Milton bottle

The Whisky Exchange Obviously, I was eager to taste this remarkably aged spirit, but I was also intrigued by the business of making a whisky this old. Seventy-two years is an absurdly long time to wait for a return on investment. The person filling that barrel in 1949 couldn’t have expected that the spirit would remain there until well into the twenty-first century. Throughout all those years the cask was losing volume too, the dreaded “angels’ share” sucking valuable whisky into the air through evaporation. Having known plenty of craft distillers walking the tightrope between aging their spirits long enough to reach maturation and generating sales enough to keep the lights on, the idea of hanging on to a cask of Scotch for seventy-two years struck me as an inherently wild prospect. “You have to respect what they’re doing,” Robin Robinson, spirits brand consultant and author of The Complete Whiskey Course, told me. “Gordon & MacPhail really do consider themselves the stewards of ancient Scottish whisky history. I’ve been through their warehouse and I’ve seen some phenomenal barrels.” “Extreme-Aged” Whiskies Are a Big Deal, But How Old Is Too Old? How distillers and blenders keep “extreme-aged” spirits on track after 50 years Gordon & MacPhail is an independent bottler, meaning that the company specializes in aging and curating whisky from a variety of Scottish distilleries. Independent bottlers can offer very good Scotch, but they don’t necessarily enjoy the international ...

The Whisky Exchange Obviously, I was eager to taste this remarkably aged spirit, but I was also intrigued by the business of making a whisky this old. Seventy-two years is an absurdly long time to wait for a return on investment. The person filling that barrel in 1949 couldn’t have expected that the spirit would remain there until well into the twenty-first century. Throughout all those years the cask was losing volume too, the dreaded “angels’ share” sucking valuable whisky into the air through evaporation. Having known plenty of craft distillers walking the tightrope between aging their spirits long enough to reach maturation and generating sales enough to keep the lights on, the idea of hanging on to a cask of Scotch for seventy-two years struck me as an inherently wild prospect. “You have to respect what they’re doing,” Robin Robinson, spirits brand consultant and author of The Complete Whiskey Course, told me. “Gordon & MacPhail really do consider themselves the stewards of ancient Scottish whisky history. I’ve been through their warehouse and I’ve seen some phenomenal barrels.” “Extreme-Aged” Whiskies Are a Big Deal, But How Old Is Too Old? How distillers and blenders keep “extreme-aged” spirits on track after 50 years Gordon & MacPhail is an independent bottler, meaning that the company specializes in aging and curating whisky from a variety of Scottish distilleries. Independent bottlers can offer very good Scotch, but they don’t necessarily enjoy the international ...