£1,700.00
BEN NEVIS DISTILLERY 32yo 1966 50.5%
This 32 year old Highland single malt was distilled at the Ben Nevis distillery in June 1966 and then bottled in September 1998.
This is where it all gets a little bizarre .... because when the cask was bottled for a private US customer in 1998, the sale ended up falling through and the bottles were cast aside and forgotten about until quite recently. The whisky was subsequently repackaged as the Forgotten Bottlings and the rest is, as they say, history.
Yielded from oak casks at a natural strength 50.5% ABV, this is one of 689 bottles that comes with a fine timber presentation case.SpecificationsRegionHighlandsVintage1966Age32Bottled1998SeriesForgotten BottlingsYield689CaskOakABV50.5%Content70clBrandBen NevisCustomer reviewsNo reviews left yet.
BEN NEVIS DISTILLERY 32yo 1966 50.5%
It was in 1825 that ‘Long’ John Macdonald took out a licence for his Ben Nevis distillery on the outskirts of Fort William and close to Britain’s highest mountain. His son Peter took up the reins soon after and built a significant business. By the end of the 19th century, when blended Scotch was becoming the fashion, Long John’s Dew of Ben Nevis was a successful single malt brand.
Such was the popularity of the MacDonald’s whisky that Peter built a second distillery, ‘Nevis’, which ran in tandem with the original unit. At one point, over 200 people were employed in this virtual whisky city.
This golden age was not to last. In 1908 Nevis closed and its sister plant operated intermittently until 1941 when the colourful Canadian entrepreneur (and former bootlegger) Joseph Hobbs bought the firm. The Long John brand name had already been sold to Seager Evans, and Hobbs sold off the former Nevis site to Associated Scottish Distilleries. Closed during WWII, Hobbs restarted production in 1955 when he installed a Coffey still. He then started to blend his malt and grain together before maturing.
The distillery fell silent in 1978, but production started again, along with much needed refurbishment, in 1981 when it was bought, appropriately enough, by Long John International – by then the whisky division of the brewer Whitbread. In 1989, Long John sold it to the Japanese distiller Nikka which had been buying malt and grain from the distillery for a number of years.
Ben Nevis has continued in production and has split its whisky between bulk supplies for Japan, the Dew of Ben Nevis and Macdonalds of Glencoe blends, and single malt bottlings, which start with a 10-year-old expression but in recent years have been extended to include Macdonald’s Traditional Ben Nevis which includes smokier components. Whisky from one of the last ‘Blended At Birth’ casks appeared as a 40-year-old in 2002.
| Weight | 3 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 12 × 40 × 20 cm |
