Macallan 17 for a Third the Price, a Bowmore 22, and How Islay Became Whisky Island

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A different kind of order this week. Master of Malt is a UK retailer, and shipping to the States runs heavier than The Whisky World — the basket I priced came to roughly $130 for four bottles. That number is the whole reason to read this section carefully, because the first bottle carries most of the freight. Order one on its own and you're paying it all yourself. Fill the box and the economics change sharply.

So bundle. If only one of these appeals to you, that's fine — find three or four other people who want one. Text the friend who's been asking what to buy, check with the brother-in-law who liked the Islay you poured at Thanksgiving, split a box several ways. Everyone pays for their own bottle plus a share of the freight, and a $130 shipping charge stops being the reason not to order. Final cost varies by weight and destination, so price your own basket before committing. This is a store you order from once, deliberately, with other people.

What makes it worth the effort is the catalog. Every bottle below is an independent release that either never reaches the US or costs considerably more when it does. Master of Malt removes UK VAT automatically on US orders, and the export prices below reflect that.

"Speyside (M)" is Signatory's label code for undisclosed Macallan, and it's the worst-kept secret in Scotch — Signatory's own US arm jokes that the M stands for Macallan. Distilled in 2008, seventeen years in oloroso sherry butts, bottled this year at 100 proof. No chill filtration, no added color, no packaging spend. Just the distillate, presented the way an independent bottler presents things.

ABV: 57.1% | Cask: Oloroso sherry butts | 700ml

Export price: ~$93 (UK listing £83.95 inc VAT)
Typical US Market Range: Not distributed in the US
Price gap: Macallan's own 18 Year Old Sherry Oak runs roughly $395–450 stateside at 43%. This lands near $125 with shipping — under a third of that, one year younger, and 14.1 percentage points stronger.

Who's this for: Anyone who's wondered what Macallan tastes like without the marketing department involved.
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Young, raw, and completely unpolished — which is the point. Seven years in second-fill bourbon barrels at 55%, bottled independently for the Living Souls series. Second-fill means there isn't enough wood to bury anything, so what you get is Bowmore's spirit while it's still sharp: sea spray, citrus, and smoke that hasn't been rounded off. Bowmore's own entry-level bottlings are managed far more heavily, and nothing in this style reaches US shelves.

ABV: 55% | Cask: Second-fill bourbon barrels | 700ml

Export price: ~$66 (UK listing £59.50 inc VAT)
Typical US Market Range: Not distributed in the US

Who's this for: Anyone who wants Bowmore with the edges still on, at the cheapest entry point in this box.
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One of the best ideas in whisky right now. Thompson Bros. bottle a rotating pool of single malts into opaque black glass with the label hidden under the lid, so you don't learn the distillery or the age until the bottle is open in front of you. Past batches have spanned a six-year-old Dornoch to a 29-year-old Ben Nevis, across refill hogsheads, recharred casks, first-fill bourbon, PX and sherry, wine barriques and Port finishes. Thompson Bros. have earned enough trust that the gamble isn't on whether it's worth the money — it's on what turns up.

ABV: 46.3% | Cask: Undisclosed | 700ml

Export price: ~$73 (UK listing £65.95 inc VAT)
Typical US Market Range: Not distributed in the US

Who's this for: Anyone who's ever caught themselves reading the label before the glass, and wants to find out what they actually think.
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Dailuaine is one of the most underrated distilleries in Speyside, largely because almost everything it makes disappears into Johnnie Walker. Its ex-sherry output is genuinely excellent, and going independent is the practical way to find it. This is a single first-fill oloroso butt, distilled April 2008, bottled March 2026, yielding 670 bottles at full strength.

ABV: 57% | Cask: First-fill oloroso sherry butt (single cask, 670 bottles) | 700ml

Export price: ~$93 (UK listing £83.95 inc VAT)
Typical US Market Range: No US core range. Diageo's Flora & Fauna 16 is the distillery's only permanent official bottling and barely reaches the States, which leaves independents as the realistic route in.

Who's this for: Anyone who's tired of paying a premium for the name on the label rather than what's in the bottle.
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The splurge, and not pretending otherwise. Where the 7-year-old above shows you the raw spirit, this shows you what happens when it's left alone for two decades. Bowmore doesn't taste like the rest of Islay — less about raw peat, more about smoke sitting under fruit — and mature bourbon-cask Bowmore is where that reputation comes from: tropical fruit emerging as the peat turns softer, quieter and funkier. Plain ex-bourbon at 52%, no finishing, nothing dressed up around it.

ABV: 52% | Cask: Bourbon barrels | 700ml

Export price: ~$199 (UK listing £179.50 inc VAT)
Typical US Market Range: Not distributed in the US. Bowmore's official 18 averages around $205 at 43%; the 25 runs several times that.

Who's this for: Anyone who wants a properly mature Bowmore at real strength, with nothing between them and the distillery.
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Every so often I'll use this space for something that isn't whisky — something I've spent real time researching and vetting, and that's earned a permanent place in my regular life. Nobody's paying for placement here; I'm writing about this pan because I bought it and cook on it constantly. That's the only reason anything shows up in this section.

Kehoe Carbon Cookware is Dennis and Kasey Kehoe, a husband-and-wife metalworking team on the Central Coast of California. Dennis came to metal through bronze casting in 2001, then found blacksmithing in 2008 and, by his own account, was hooked after a few swings of the hammer. Kasey's background is structural steel — a welder and pipefitter who learned on her father's machine. They already ran a custom architectural-ironwork shop when, in December 2018, Dennis forged Kasey a carbon steel pan as a Christmas gift. It cooked as well as it looked, he made a few more, the first batch sold out, and a cookware company fell out of a present.

I cook on the 11-inch, 12-gauge skillet — a spec they no longer list as a standard option, since the 11-inch now comes in the heavier 10-gauge. Three things sold me.

The first is responsiveness. Carbon steel is thinner and lighter than cast iron, so it heats up and cools down noticeably faster — when I turn the burner down, the pan actually listens, instead of coasting hot for another few minutes the way my cast iron does. Kehoe forges these thicker than most store-bought carbon steel, so you still get real heft and heat retention; the 12-gauge just responds a step quicker than their cast-iron-weight 10-gauge, which is exactly what I wanted.

The second is the surface. The handle rivets are worked flush into the cooking side — you can make out the faint circles, but there's nothing raised for food to catch on, so it cleans up easily and looks the part.

The third is the seasoning. Carbon steel's smoother cooking surface can develop a remarkably slick season, though that seasoning is also more delicate than cast iron's. Mine slides eggs like the pan was greased when it wasn't. And because every piece is forged by hand, the hammer marks are still in the steel. It reads like something that belongs on a wall, then you cook breakfast in it.

Here's the part that surprised me most, and the part that'll land with anyone who's chased down a small distillery or an independent bottler: you're buying from the person who made it. I've traded messages directly with Dennis about seasoning and care, and it's the kind of exchange you rarely get from a larger company. That's the appeal. This is the cookware equivalent of a single cask from a distillery that answers its own email — not the mass-market thing everyone owns, but something made by a named pair of hands, improved through use, and built to be handed down long after the purchase price is forgotten.

If you want to see the work, they're at kehoecarboncookware.com and on Instagram at @kehoe_carbon_cookware. Stock moves fast, and the email list gets first crack at each drop.

They expected Glenmorangie Original with extra sweetness and got something stranger. Orchard fruit and orange oil on the nose; the palate opened familiar before veering into blood orange, vanilla, toasted spice and a milk-chocolate fudge finish. Zesty was the recurring word, with lemon-rind bitterness on the second sip. Water pulled out banana but most preferred it neat. Their one criticism was the transition — a roller coaster, interesting rather than smooth. Nobody questioned the quality; the price did the damage.

Verdict: Scores of 2.5, 2.5, 3 and 3.5, averaging 2.875 — just under the 3 they treat as the buy-a-bottle line, and every deduction was about price rather than the whisky. Full review

My take: They're right that it's good whisky and right that $100 is steep for NAS in a market this soft. Which matters more depends on whether you'd buy it without the name on the label. If you would, there's no rush. If you're buying it because it's his, that's fair too, just be honest that it's why.

A re-review six years on, and his case for revisiting Springbank holds up: small batches shift year to year, and palates shift with them. He found it fruit-forward and creamy — peach and apricot stone fruit, almost yogurt-like — with cereal emerging as it sat and a trace of the industrial funk he calls 3-in-1 oil. Sweet and sour on arrival, pineapple and lemon drops he hadn't caught before, long finish. Water was the sticking point: a few drops flattened the freshness into candied sweetness and cut the finish short.

Verdict: No score, but unambiguous — still stunning, worth every penny of the roughly £55–57 RRP, and drink it neat. Full review

My take: Water is a tool for any whisky — a drop at a time, when something reads hot or you want to see what else is in there. He's saying this particular bottle doesn't reward it, not that you should stop experimenting. The real question is the roughly $100 US price. If you already know you like the Springbank house character, easy yes. If you're still working out what you like, there are better places to spend $100 first.

A quick fresh-pop reaction rather than a sit-down review, and the verdict was immediate. Fruit on the nose plus the honeyed, heathery note he associates with unpeated Bruichladdich, with the ABV a big part of the appeal — and he's open about the bottle itself being a draw. His came to roughly CAD $200 shipped direct from the distillery. This is the 25th-anniversary release: unpeated, 100% Scottish barley, matured entirely on Islay in first-fill bourbon with a portion of French red wine casks, non-chill filtered and natural colour.

Verdict: Really good, highly recommended, pick one up when you get the chance. Full review

My take: At $134.99 in the US this is one of the more honestly priced anniversary bottlings of the year — 14 years, cask strength, no chill filtration, natural colour, and none of the tiered-packaging nonsense that usually rides along with a milestone. The wine-cask portion is the variable. If red-wine influence has burned you before, know it's in the recipe. If unpeated Bruichladdich is already your thing, this is that with the volume up.

Islay now packs eleven working distilleries onto an island roughly 25 miles long. The reason has less to do with romance than with barley, fuel, boats, and 150 years of badly designed tax law.

Start with the raw materials. Islay's low ground is unusually fertile for the Hebrides — limestone and mica schist beneath it, harder quartzite up in the hills — which gave it enough arable land to grow meaningful quantities of barley locally. It gets heavy rainfall and has abundant fresh water. Peat bogs cover about a fifth of the island's surface. And it has sheltered coves deep enough to load a boat. Every input sat within a cart ride of the others, with a way to move the results out. Islay also lies roughly 23 miles off the Irish coast, which makes Ireland a plausible route for distilling knowledge to have arrived, though when or how can't be established.

Peat was fuel long before it was flavor. Malting means letting barley germinate, then arresting that growth with heat before the plant consumes too much of the starch the distiller needs. Arresting it takes a fire, and a fire takes fuel. Islay had little readily available timber and peat in abundance, so peat became the island's everyday fuel — cut by hand and stacked to dry, the same fuel that heated homes across the island. The malt was dried over its smoke because it was local, cheap and already being cut for heating, and the whisky came out smoky as a consequence. As coal and coke became widely available in the 19th century, many mainland distilleries reduced or abandoned peat and chased a cleaner style. Islay held onto it longer — first because peat stayed practical, then because the smoky spirit became valuable to blenders and eventually to drinkers.

Now the part that actually explains the history. Spirits had been taxed in Scotland since 1644, and duty climbed steadily through the 1700s as the government paid for its wars. Rising tax alone wouldn't have made criminals of farmers. The shape of the law did. Parliament kept rewriting the rules in ways that squeezed small Highland distillers, and the rules lurched in opposite directions. The 1784 Wash Act drew a formal line between Highlands and Lowlands, taxed Highland distillers on their still capacity, capped that capacity at farm scale, and barred them from selling south of the Highland line — cutting them off from the markets with the money. Later acts jerked the still-size limits and grain allowances around again. The details kept changing; the effect didn't. Small farm distillers were repeatedly boxed into uneconomic equipment or tiny local markets. At the same time, landlords were shifting from rent paid in goods to rent paid in cash. A tenant sitting on surplus barley now had one of the few reliable ways to turn it into money, and the law had just told him he couldn't do it legally. He did it anyway. It's the same logic that made rye the currency of the Pennsylvania frontier, which we got into a few weeks back.

On Islay this ran at scale, because enforcement was almost nonexistent for much of the 18th century. The island had no resident excise officer until 1797 — more than 150 years after the first spirits tax. In 1777 the minister of Kilchoman parish reported there wasn't an exciseman on the whole island and that the quantity of whisky being made was very great. Stills ran at Lossit, Octomore, Tallant, Mulindry, Cragabus and a dozen other named sites. The whisky left by small boat for Ayrshire, Galloway, Mull, Lewis and Ireland, and went up the Clyde into Glasgow hidden under cargoes of potatoes. Officers who eventually interfered were threatened and assaulted. Alfred Barnard — the trade journalist who visited 162 distilleries across Britain and Ireland in the 1880s, and whose account remains a foundational record of the era — wrote that smuggling had been the chief employment of the crofters and fishermen, especially in winter. One number gives the scale: when a national distilling ban came in during the 1795 crop failure, the laird Walter Campbell confiscated at least 90 stills belonging to his own tenants, who then brought tinkers over from Ireland to build replacements. And the problem was nationwide — 14,000 detections of illicit distilling were recorded during 1823 alone, and more than half the whisky drunk in Scotland had never paid a penny of duty.

The 1823 Excise Act solved it with arithmetic instead of enforcement. Duty on legal spirit was cut by more than half and the still licence set at £10, and legal production finally made commercial sense at scale. The number of licensed distilleries in Scotland more than doubled within two years, from 111 in 1823 to 263 by 1825. On Islay, the licensed distillery often went up where the illegal ones already were — tradition puts illicit stills around Lagavulin from 1742, and the licensed distillery dates from 1816. Walter Frederick Campbell, laird from 1816, is credited with helping establish or legalise roughly a dozen distilleries. He also built settlements to support Islay's changing economy: Port Ellen in 1821, then Port Charlotte in 1828, named for his mother and developed alongside the Lochindaal distillery.

Then came expansion, and then a long collapse. Ardbeg and Laphroaig were licensed in 1815, Lagavulin in 1816, Caol Ila in 1846, Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain both in 1881. The market eventually turned — Lochindaal closed in 1929, Port Ellen in 1983 — and by the late 1990s closures had reduced Islay to a small surviving core. Then the recovery began: Bruichladdich restarted in 2001, Kilchoman opened in 2005, Ardnahoe began distilling in 2018, Port Ellen returned in 2024, and Laggan Bay filled its first cask this year. Islay now has eleven working distilleries, with Portintruan expecting to begin production later in 2026.

Two hundred years on, the map looks much like it did before the excisemen arrived. The difference is that it's legal now, and at Islay's peated distilleries the smoke is deliberate rather than an unavoidable byproduct.

On July 21, Kilchoman announced the first edition of its Family Collection: four single malts aged 11, 14, 18 and 20 years, selected by the five members of the founding Wills family during their annual review of maturing stock. The 20 Year Old (49.9%) is the distillery's oldest general release to date, and what Kilchoman calls its first globally available 20-year-old. The 18 (50%) and 20 come from ex-bourbon casks filled with heavily peated Port Ellen malt at 50ppm; the 11 (54.7%) uses the same malt but went into sherry. The 14 (50.9%) is the outlier — a 100% Islay expression distilled in 2011 from barley grown at Rockside Farm, malted on site and peated to 20ppm. RRPs are £117, £127, £191 and £249, available later this month from selected specialist retailers. Kilchoman says more editions will follow.

My take: Kilchoman filled its first cask in December 2005, so a 20-year-old in 2026 isn't a selection from a deep warehouse — it's the back wall. That's not a knock, it's just worth knowing what you're buying. The backdrop is less forgiving. Scotch is working through a real inventory overhang, rare whisky has pulled back hard from its recent highs, and buyers have broadly been trading down rather than up. This is Kilchoman's most expensive release yet, arriving in a market that has been rewarding restraint.

The style question is the more interesting one anyway. Kilchoman's reputation was built on young whisky that didn't apologize for being young — heavy peat and active first-fill casks carrying a five- or eight-year-old further than the age statement suggested. That's flavor loading, not fast maturation. Two decades in ex-bourbon is a different proposition: it can soften the spirit and quietly file the smoke down. Whether that flatters this distillate or sands off what made it worth chasing is an open question, and £249 puts the 20 up against Islay names with far longer track records at that age.

Worth holding one number next to another: a month ago Kilchoman added Rockside 11 to its permanent core range at £55. The Family Collection 11 is £117. They aren't the same whisky — Rockside is 20ppm in a bourbon and sherry mix, this one is 50ppm Port Ellen malt in sherry at 54.7% — but it's a steep step for the same age statement, and worth deciding what you're actually paying for. US distribution isn't confirmed, so this is a UK order for now, landing around $130 / $141 / $212 / $276 once a UK retailer strips VAT for a US address, before shipping and duty. I'm undecided on this one. An old Kilchoman is genuinely appealing — I want to know what two decades did to a spirit built to be drunk young — but I'm not sure £249 is the price at which I want to find out. The 14 is the most distinctive bottle in the set regardless, as the only 100% Islay expression. I'd wait for reviews before committing to any of them.

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That's it for this week.

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— Tim