Lagavulin 16 Under $75, Macallan Cask Strength Under $100 — and What a Worm Tub Actually Does

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No customs math this week — InternetWines ships domestically out of Fairview Heights, Illinois, so what you see is what you pay plus shipping. Five worth your attention, and I've put the actual market comps next to each so you can see which of these are real deals and which are just fine prices.

The best-value bottle on this list by a wide margin. Undiluted Redbreast 12 gives you what the 40% version can only gesture at — the pot still spice arrives with actual force, and the Oloroso influence stops being a background note. Batch strength varies, so check the label when it lands.

ABV: 58.1% (116.2 proof, this batch) | Cask: ex-bourbon American oak and Oloroso sherry butts | 750ml

Price: $69.97 (regular $99.99)
Typical US Market Range: $85–110
Savings: ~$15–40

Who's this for: Anyone who wants the quintessential Irish pot still whiskey — far better than the standard 12.

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I rarely recommend this one — it's usually priced on reputation rather than what's in the bottle. At $74.97 for a 16-year-old Islay, the math changes. Sixteen years is a long time for peated spirit and it shows: the smoke has softened into something closer to tar and dried fruit than campfire. Diageo doesn't disclose the cask breakdown beyond "oak," so take any specific claim you read elsewhere with caution.

ABV: 43% | Cask: undisclosed by Diageo | 750ml

Price: $74.97 (regular $79.99)
Typical US Market Range: $80–97, averaging around $93
Savings: ~$5–22

Who's this for: Someone wanting an accessible introduction to peat, and simply a classic on the shelf.

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One of two Skye distilleries, and the one that made a coastal, peppery style of peat its whole identity. Talisker runs swan-necked lyne pipes into worm tubs, which is a large part of why it lands heavier and oilier than its 45.8% would suggest. Worth reading alongside the worm tub piece below.

ABV: 45.8% | Cask: American oak | 750ml

Price: $59.97 (regular $69.99)
Typical US Market Range: $60–80, averaging around $73
Savings: ~$5–20

Who's this for: Peat drinkers who want salt and pepper rather than Islay's medicinal edge.

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Sold only in Japan for three decades before Wild Turkey brought it back to the US in April 2025 as a permanent line item. The extra age gives you the nutty, leathery Turkey signature with more oak and dark fruit behind it, at the same 101 proof. Reviewers are split on whether it's worth the premium over standard 101 — at this price the question mostly goes away.

ABV: 50.5% | Cask: new charred American oak | Mashbill: 75% corn, 13% rye, 12% malted barley | 750ml

Price: $39.97 (regular $49.99)
Typical US Market Range: SRP $45, market average about $46
Savings: ~$5–6

Who's this for: Turkey drinkers who want the age statement without paying secondary prices for the 12.

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A higher-strength take on the Sherry Oak 12, launched in late 2025 and still thin on US distribution. At 55% the sherry character has more to push against — dates, ginger, cacao — and it holds up to water better than the 43% version. Fair price rather than a discount: Remedy Liquor has it at $99.99, so this is the going rate.

ABV: 55% | Cask: sherry-seasoned oak | 750ml

Price: $99.97 (regular $109.99)
Typical US Market Range: $99.99 at Remedy Liquor; UK launch SRP was £125
Price gap: negligible against US comps

Who's this for: At $99, it's finally worth considering a Macallan at near cask strength — if you've always wanted one on the shelf that wasn't completely overpriced, this is it.

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This is the watch that got me into watches.

There's a version of whisky drinking where you buy the bottle, pour the dram, and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with that. It's most of what any of us do most of the time. Then there's the distillery tour — the mash tun, the washbacks, the shape of the stills, someone explaining where they make the cut and why, and the slow realization that a great many things had to go right in a specific order for the liquid in your glass to taste the way it does. It doesn't change the whisky. It changes what you understand about the whisky.

Skeleton dials are one of the most divisive things in watch collecting, and I've never understood the objection, because a skeleton dial is the tour.

Consider what you're buying with a mechanical watch. Not accuracy — a cheap quartz beats almost any automatic. Not convenience. You're paying for a machine that runs on a wound spring and keeps time through gears, an escapement, and a balance wheel, and for the fact that dozens of parts have to be right for two hands to move correctly. A closed dial is the bottle on the shelf. It works, and you never have to think about how. A skeleton lets you stand in the still house and watch.

I love a beautiful dial as much as anyone. But every collector should own one skeleton, if only as a reminder of what the money actually bought.

The RW1212 was built for this from the start. Raymond Weil's R&D team spent eighteen months on it, taking apart a Sellita caliber they already used to work out how to bring the balance wheel to the dial side — so the skeleton version isn't a movement stripped bare after the fact, it's the original idea carried through the rest of the watch. The balance sits exposed at six o'clock under two slim bridges, hairspring breathing in and out, escapement and gear train turning around it. Sellita builds it. Raymond Weil's CEO has been blunt about that split rather than dressing it up the way other brands do, and I like the watch more for it. Same instinct as the dial, and the same instinct as a distillery that tells you the fermentation time: say what's actually in there.

The bronze bezel does the rest. Bronze patinas — darkening and mottling according to your skin, your climate, your habits — and with the aged leather strap, this is a watch that keeps changing after you buy it. Two of them on two different wrists won't match in a year. Something else whisky people will recognize: the thing keeps working on itself after it leaves the factory.

It isn't a perfect watch. The lugs are straighter than I'd choose, and there's no seconds hand, which bothers people who want to see it running at a glance — though the balance wheel is right there doing exactly that. None of it moves me. The movement is beautifully assembled and it's on display, which is why I bought it.

I think about that first tour a lot. Not because the whisky was better afterward, but because I couldn't go back to not knowing. This watch did the same thing to me. Sometimes the piece that gets you in isn't the best thing you'll ever own. It's the one that teaches you what to look for in everything that follows.

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Raymond Weil

Murdo bought this in Hong Kong for the equivalent of £245 — roughly three times what a standard Springbank 10 costs him — and opened it on the spot at Joe's Whisky Shop to share with whoever was standing there. The whisky is 60% ex-bourbon, 40% ex-sherry, though he suspects the sherry was used with a very light hand. On the nose he found himself in a haystack: floral, chrysanthemum and osmanthus, pineapple and orange zest, vanilla and cinnamon, no smoke. The palate turned thick, creamy and oily, heavy on umami and almost fishy, with seaweed, leather, ginger, caramel and spent charcoal. He's a writer who avoids the word "funky" and used it anyway. His conclusion: this doesn't resemble any Springbank he's had, and the Bere barley is the only explanation. Not better than the regular expressions, just genuinely different.

Score: 8/10 — "Something special" — Full review

My take: The interesting part is why Bere costs what it does. It's the oldest cultivated barley strain in Scotland, it yields less alcohol per ton, and it jams the mills — so you're paying for the distillery's inefficiency, not for age or cask. That's a real thing to buy if you want to taste what barley variety actually does. It's a bad thing to buy if you want the best Springbank per dollar, and Murdo, who paid triple, still calls the value debatable. Skip unless the barley question is the reason you're reaching for the bottle.

Jeremy's ongoing series pits an official bottling against an independent from the same distillery. On the Clynelish 14 he found the waxy crayon note that makes the distillery identifiable by nose alone, over orchard and tropical fruit — apples, pears, banana — carrying into a banana split, bananas foster sweetness on the palate. He describes it as primarily ex-bourbon with some sherry influence, though Diageo doesn't publish the cask makeup, so treat that as his read. The Gordon & MacPhail is a refill sherry hogshead from the Connoisseurs Choice line: red plum, dates, figs, nuttiness, a fudgy edge. His honest complaint is that the cask drowns the distillery — the wax is buried in the background, and blind he says you could mistake it for a Speyside Oloroso.

Verdict: Gordon & MacPhail, on the strength of the finish. Series now 3–2 to the independents. Full review

My take: This is the whole indie argument in one comparison. You're usually not buying more distillery character, you're buying more cask — and at 56.5% versus 46%, more intensity. Jeremy picked the G&M on mood, not quality, and said so. If Clynelish's wax is why you drink Clynelish, the 14 remains the better bottle.

Rob worked through three Amruts, two of them single casks selected for BSW by his friend Rohit. The Port Nova had sat in his basement roughly three years — he didn't love it on opening — and time has transformed it: juicy port, buttery pastry and sweet croissant, full viscosity. He scored it 87, docking two points for how long it took to get there, and suggests decanting a fresh bottle. The peated Port Pipe (ex-bourbon then second-fill port) drew jelly-on-burnt-toast and clean peat, also 87, though it arrived there immediately. The first-fill PX took it: cooked fruit, figgy and raisin bread, buttery richness with smoke on the back end, tasting well beyond seven years. Worth noting Rob's aside on Indian maturation — faster isn't older, it's a different animal, and he's clear you can't fairly compare it to mellow aged Scotch.

Scores: PX 89, Port Nova 87, Port Pipe 87 — Full review

My take: Two disclosures before you get excited: Rob has an affiliate code here, and BSW ships within Canada only, so US readers can't buy these. Take it as an argument for Amrut generally — and the Port Nova lesson applies to any bottle you've written off after one pour.

Every still needs a way to turn vapor back into liquid, and for generations the standard way to do it was the worm tub. The lyne arm leaves the top of the still and feeds into a long copper pipe that coils downward, tapering as it goes, submerged in a vat of cold water. The pipe is the worm. The vat is the tub. They sit outdoors at most distilleries that have them, partly by tradition and partly because they're too big to fit anywhere else.

The replacement was the shell-and-tube condenser, and it took over the industry from the 1960s onward. It's a copper shell filled with roughly a hundred small copper tubes. Cold water runs through the tubes, vapor circulates around them, and condensation happens fast in a fraction of the space. It's cheaper to run, easier to maintain, and it lets you distill quicker. Worm tubs went from universal to unusual inside a couple of decades.

The reason it matters isn't the shape of the equipment — it's copper. Copper scrubs sulphur compounds out of the vapor as it condenses. A hundred narrow tubes give the vapor an enormous amount of copper surface to touch. A single coiled pipe gives it far less. Push the same spirit through both and the worm tub version arrives with more of those compounds intact: heavier, meatier, more texturally dense.

Here's where the received wisdom gets it wrong. Worm tubs do not automatically produce sulphur bombs. The worm sets the conditions; one of the biggest levers within it is the water. Run cold water into the tub fast and condensation happens quickly, copper contact drops, and you get the heavy sulphury new make people associate with the equipment — Craigellachie and Speyburn are cited as examples. Run it slowly and the tub warms up, the vapor spends longer against the copper, and the spirit comes out notably lighter. Glen Elgin, Oban and Royal Lochnagar all work this way. Ballindalloch runs its wooden tubs deliberately warm for the same reason. Mortlach goes in the other direction and sprays cold water onto the lyne arm before it descends into the worm. Same technology, opposite intentions.

Dalwhinnie is the case that proved all of it, and the detail people usually skip is the most interesting part. In 1986 the distillery pulled its worm tubs during a modernisation and fitted shell-and-tube condensers. The new make character changed enough that in 1995 the condensers came out and worms went back in. That's the version everyone tells. What's less often mentioned is that the character still wasn't quite what it had been. The originals were rectangular cast-iron vats; because Dalwhinnie was built facing the railway line, the worms were already the first thing arriving visitors saw, so the replacements were made round and wooden for looks. Water moved through the new shape differently, and the flow rate had to be tuned to get back toward the old spirit. Even reinstalling the equipment didn't reinstall the whisky.

Who's still running them is a shorter list than you'd think. A 2017 count found just 16 of 118 operating Scotch distilleries using worms. The absolute number has actually ticked up since as old sites reopened and a few new ones deliberately chose them, but they remain rare: roughly 20 among the SWA's 154 operating distilleries today. The names include Mortlach, Talisker, Springbank, Old Pulteney, Benrinnes, Cragganmore, Balmenach, Craigellachie, Speyburn, Knockdhu, Glen Elgin, Glenkinchie, Oban, Royal Lochnagar, Edradour and Dalwhinnie. Several have modernised the tub while keeping the worm — Craigellachie moved to stainless steel tubs in 2014 but kept its original copper coils, and Rosebank came back with stainless tubs clad in larch. Brora's 2021 restoration reinstated worm tubs alongside the original stills, and the team there runs them hot on purpose, chasing as much reflux as they can get. And it isn't only heritage sites: Ballindalloch and Ardnahoe were both built with worms this century, specifically to make an older style of spirit.

What this means for your glass is less dramatic than the word "sulphury" suggests. Sulphury new make doesn't necessarily stay sulphury — much of that overt character recedes during maturation, while the weight remains: oilier texture, a broader palate, more grip. If you've ever wondered why Mortlach and Craigellachie feel structurally different from a lighter, comparably aged Speyside malt, the answer is partly maturation and partly a copper pipe sitting in a tub of cold water out the back. Worth remembering the next time a distillery makes a point of telling you about its condensers: they're telling you something real, but the flow rate they don't mention matters just as much.

On August 6, Diageo reported results for the year ended June 30. Among its whisky categories, Scotch was the standout: volumes up 3%, organic net sales up 2%, and now 24% of the company's total net sales — its largest category by a wide margin. Canadian and American whisky both went backwards. Canadian net sales fell 15% globally, with Crown Royal down 15.9% in the US. American whiskey volumes dropped 6% and net sales 8%.

The catch is where the Scotch growth came from. Johnnie Walker's gains were driven by Türkiye and India; Buchanan's grew on Colombia. In the US, Diageo's Scotch net sales actually fell 1.1%. And across the group, organic net sales fell 2% on volume down 0.4% and price/mix down 1.6% — which Diageo attributes primarily to adverse mix, meaning buyers shifting toward lower-value products rather than to price cuts. Looking ahead, the company guided fiscal 27 with North America down mid-single-digit, assuming the US spirits market itself contracts about 3%.

My take: Scotch is growing, but the growth is migrating down the value ladder. That's the real finding, and it's the second time we've seen it this summer. Edrington spelled it out even more clearly in June: core revenue fell 3% despite strong volume growth, as buyers shifted toward the core range. The Macallan 12 grew double digits while its 25- and 30-year-olds declined. Two of the biggest names in Scotch, reporting independently, describing the same migration.

The counterargument is that this is a healthy correction after a decade of price increases nobody could defend, and I think that's mostly right. What I'd watch instead is how the margin got held. Diageo's operating profit before exceptionals rose 2%, mainly on cost savings, while marketing investment fell 13.1%. A company defending profitability by spending less on its brands is doing something different from one defending it with pricing power, and cost cutting gets harder to repeat.

For buyers, the practical read is that the core range is where the value is right now, and Diageo's own guidance for a softer North America suggests that doesn't reverse quickly. What I'd be cautious on is the $150-plus no-age-statement tier. It's the segment I'd expect to have the least to fall back on when buyers start trading down. A bottle nobody wants at $180 is still not a bargain at $140.

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That's it for this week.

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— Tim