ANNANDALE DISTILLERY IS COMMITTED TO RESPONSIBLE DRINKING

Single Cask Single Malts at Cask Strength

"Sampling whisky as it matures is one of the enduring pleasures of owning a distillery. Thankfully, no instrument has ever been developed that can indicate whether or not a cask of whisky has transitioned from ‘OK to drink’ to ‘delightful to drink’. This means that every single cask must be nosed and tasted regularly. Working from cask to cask, it transpires that some are sensorially mature beyond their years. As the Founders of Annandale Distillery, it’s our privilege and pleasure to select and set aside a few of these early maturing 2016 casks, for you to enjoy. This is Annandale’s Founders’ Selection."  - David Thomson & Teresa Church 

Following on from the successful release of our first Founders Selection in November 2019, our pursuit to discover our next Founders Selection drew us to casks that have always sparked our curiosity.

March 2017 saw Annandale fill just 90x 230L Ex- STR (Shaved, Toasted and Re-charred) French Burgundy casks. We took great pleasure and interest in tracking the maturation journey of these casks and by March of 2020, the time came to select just 2 outstanding casks from the 90 casks filled to bottle. These were casks 321 (2017) Man O’Words and 355 (2017) Man O’Sword.

Founders’ Selection: Cask 2016/544 (Man O’ Sword) & Cask 2016/588 (Man O’ Words) SOLD OUT

It was during one of these routine samplings that we came across a clutch of sherry-conditioned virgin oak hogsheads, lurking in the dark and damp recesses of our historic bonded warehouses. We’d sourced 12 of these hogsheads in early 2016 from Miguel Martin (José y Miguel Martín SA, Spain). Eight were coopered in Spain from American oak. The other four, also coopered in Spain, were of homegrown Spanish oak. Half were filled with our unpeated Man O’ Words spirit and the other half filled with our peated Man O’ Sword.

Spanish oak (Quercus rubor) is faster growing than American oak (Quercus alba), giving it a more open grain. This allows the maturing spirit to penetrate the oak more readily to extract various flavour compounds. We thought this might be interesting……and it has certainly proved to be so!

Casks 2016/544 and 2016/588 are the inaugural bottlings in our Founders’ Selection range.