30 Years of the SMWS & 3 New Single Malt Distilleries
It has been over a year since the society added a new number to their distillery codes, there was speculation, as they’re currently celebrating a very enviable 30 years as the world’s largest Whisky Club, they may release a new number, number 130, how fitting! But as it turns out, as they’ve been extremely busy tasting many new distilleries in the hope of finding 130, that they found a whopping three new distilleries and all were just launched in November’s BIG outurn of 40 new bottlings.
I am sure the members at the Society didn’t anticipate 3 numbers being launched all in one month, 130, 131 and 132 (I know I didn’t). But wait there’s more… there is something unusual about these three distilleries, they are all Japanese and two of them are distilleries which are currently closed. Want to know what the numbers are? wait no more, listed below are the three distilleries and also some more info on age etc:
The 3 new bottlings are:
130.1 Chichibu 4yo (Dynamic & Attractive) 1st Fill Barrel ex-Bourbon 61.9% vol 227 bottles
131.1 Hanyu 22yo (The Sinful Side of Sexy) 1st Fill Barrel ex-Bourbon 57.4% vol 212 bottles
132.1 Karuizawa 28yo (Secret Moonlit Garden Dram) Refill Butt ex-Sherry 59.9% vol 229 bottles
Now I am sure you understand the no 1 bottles from the society are slightly attractive to the collector, and with these three new distilleries all being Japanese they just catapulted up the ranks of collectability and with two of them being closed they went galactic… so it won’t surprise you to learn that these were in high demand and sold out in the UK within minutes on the phone and a couple of hours at the venues. With the SMWS having members rooms all over the world the UK allocation was not too much, there really wasn’t a lot of these new bottles to go around.
Of course, you may be aware we love Single Cask Whiskies but we also love Japanese Whisky, we wanted these drams… so on the 15th November I headed through to the member’s rooms in Queen Street, for its opening, waited patiently, had a coffee and purchased all three at 10 am sharp.
Look at our lovely trio of Whisky ninjas…
Tasting notes of these will be live in a week or two!
PS: Ooops, did I mention you need to be a member to buy society drams, click to find out more.
