Craigellachie 17 for $95, the new Laphroaig 15, and Scotland's Oldest Distillery Isn't Who You Think

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Remedy ships domestic from Los Angeles, New York, and Sugar Land, Texas — no customs, no import math, no VAT to back out. Orders process in 1–3 business days with Ground, 2-Day, and Overnight options, and someone 21+ has to be there to sign; that requirement doesn't bend, and they won't ship to PO boxes, APO/FPO addresses, or carrier hold locations. Spirits currently go to AK, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, MD, ME, MI, MO, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, SC, SD, TX, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, and WY — state rules shift, so drop your zip in at checkout to confirm before you get attached to a bottle.

The news bottle of the week. Laphroaig just brought the 15 back to its permanent core range after more than a decade away — and bumped it from the old 43% to 46% along the way. Wider American retail distribution doesn't start until September, so seeing it shippable now, slightly under the $89 US launch price, is genuinely early. Zesty citrus and dried hay over that unmistakable BBQ smoke, with the extra five years sanding down the 10's medicinal edges.

ABV: 46% | Cask: Ex-Bourbon American Oak | 700ml

Price: $84.99
Typical US Market Range: ~$89–90 (US launch price)
Savings: Modest — the story here is early access, not discount

Who's this for: Islay drinkers who found the 10 too raw and the 18 too pricey
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The deal of the week, and it isn't close. Craigellachie 17 sits at $166–180 nearly everywhere in the US right now — this is $45 off Remedy's own regular price and roughly half what most retailers are asking. Craigellachie is the meaty, old-school outlier of Speyside — worm tub condensers, oil-fired heritage — and the 17 rounds the 13's muscular edge into ripe tropical fruit, vanilla, and toffee. A genuine step up from the 13, now priced below what that bottle plus a nice bar pour would run you.

ABV: 46% | Cask: Ex-Bourbon & Ex-Sherry | 750ml

Price: $94.99
Typical US Market Range: $166–180
Savings: ~$70–85

Who's this for: Anyone who liked the 13 and wondered what four more years buys you
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The annual Friends of Laphroaig release, and one of the more interesting recent ones: three-quarters matured in second-fill Madeira casks, the rest finished in first-fill port casks, mostly white port. Cask strength at 52.3%, and the Portuguese fortified-wine influence pulls the smoke toward honey, toasted peach, and charred orange peel. At $30 under its original SRP nearly three years on, this is the kind of limited release you rarely see get cheaper.

ABV: 52.3% | Cask: Second-Fill Madeira & First-Fill White Port | 700ml

Price: $69.99
Typical US Market Range: $95–106 (original SRP $99)
Savings: ~$25–36

Who's this for: Peatheads who want cask strength and something other than another sherry finish
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The original blended grain Scotch — the whisky that launched Compass Box in 2000 — now a once-a-year limited release because mature grain stock has gotten genuinely hard to source. The 2025 edition is just 9,912 bottles, built on Cameronbridge single grain including a parcel double-matured in a first-fill Marsala barrique, bumped to 46%, natural color, non-chill filtered. Caramel, peach purée, chocolate mousse, nutmeg custard. Blended grain is the most overlooked category in Scotch, and this is its flagship at nearly half price.

ABV: 46% | Cask: Ex-Bourbon, with a parcel double-matured in First-Fill Marsala Barrique | 700ml

Price: $79.99
Typical US Market Range: $130–160
Savings: ~$50–80

Who's this for: Anyone curious what grain whisky can do when it's treated like the main event
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Two allocated Heaven Hill barrel proofers in one box. B526 is the third batch of the Barrel Proof Rye line, released in May — 10 years 8 months old, 115.6 proof, uncut, non-chill filtered, all baking spice, stewed fruit, and a long butterscotch-and-rye-spice finish. The bourbon batch isn't specified, which is worth knowing going in. You're paying roughly combined MSRP for two bottles that rarely sit on shelves at MSRP. Fair deal, great pairing.

Rye: 57.8% ABV (115.6 proof) | Bourbon: batch not specified | 750ml each

Price: $134.99
Typical US Market Range: ~$145 combined MSRP ($70 rye + $75 bourbon), both routinely above that at retail
Savings: This one's about allocation, not discount

Who's this for: The bourbon-and-rye drinker who wants a side-by-side tasting night
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Back in May I featured the piece that anchors my whisky lounge table — a handcrafted, laser-cut 3D wooden map of Scotland from Gebra Crafters, with distilleries marked and numbered against a legend, plus custom word art for the distilleries that shaped my whisky journey. Mine is the circular version, mounted as a Lazy Susan for the tasting table, and two months on it's still the thing guests ask about first.

Quick refresher on the details: sizes run from 11.5 × 10 inches up to 30 × 26 inches, starting at $99. Distillery customization is free, shipping is free, and custom orders include a draft for approval before anything gets cut. Same transparency note as before: I reached out to them, not the other way around — I bought mine, readers asked where it came from, and Gebra Crafters agreed to a reader discount after the fact.

That discount is still live: 20% off with code WHISKY20 (minimum $150 order), good across their whole site — so a hometown map, golf course, or marathon route qualifies too.

Shop the 3D Wooden Map of Scotland Here

Three of Dramface's contributors tasted Balcones' flagship Texas single malt side by side and all landed on the same number. Ogilvie's 2013 batch, snagged at auction for about $40, gave him black cherries, stewed plums and honeyed pears, then a palate of cinnamon-dusted stone fruit compote, brown sugar and pumpernickel — "a compote, honey, and malt masterpiece," and his pick for the best official bottling on his shelf, full stop. Murdo, drinking what he's convinced was the only Balcones ever sold at retail in Hong Kong, got a far oakier, funkier read: musty storage room, acetone, Jamaican rum ester vibes, then a thick arrival of caramel, dark chocolate, coffee and — his word — Dr Pepper. Eallair found orange marmalade on warm sourdough and toasted oak, and dug into production: a fifty-year-old mash tun inherited from Speyburn, seven-day open-top fermentation without pasteurization, and helical lyne arms that effectively make their Forsyths stills the longest in the world.

Score: 8/10 from all three — Full review

My take: Three palates, three bottling years, three continents of purchase, three identical scores — and wildly different notes. Ogilvie's is dark fruit and bakery, Murdo's is oak and soda pop. That's not disagreement, that's a whisky with enough going on that people find different rooms in the same house. Better news for US readers than the review lets on: both were drinking auction bottles, but Texas 1 is on shelves domestically at $62–70, cheaper than at launch in 2013. If the category's uneven pricing has kept you away from American single malt, this is the on-ramp. One caveat — these were 2013 bottles with no age statement; current releases carry a stated age.

An early review of the returning 15 — the same bottle in Bottles Worth Grabbing above — and the headline isn't the whisky, it's the label. Beyond the age statement and the bump from 43% to 46%, he found the back of the box states outright that it's neither chill filtered nor colored, calling it the only official Laphroaig he can think of that spells out all four quality guarantees in unambiguous writing. The pour backs it up: visibly pale, roughly half the color of a typical recent Laphroaig. On the nose, wet dog on a windy beach, brine, seaweed and smoked fish, then coal dust, Cherry Bakewell, caramelized oak and a distinct almond-hazelnut nuttiness he credits to the extra years, with Germolene and a menthol edge. The palate is very salty, syrupy with bourbon-cask caramel and thick medicinal peat, finishing long and smoky with salmiak and Fisherman's Friends. He's honest that older Laphroaigs are hit or miss for him — sometimes the peat buries the maturity, sometimes the age flattens the peat — but this one lands.

Verdict: A middle-aged peated whisky done right, and possibly the best-presented Laphroaig ever. Full review

My take: The presentation news deserves more attention than it's getting. Natural color and non-chill filtration stated outright on a core-range Laphroaig is a real shift from a distillery that's spent years letting drinkers guess, and if it holds across future releases it matters more than any single bottle. Worth being precise about "back after a decade," too: that counts from the limited 200th-anniversary 15 in 2015. The original core-range bottling was dropped in 2009 — seventeen years ago — and most coverage has flattened the difference. He calls the price justified rather than a bargain, and better value than the recent 18, which tracks with the US side around $85–90. If you're a 10 Cask Strength drinker, his framing is the useful one: not a replacement, a different proposition.

Kilkerran's oldest core bottling from Glengyle — Springbank's sister distillery, same barley, same team — at a 60/40 bourbon-to-sherry split, with a genuinely dark, almost reddish color from cask alone. His notes come from a bottle open two and a half weeks, and much of the review is about how it moved: cherry and sticky brown-sugar toffee opening into orange and proper chocolate, with Campbeltown brine, oiliness, a wisp of peat and a mellow cigar-box note underneath. The palate shifted toward darker raisin and cherry, with ash and honey coating everything. The finish is where he lights up — a nutty quality that only emerged after weeks of air, tying together chocolate, ash, mint and coastal salt. Water makes it drier and more overtly Campbeltown. Head-to-head against Springbank 15, he gives Springbank the edge: same family of flavors, pitched lower and resonating longer — violin versus cello.

Verdict: 4.75/5 glasses on quality, docked to 4.5/5 on value at around $175. Full review

My take: One correction worth making: despite the darker color, this is actually less sherry-influenced than the 2023 vatting, which ran roughly 60–65% sherry with a splash of rum. The 40% here is a step up from the bourbon-led 2020–2022 releases, but Kilkerran 16 has been sherry-forward before, and more so. Color is a poor proxy for batch makeup. On value I'd push back harder than he does — these come up at auction closer to $150 all-in, and you should still find one domestically around that number if you look. More to the point, Glengyle is a genuinely small-production distillery. The price isn't a marketing markup on a big brand; it's limited bottles shipped a long way into a fragmented US distribution system, and what you get for it is an experience nothing else on the shelf replicates. His patience note is the one to carry: the best thing in this bottle — that nutty finish — wasn't there at the neck pour. Don't judge it on night one.

Search for Scotland's oldest working distillery and the answer you'll usually find is The Glenturret. Ask the surviving records and you'll get a different one. The gap between those two is one of the better stories in whisky, and it says a lot about how the industry's history actually got written.

Glenturret's claim begins with a 1763 rental document referring to a distillery called Thurot somewhere on the sprawling Ochtertyre estate near Crieff — the earliest known name for The Glenturret, by the brand's own account. Credit where due: the owners commissioned the research themselves and published the findings. The problem is what the document says. It records that no rent was paid because the distillery had "been waste for several years" — already dead by 1763 — and historians have found neither its precise location nor any evidence connecting it to today's Glenturret, which stands on the site of the old Hosh Distillery. Hosh first appears in excise records in 1816, fell silent in 1923, had its stills stripped out in the 1930s (one building became a mushroom farm), and was rebuilt in the late 1950s. The distillery also traces illicit distilling on the site back to 1717 — a story worth enjoying on the tour, and taking on faith.

Bowmore has the same problem. The 1779 founding date is on every bottle, but no 18th-century evidence for a distillery there has ever surfaced — the supposed founder doesn't even appear in Bowmore's rental records until 1798 — and the distillery first shows up in excise records in 1816.

Then there's Strathisla, founded in 1786 as the Milton Distillery in Keith — younger than both rivals by their advertised dates, but the only one whose paper actually supports the claim. A 1785 land charter sits in the National Records of Scotland, and researchers recently found George Taylor's itemized account of building the distillery, down to shipping the first whisky in early 1787. Whisky historian Iain Russell, who has picked apart all of these claims, lands here: the strongest documented case for Scotland's oldest working distillery belongs to Strathisla — the pagoda-roofed Speyside postcard most people know only as the home of Chivas.

Two footnotes. Littlemill marketed itself for decades as Scotland's oldest, founded 1772 — but it closed in 1994, burned down in 2004, and Russell found its celebrated 1773 "licence" was actually permission to sell alcohol at a coaching inn, not distil it. And Glen Garioch might be a dark horse: a Thomas Simpson advertised whisky from his Oldmeldrum distillery in December 1785, possibly the same operation — though Oldmeldrum had multiple distilleries, and the evidence is inconclusive.

One more myth worth retiring while we're here: The Glenlivet was never Scotland's first licensed distillery. George Smith was the first legal distiller in the parish of Glenlivet after the 1823 Excise Act — a much narrower claim, and the one the brand itself now uses.

So the honest scorecard: oldest by brand claim, Glenturret. Strongest documented claim, Strathisla. Most intriguing unresolved contender, Glen Garioch. In this industry, the qualifier is usually doing more work than the date.

On April 30, President Trump said tariffs and restrictions on whisky produced in the United Kingdom would be lifted — a story we've covered before in this newsletter, and one that drew immediate celebration from the Scotch Whisky Association and distillers on both sides of the Atlantic. The statement, made following the King and Queen's state visit to Washington, was backed the same day by a narrower pledge from US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, promising "preferential duty access" for UK-produced whiskey without naming a rate or a date. The relief it implied was real: under the 10% tariff imposed in April 2025, Scotch shipments to the US fell 15% by volume between May and December 2025, and full-year US exports dropped 4% in value to £933 million — in what remains Scotch whisky's most valuable market.

So is the tariff actually ending? Here's the simple version. Scotch still pays 10% today — the announcement never turned into customs instructions, and importers have kept paying for eleven weeks. That tariff legally expires on July 24 unless Congress extends it, and no extension has been enacted, because the law behind it carries a 150-day limit. But a replacement is in the works: USTR has proposed a new 10% tariff on UK goods under a different law — this time justified by forced-labor enforcement rather than trade deficits — and has completed its hearings, though no final action has been issued. Trump's promised whisky exemption could still surface in that version. So far, it exists only as a press release.

My take: The current tariff will likely end this week not because of the King, the Truth Social post, or the USTR statement, but because a 1974 statute runs out of road — and any relief may last only as long as it takes the administration to swap one legal authority for another. The proposed replacement sits in open tension with the "preferential access" pledge made the same week the King flew home, and that pledge could still materialize as a whisky exemption. It just hasn't yet. This is now a saga in which Scotch has spent seven years as a bargaining chip in disputes that have nothing to do with whisky — aircraft subsidies, trade deficits, forced-labor enforcement, royal diplomacy — and a binding zero-for-zero spirits agreement remains the only version of the story that actually ends. In the meantime, don't expect price drops at retail: most bottles on US shelves were imported under the old math. The likeliest outcome isn't cheaper whisky. It's that the tariff's legal label changes while the bill importers pay stays exactly the same.

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That's it for this week.

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— Tim