One of the (many) things I love about whisky is the great profusion of choice we have, at this particular special moment in time. As you already know if you’re a devotee, the whisky market is in a kind of a golden age; more and more people are falling under its spell, and so sales are climbing and the range of whiskies available has probably never been greater.
Standard distillery bottlings are where most people start with whisky; they’re widely available, often affordable and generally of consistent high quality. However some (not all, but many) make concessions to the mass-market; they’ll chill-filter a whisky to avoid some unsightly clouding, or add caramel to make the spirit a more appealing colour for the store shelf. The spirit may be watered down to a set alcohol strength. In addition, without exception these standard bottlings are blended from many different casks to maintain a consistent flavour profile. This is essential for a distillery’s main product lines which the consumer can pick up from month to month, and year to year, and be assured that his whisky will taste just like that last bottle they loved. However the romantic notion of tasting a spirit “straight from the warehouse” is lost, or at least obscured, by all of these processes.
Luckily for the consumer looking for a more “pure” experience, alternatives do exist. Independent bottlers have an entirely different marketing strategy to the distillers; rather than keeping a bottling consistent over time, they commonly make their market in quality and novelty. A typical independent will buy a cask from a distillery, after which they may refill the maturing spirit into their own wood or simply let time take its course with the original cask. But the best part of the process happens before they bottle it, and that is often – nothing! Nothing added to the whisky for colouring or to reduce the natural strength; no chill filtering; no blending. (I imagine the whisky is still put through a coarse filter to stop you finding little chunks of wood, charcoal and who knows what else in it; it’s just not CHILL-filtered).