Single Cask

When browsing the shelves of your favourite whisky store, you may encounter several bottles labeled as single cask. Now although the term is rather self-explanatory, I’ve often heard whisky newcomers ask: Well aren’t all bottles from single casks?, and the answer is quite simply no.

In order to understand why all bottles of whisky are not from a single cask, one needs to understand the intricacies of maturing whisky. Surprisingly, even though two identical casks may be filled on the same day, with spirit from the same run, matured for the same duration, stored in the same warehouse, right next to one another, they will still have varying nuances in their flavor profiles. The differences may be incredibly slight and near impossible to detect, or they may even be fairly pronounced and easily distinguishable. The reason for this is that it is impossible for each cask to be identical when considering the grain of the wood, and as the spirit can get as much as 70% of its flavor from the cask, such microscopic differences as grain patterns and cell size suddenly aren’t as negligible as we may naturally think.

Because of the slight differences in the whisky of individual casks after the required term of maturation, distillers, in an effort to produce a consistent bottle of whisky, will vat these casks together – after all, if you love your bottle of Highland Park 12yo, you want it to taste the same every time you buy it. Vatting casks together allows the slight differences to be overpowered and lost, and the general distillery profile to emerge dominant.

Every so often, a distillery may encounter a particular cask that overtime has evolved into something much greater than its mere expectations. This cask may then be kept aside to be bottled as a special single cask release to showcase some of the distillery’s uniqueness, or to celebrate a particular occasion.

A single cask bottle is worth looking out for if you are interested in getting to know a distillery better, but just keep in mind that it may not be an accurate reflection on the whisky the distillery commonly produces. My personal advice would be to only try a single cask bottle once you’ve tried the regular expressions available (at least the ones you can afford), so as to be in a better position to assess the differences and not form a misleading impression of a distillery.

As mentioned, most distilleries do not commonly release single cask whiskies and some of the special releases can be very expensive, so your best option may be to find an Independent Bottler that does. The only exceptions I can think of right now is the The Balvenie 15yo which is a standard release, and a really great one at that. The labels on single cask bottlings will often detail the cask number/identifier, cask type, bottles produced, as well as dates of distillation and bottling.

Tips and Thoughts:
1)      If it doesn’t say single cask, it isn’t
2)      Don’t judge a distillery on single cask alone
3)      Independent Bottlers (IB) are good sources of single cask whisky
4)      Caution, some IBs will mature (and/or finish) whisky in a cask that the original distillery would never use