Lagavulin 12 at Half Price, What to Drink Instead of Balvenie 14, and The Story of Campbeltown

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!

Hi Proof is a domestic shop out of Fullerton, California — nationwide shipping, or pickup if you're in Orange County. What makes them worth watching is the closeout section, where bottles that landed at full allocation pricing get moved at half off or better. Four of the five below are closeouts, and two are among the sharpest prices I've seen all year.

Laphroaig discontinued the 15 in 2009, brought it back briefly for the 200th anniversary in 2015, and has now made it permanent. Matured fully in American oak ex-bourbon, and this time bottled at 46% instead of the old 43%. It went on sale in the UK on June 29 and isn't due at US specialist retailers until September. Hi Proof has it now, and under the $89 US price.

ABV: 46% | Cask: American oak ex-bourbon | 700ml

Price: $74.99
Typical US Market Range: ~$89 at announced US pricing
Savings: ~$14

Who's this for: Anyone who wants a new release Laphroaig, bottled the way we wish the Lagavulin 16 were bottled — 46%, and at a good price.

Buy Here

The annual cask-strength 12 is the one Lagavulin release people actually chase, and this one came in at 57.4% from first-fill ex-bourbon and refill casks.

ABV: 57.4% | Cask: First-fill ex-bourbon and refill | 750ml

Price: $82.99 (down from $179.99)
Typical US Market Range: $125–180
Savings: ~$42–97

Who's this for: Anyone who wants the purest form of Lagavulin at the lowest price possible — easily the best in their lineup, and much better than the 16 and at a price that won’t last forever.

Buy Here

The 2024 Fèis Ìle bottling, built as a callback to two earlier Càirdeas releases — 2019's Triple Wood and 2021's PX Cask. Ten years old, matured in over-charred first- and second-fill ex-bourbon barrels and quarter casks, then finished in PX. Laphroaig's peat with dried fruit and toffee running underneath it. SRP was $109.99.

ABV: 52.4% | Cask: Over-charred ex-bourbon and quarter casks, PX finish | 700ml

Price: $64.99 (down from $109.99)
Typical US Market Range: $99–125
Savings: ~$34–60

Who's this for: Anyone who wants a cask strength 10-year-old Laphroaig for $65? An easy buy.

Buy Here

Longmorn spent most of a century as blending stock for Chivas, which is why almost nobody has a bottle on the shelf. Pernod Ricard launched this 18-year-old for the US market in 2024 at cask strength, non-chill filtered, no added color, matured entirely in American oak barrels and hogsheads. It arrived at $279.99, and the price was the problem — the whisky never was. At $115 it stops being a debate.

ABV: 57.6% | Cask: American oak barrels and hogsheads | 700ml

Price: $114.97 (down from $279.99)
Typical US Market Range: $180–280
Savings: ~$65–165

Who's this for: Anyone who wants a well-aged Speyside at cask strength for incredible value.

Buy Here

Batch 26-02 at 110.6 proof, aged seven years and three months — Maker's now prints the exact age on the label. Wheated mash bill, bottled straight from the barrel. SRP is $50, and it regularly holds that price.

ABV: 55.3% | Cask: New charred American oak | 750ml

Price: $35.99
Typical US Market Range: $45–55
Savings: ~$9–19

Who's this for: A cask strength wheated bourbon with seven years on it for $36 — an easy buy.

Buy Here

If you saw the post, this is the follow-up I promised. Three bottles came up: Balvenie 14 Caribbean Cask, Dalmore 12, and Caol Ila 12. This isn't really about those three. It's about where your money goes when you buy them — how much of the price is whisky and how much is the story printed on the box. Two alternatives for each below. Prices vary a lot by state, so treat every number as a range to check rather than a quote.

43%, and somewhere in the $70s to low $90s. Fourteen years in ex-bourbon, then a finish in casks seasoned with a blend of West Indian rums. The finish barely registers — you spend more time hunting for the rum than tasting it — and at 43% there's nothing underneath holding it up. Sweet, soft, short.

Around $50–55. Ex-bourbon matured, 46%, non-chill filtered, natural color, and Arran prints all of it on the bottle. Green apple, pear, and lemon zest over vanilla custard, with baked pineapple and coconut underneath — overlapping the same fruit profile the Caribbean Cask is selling you, from wood and spirit rather than a finish. The difference is structure. The texture runs thick and oily for the strength, and a peppery mid-palate of cardamom and ginger keeps it from collapsing into sugar. Fair warning: some find a tannic edge here that Balvenie doesn't have. That's the price of character.

Roughly $60–85 at 46%. Its signature is texture rather than flavor — a waxy, oily mouthfeel, beeswax and coastal lamp oil, that no other Highland malt replicates. Around it sits orange marmalade, green apple, honeyed barley, a saline edge, a whisper of smoke. Where the Balvenie finishes sweeter than it starts, Clynelish finishes drier: tea, wet granite, black pepper, clove. Don't let the Caribbean Cask marketing convince you you're getting something you're not. Clynelish costs the same or less and gives you more. Two caveats: Diageo discloses almost nothing about how it's made, and drinkers who've followed it for years say recent batches carry less of the heavy wax than older ones did.

40%, and the maturation is worth understanding. Nine years in American white oak ex-bourbon, then the spirit splits — half stays in bourbon wood, half moves into 30-year-old Gonzalez Byass Matusalem oloroso butts for the final stretch, then the two recombine. Those butts are genuinely rare, and Dalmore markets hard on them. But only half the liquid ever sees sherry, and only for three years. The rare casks are real. What's in your glass is mostly a story about them.

Around $66 at 46%, non-chill filtered, natural color, matured in Pedro Ximénez, oloroso, and virgin oak. This is what sherry-led maturation tastes like next to a partial finish: dried fruit, honey, cocoa, and baking spice, with the weight to carry them and the proof to deliver them. Worth knowing that the current core range still leans on stock laid down before Billy Walker bought the distillery — his own long-fermentation spirit is still maturing.

Prices swing hard by market, low $60s into the $80s, so shop it. Mull's unpeated malt at 46.3%, non-chill filtered, natural color, largely ex-bourbon. Rich orange and citrus, caramel and vanilla, cinnamon and clove, with a saltiness that comes through from the harbor. It isn't chasing the sherry profile and doesn't pretend to. It's here for the same drinker by a different road — if you were buying Dalmore for an approachable, fruit-and-spice Highland malt rather than for the sherry story specifically, this does that job with more proof and nothing filtered out. Batch variation is real; most are very good, a few are flat.

43%, and a price that has drifted into the $70s and $80s in a lot of markets for what is fundamentally Diageo's workhorse Islay malt. The whisky is good. The value quietly evaporated.

Generally $50–70. Tobermory's peated spirit at 30 to 40 ppm, 46.3%, non-chill filtered, natural color. Here's the useful contrast: Caol Ila's smoke is clean and precise, the product of tall stills and a house style built for consistency in blends. Ledaig's is dirtier — farmyard, rubber, ash, a peat that hasn't been sanded down. Some people bounce off it. If you've found Caol Ila a little too well-behaved, this is the correction, and it's usually cheaper.

Obvious for a reason. Around $55–70, 46%, non-chill filtered, natural color. More peat than Caol Ila, more proof, typically less money. Tar, citrus, and dark smoke with enough sweetness underneath to stay balanced. If you've been buying Caol Ila 12 out of habit, put the two side by side and see whether the habit survives.

Four writers on one bottle, which Dramface saves for releases they think warrant it. Eight years old, distilled 2017, bourbon casks finished in Paul Launois Champagne barriques — 5,726 bottles at cask strength, around £65 in the UK. The notes converge: fermented fruit and warm spice, grilled citrus and pineapple, coastal salinity underneath, and a mouthfeel all four called the standout, buttery and viscous with a faint effervescence. Argyle found it closed neat and said water made the salinity boom. Balfour scored it lowest and still called the mouthfeel the best of the series, warning about tannic bite. Fleming called it the best Launois release yet, circling a funky vegetal bitterness he compared to Amaro. Crystal noted the scramble has cooled — there's still stock this year, which hasn't been true in the past.

Scores: 8/10, 7/10, 8/10, 8/10 [Full review]

My take: Every Ardnamurchan bottle carries a code giving you the casks, the barley, the fermentation, the fill dates — no story to decode, because they print it. That stock is sitting long enough to find is the buying window, not a warning. The catch is US availability: not broadly distributed here, and the writers who got it paid to ship it in. If you see one on a shelf, that's the decision made for you.

A borrowed bottle, shared by a community member named Joe, and all four scored it 4 out of 4 — something they noted they hadn't done in a long time. Distilled in the mid-1980s. Banana and banana foster, graham cracker, milk chocolate and marshmallow — one landed on s'mores and the rest agreed — over crème brûlée custard, honeysuckle, and a malty base, with butterscotch arriving very late and a musty dunnage character underneath. Water, which they approached nervously at 43%, pushed it toward pears and pancake batter without thinning it. Their recurring point: it doesn't drink like 43%. They also credited Glenfarclas for restraint — no crystal decanter, just the standard bottle in a red box. As one put it, another distillery would have charged $6,000 for the same liquid in fancier packaging.

Scores: 4/4 from all four [Full review]

My take: Worth understanding what 43% means on a whisky this old. In Scotland's cool, damp warehouses casks lose alcohol faster than water, so strength falls year over year, and below 40% it can't legally be sold as Scotch. This likely reflects four decades of maturation rather than dilution before bottling. That doesn't guarantee body, but this one clearly kept plenty. Low proof is only a problem when there's nothing behind it. Roughly $1,500 by their estimate is restrained for a 40-year-old, and the missing decanter is the takeaway.

The first Sutherland release bottled as a single malt rather than a blended malt. Eight years old, 48%, non-chill filtered, no added color, matured in de-charred and re-charred ex-bourbon barrels — casks shaved back, re-toasted, and re-charred before filling. Batch one, so more are likely coming. He paid £45, with stock still findable in UK shops. The nose is pure Clynelish: beeswax, honey, orchard fruit, caramel, licorice, vanilla, intense for the age and without the new-make edge he's found on other young indie bottlings. The palate is mouth-coating and oily with no bite at 48%, stewed orchard fruit and honey before licorice arrives hard — he isn't a licorice fan and still thought it worked. The finish adds black currant and chocolate, though he'd have liked it longer.

Verdict: A fantastic young Clynelish, impressive for the price [Full review]

My take: The counterpoint to the Clynelish argument earlier in the issue. The official 14 costs about the same in the UK and gives you six more years and a name people know. This gives you 48%, confirmed non-chill filtration and natural color, and a cask treatment the bottler will explain. Neither is wrong — but note which one tells you what it did. The de-char/re-char is doing real work, resurfacing tired wood for more extraction in a short maturation, and it's why this drinks older than eight. US readers: UK availability, and you're arranging shipping yourself.

In 1885 there were twenty-one working distilleries inside a town of a few thousand people. Campbeltown sits near the bottom of the Kintyre peninsula, about as far from the rest of Scotland as you can get while still being attached to it, and for most of a century that isolation was an advantage rather than a problem. The farms behind the town grew barley. The bogs around it cut peat. A coal mine at Drumlemble, a few miles west, fed the stills — a local fuel supply that most distilling regions had to bring in by sea. And the harbor was deep, sheltered, and pointed straight at Glasgow and the export markets beyond it. Everything a distiller needed sat within a few miles of everything else. The town called itself the whisky capital of the world, and for a while nobody had grounds to argue.

What Campbeltown actually sold was an ingredient. The London market wasn't buying Campbeltown as single malt. It was drinking it inside blends, where the heavy, oily, smoky spirit coming off those stills gave the bottle its backbone. As blended Scotch conquered the Victorian world, Campbeltown rode it up. The distilleries weren't building brands. They were filling orders, and the orders kept coming.

Then, inside a single decade, almost all of it was gone. Seventeen distilleries closed in the 1920s. By the end of the 1920s, only Springbank, Glen Scotia, and Rieclachan remained, and even they operated intermittently. Rieclachan closed in 1934, leaving Springbank and Glen Scotia as the last two standing. There wasn't one cause. American Prohibition erased an enormous export market in 1920. Duty hikes after the war and then the Depression took much of what remained. The blending houses had settled on their recipes, and what they wanted was the lighter Speyside style — a region the railroads had made cheap and easy to buy from. The Drumlemble mine closed in 1923, taking the local fuel advantage with it. And as prices fell, accounts from the period describe corner-cutting: casks reused well past their usefulness, buildings left to go to seed, quality slipping at precisely the moment buyers had somewhere else to go.

You'll hear that Campbeltown ruined itself by filling whisky into old herring barrels. It's a great story and it's repeated everywhere. What's solidly documented is the insult, not the practice — blenders called the region's whisky "stinking fish" once the style fell out of fashion. Whether anyone truly filled whisky into old herring casks is far shakier than the retelling suggests. What isn't in dispute is that the reputation was earned in part. The whisky did get worse, buyers noticed, and a nickname that memorable finished what the economics had started.

Seventy years later, the region nearly got erased on paper. By 2000 Campbeltown was down to two working distilleries, and the Scotch Whisky Association was working through how the regions would be defined in law. As Springbank tells it, the association's position was that two distilleries didn't make a region, and chairman Hedley Wright's response was to point at the Lowlands, which qualified with three — Auchentoshan, Bladnoch, and Glenkinchie. So he bought the ruins of Glengyle, closed since the 1920s, rebuilt it with secondhand equipment scavenged from distilleries that no longer needed it, and fired the stills in 2004. No regulation has ever specified a minimum number of distilleries, then or now. But the case for Campbeltown got considerably harder to argue with once there were three of them, and the region kept its status. The whisky is sold as Kilkerran because someone else already owned the Glengyle name.

Today the town is climbing again, slowly. Springbank has become one of the most chased names in Scotch, and the labor-intensive methods that once looked commercially obsolete are now exactly what people line up for. Glen Scotia has quietly rebuilt its quality and its reputation. Kilkerran 12 is among the best-value age-stated malts anyone is making. Three new distillery projects are advancing: Machrihanish from the Isle of Raasay team, along with Dál Riata and Witchburn. Witchburn is already under construction, while Dál Riata and Machrihanish remain at earlier stages. Timelines have slipped repeatedly, and none has yet confirmed a first spirit run. What's worth carrying forward is how tangled the collapse actually was. Campbeltown lost its export market, its tax position, its fuel supply, its place in the blenders' recipes, and its good name, and it lost them close enough together that no single fix would have held. Springbank and Glen Scotia didn't survive because they were smarter than the seventeen that closed. They survived because they were small, stubborn, and lucky in the order things happened to them. That's a thinner margin than the comeback story usually admits, and it's worth remembering while three new distillery projects move forward in a town that has done this before.

Sazerac wants to buy Brown-Forman — the owner of Jack Daniel's, Woodford Reserve and Old Forester — for $15 billion, and Brown-Forman keeps saying no. We covered the first round back in April. What's new is the tactic: rather than keep working the boardroom, Sazerac sent its offer straight to the family shareholders who actually control the votes, along with a pitch deck arguing why they should take it. Chris Perugini at Forbes got hold of that letter and wrote it up properly: Perugini's full report at Forbes.

The pitch is that Sazerac wouldn't break anything. Keep the brands as they are, run Brown-Forman's whiskies through Sazerac's US sales machine, and use Brown-Forman's international network to push Sazerac's own brands into the UK, India and Australia. Together they'd be the second-biggest drinks company in the world behind Diageo. Brown-Forman's board called the proposal not actionable, and the Brown family's voting group said the same. Reuters reports Sazerac has offered to improve the terms if anyone will sit down with it.

My take: This is pressure, not a negotiation. The Browns have controlled this company since 1870, they hold the votes, and they've now turned Sazerac down twice. Going public with the deck is what you do when the private route is closed. It usually signals the end of a takeover attempt more than a turning point in one.

The part nobody's leading with is the Scotch. Brown-Forman owns GlenDronach, BenRiach and Glenglassaugh — the three distilleries Billy Walker rebuilt before selling them in 2016. Sazerac doesn't own a Scotch distillery at all. In a deal about Jack Daniel's, three Speyside and Highland malts are an afterthought, and afterthoughts tend to get run for margin rather than for character.

None of this changes anything on shelves this year, and none of it is a reason to buy in a hurry. Takeover rumors move auction prices, not what's in the bottle. If GlenDronach 15 or a cask-strength BenRiach is something you'd actually drink, buy it for that reason. Worth watching, not predicting: whether this kind of pressure ever nudges Brown-Forman into selling pieces of itself on its own terms. Nothing reported suggests the Scotch distilleries are anywhere near the table.

Handcrafted layered wooden map with distillery markers. 20% off with code WHISKY20 (min $150 order). Shop here.

15% off through our reader link. Get it here.

Use code TWI50 for $50 off your order. Shop Lyons Crafted here.

First US release from this tiny single estate Speyside distillery. 15% off with code Estate15. Grab it here.

That's it for this week.

If you know someone who'd be into this, forward it their way. More people on the list means better deals, better content, and more leverage when I go knocking on doors for exclusive offers.

And if you're not already, come hang out on Instagram and TikTok — that's where I post the stuff that doesn't make it into the newsletter.

— Tim