Highland 1994 27 Year Old Single Cask For Royal Mile Whiskies // Rare Find

Clynelish

A story of two distilleries, the original Clynelish was founded in 1819 by the Duke of Sutherland in the town of Brora. After a number of licensee changes Clynelish eventually fell to the hands of James Ainslie & Heibron in 1896. This firm narrowly escaped bankruptcy and is purchased by Distillers Company Limited, the organisation we know today as Diageo. The site would be mothballed in 1931 before resuming once again in 1939. Demand for Clynelish whisky was at an all time high throughout the 1960s, with the malt exclusively going into DCL’s blended products including Johnnie Walker. In 1967 a second distillery on the site was built, named Clynelish A & B. The two ran parallel to each other for a short time to ensure spirit quality was consistent, before Clynelish A was closed in 1968. Fortune would favour this old distillery however, as Caol Ila required urgent renovation, leaving a drought in DCL’s portfolio for peated malt. Consequently, Clynelish A was reopened under the name Brora, creating a peated malt whisky for the company’s blends. The B site retained the Clynelish name, and is the distillery we know today. Brora closed in 1983, although it has seen recent efforts to revive it for production amid the global whisky boom. 
 
Clynelish today is a core component of Diageo’s signature blends such as Johnnie Walker, a fact that has remained largely unchanged for over 100 years. Clynelish 14 year old is the only consistently available expression of the distillery as a single malt, with most of its 4.8 million litres per year output reserved for blended whiskies. It is however occasionally seen as part of Diageo’s annual special releases, typically finished or matured in a unique cask style. Clynelish whisky is typically quite sought after by malt whisky enthusiasts for its signature waxy and fruity style of malt whisky. As such a large volume of its output is not sold as a single malt, aged expressions of the distillery are relatively uncommon. Much of the distillery’s reputation has been built through single cask expressions bottled by independent bottlers, making many older vintages of the distillery highly sought after.