond stills and three sets of column stills. A Lomond still, as you’re no doubt wondering, is a hybrid style of still that features a traditional pot but is fitted with a rectifying head (like a column still). This allows a further range of characters to be produced, allowing the distiller to produce different kinds of whisky from a single apparatus. If you’ve had the pleasure of visiting McHenry and Sons distillery in Tasmania you’ll have seen exactly such a still in action. We mentioned earlier that Duncan Thomas, Loch Lomond’s founder, was one of the great innovators of the industry. In his early days at Littlemill he replaced the pot stills with hybrid refracting stills and later perfected this design when he commissioned what became known as the Lomond still for the newly built Loch Lomond Distillery. Lomond stills have since been used across the industry at distilleries like Miltonduff, Glenburgie, Inverleven, Scapa and most recently Bruichladdich.

In purchasing Loch Lomond, Glen Catrine had the means to heavily exploit the private label and bulk whisky market; an unglamorous but highly lucrative business. Over the next three decades they rapidly build up the distillery’s infrastructure to flexibly produce a wide variety of whisky styles for their customers including traditional peated and unpeated single malt, peated and unpeated single malt from Lomond stills (a lighter, floral style), single grain and blended whisky. In addition to producing for the private and bulk market, the company also bottled and marketed whisky under their own labels including Loch Lomond, Inchmurrin, Inchmoan, Glengarry, Clansman and High Commissioner, but the malts never really got the attention they deserved and aside from a small annual output of original bottlings, Loch Lomond single malt was mainly the preserve of independent bottlers.

The new management’s focus on single malts has meant that Master Distiller Michael Henry has free reign to create exceptional, unprecedented single malt whisky from one of the world’s most diverse barrel stocks. Loch Lomond 12 Year Old is an excellent example of this and is certainly unlike any whisky we’ve ever tasted at Whisky Club HQ. Matured in three types of casks; bourbon, refill and re-charged, the whisky has an incredibly succulent fruity character of peach, pear and apricot with a vanilla sweetness as well as the trademark hints of peat and smoke found in Loch Lomond whiskies. It’s a very well balanced malt whisky and this certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed with a whopping 93.5/100 in Jim Murray’s 2017 Whisky Bible, Gold at the 2016 San Francisco World Spirits Competition and Gold at the 2017 Berlin International Spirits Competition.

Available in Australia for the very first time and exclusive to Club members only, this is a sessionable malt like no other in my opinion. It’s captured the hearts, minds and tastebuds of critics and judges around the world, and to quote an enraptured Jim Murray: “…not sure if the distiller at the time was playing with some high propane yeast which just explodes with fruit, there is a richness to this malt that really does deserve applause…never before seen spice quite like it, or such a sublime balance with the fruity malt…”