Macallan 18 is back for $90, the Still Scotland Doesn't Talk About, England Gets Its Own Rules

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Sherry runs through all five this week — four matured entirely in sherry casks, plus a Benromach cask strength that splits the work with bourbon. Here's the real math on all five as one order: £252.08 ex-VAT in whisky ($338), plus £84.95 shipping ($114), landing at about $452 delivered. That's roughly $90 a bottle, with shipping working out to about $23 each once you're past the first bottle.

Signatory's "(M)" is the least mysterious code in independent bottling: the distillery isn't named on the bottle, but Signatory's own US operation openly identifies M as Macallan. This is a 2008 vintage at 18 years, part of the black-label Exceptional tier reserved for the standout casks in the 100 Proof range, bottled at the series' fixed 57.1% and non-chill filtered. Signatory built this range as a deliberate answer to a market that had priced itself into a corner, and this is the clearest evidence of it: an 18-year-old sherried Macallan at a number that would have looked normal ten years ago.

ABV: 57.1% | Cask: sherry | 700ml

Price: ~$89 (£66.58)
Price gap: ~$348 vs. Macallan 18 Sherry Oak, which averages around $437 ex-tax in the US
Note: different product, different bottler — the gap is a proxy, not a like-for-like

Who's this for: Anyone who's wanted to know what Macallan is capable of when priced correctly.

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Launched September 3 and the first permanent Benromach matured exclusively in first-fill sherry casks — the 10, 15 and 21 all marry sherry with bourbon. More to the point, it's the first core expression to break the 43% ceiling that's been the standing complaint about this range for years. It arrives at 46%, non-chill filtered, natural color, with the distillery's signature thread of gentle smoke running under fruitcake and orange. The 10 stays in the range.

ABV: 46% | Cask: first-fill sherry | 700ml

Price: ~$50 (£37.42)
Typical US Market Range: RRP $60 — too new for a street price
Savings: none once shipping lands; this one is about getting it before US allocation catches up

Who's this for: Benromach believers who've been waiting for the distillery to stop watering down its own core range.

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Distilled in 2014, matured in exclusively first-fill bourbon and sherry casks, and bottled at 59.7%, non-chill filtered and natural color. This is the Benromach house style with the volume up: stewed fruit and orange, milk chocolate, cracked black pepper, and the wisp of smoke that separates this distillery from the rest of Speyside. Benromach has already moved on to Batch 3, so this is the last of the previous run.

ABV: 59.7% | Cask: first-fill bourbon and sherry | 700ml

Price: ~$76 (£56.58)
Typical US Market Range: thin — Benromach cask strength vintages show a US average near $74, from very few listings
Savings: roughly at parity; you're buying a batch that's on its way out, not a discount

Who's this for: Anyone who liked the 10 but wished it hit harder - this is one of the best whiskies out there.

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One of Scotland's smallest distilleries, owned by Signatory since 2002. Batch 8 is a 2013 vintage matured in ten first- and second-fill oloroso sherry butts and bottled in 2026 at 58%, natural color, no chill filtration. Edradour's spirit is stout enough to stand up to full sherry maturation without getting buried — dried fruit, dark chocolate, toffee, and a long spicy finish that earns the strength.

ABV: 58% | Cask: first- and second-fill oloroso sherry butts | 700ml

Price: ~$74 (£54.92)
Typical US Market Range: $100–145 where the series appears
Savings: ~$26–71

Who's this for: Sherry bomb drinkers who want thickness without a Speyside price tag.

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Signatory bottled this for Scotland's return to the World Cup, matured entirely in oloroso butts in their Highland warehouses and released at 46%, non-chill filtered, natural color. Ben Nevis makes a heavy, waxy, slightly funky spirit that most sherry casks can't push around, and at 11 years the result is dark fruit and treacle over that characteristic oily weight. The retailer lists it as a commemorative release with a portion of proceeds going to the Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal.

ABV: 46% | Cask: oloroso sherry butts | 700ml

Price: ~$49 (£36.58)
Typical US Market Range: no US listings found — UK and European market only
Savings: not a savings play; this is the only way to get it

Who's this for: Those who’ve wanted to explore Ben Nevis, and anyone who thinks a football tie-in is a fine excuse for a sherried Highlander under $50.

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Ruben goes in skeptical. He's no fan of celebrity collabs and openly questions whether Dafoe had any real hand in the selection, noting Lagavulin already ran this play with Nick Offerman. Then he tastes it. The nose is classic Laphroaig — tar, sea spray, iodine — with the oloroso finish layering on chocolate, blackberries and a streak of sweet barbecue sauce. The palate is where it slips: thinner than he expected, peppery and leathery, with brown sugar that doesn't carry enough weight. The finish recovers, long and jammy with campfire smoke. His verdict: a good Laphroaig regardless of the name on the label, one that needed more texture to be outstanding. It launched by ballot on Laphroaig's site before rolling out to retailers.

Score: 89/100 Full review

My take: You can find this for around $130, which is on the pricey end, but for a 14-year-old at 53.7% with this presentation, it's not absurd. I really enjoyed it. There are better values out there, but if you want a sherry-forward Laphroaig, this is a good option — very well put together.

Chris has his eye on Ballindalloch, a Speyside distillery producing since 2014 that's still a relatively unfamiliar name in the US and put out its first US-exclusive bottling in 2025. Like many of Scotland's 21st-century distilleries, it's built around flavor-first production: slow mashing in a vintage copper mash tun, 90–140-hour fermentations in Oregon pine washbacks, slow distillation with a narrow spirit cut, and worm tub condensers. This release is mostly first-fill ex-bourbon with a smaller share of first-fill sherry butts, bottled at 50%. There's no age statement, but the brand's own description cites more than a decade of maturation. He found it creamy and waxy with a fruit-forward profile, calling to mind Glen Elgin and Clynelish while doing its own thing. He won't judge the distillery on one bottle, but he wants more.

Verdict: Intrigued — wants to try more. Full post

My take: Worm tubs, long ferments and a narrow cut are the production choices that build texture, and "waxy" is the payoff Chris is describing. The Clynelish comparison is telling: waxy texture and weight from a distillery with a completely different production setup. This is a distillery to watch now, before the rest of the US catches on.

Rob borrowed this one from a friend who doesn't usually go for peat but loved it. A big fan of the regular Sanaig, Rob was curious whether full strength would improve it. The nose sold him immediately: smoked cherries, smoked raspberries and chocolate-covered berries, which he says reminds him of Laphroaig's 10-year-old Sherry Oak Finish. He guesses it's six to eight years old based on how much of Kilchoman's 50 ppm peat comes through. The palate brings chocolate, red fruit, a touch of black licorice and steady peat smoke, with great oiliness and surprisingly little heat for 57.8%. Same recipe as the standard Sanaig — roughly 70% oloroso, 30% bourbon — just undiluted, non-chill filtered, natural color. His value line: at around $100 he'd buy it all day, but higher than that, he'd take the age-stated Laphroaig instead.

Score: 86–87/100 Full review

My take: The standard Sanaig is already one of the better sherry-and-peat values on the shelf, so the question is whether 12 extra points of ABV are worth $20–30 more. Rob says yes, and that the strength doesn't cost it any drinkability. If you like the regular, this is the upgrade.

Buried in the English whisky GI approved this month — more on that later in this issue — is a phrase worth stopping on: Malt English Whisky must be batch distilled, with at least one distillation in a pot still. Which raises the obvious question. What's the other still, and why does anyone need permission to use it?

Most drinkers carry a rough hierarchy in their heads: pot stills make the good stuff, column stills make the cheap stuff. It's a serviceable rule of thumb and it's wrong often enough to be worth dismantling. The man whose name is on the column still didn't invent it, his own country's biggest distillers rejected it, and one of the most admired grain whiskies in the world exists because a Japanese distiller deliberately bought the inefficient version.

Start with how they run. A pot still is a batch process, and a batch has edges. You fill it, heat it, take what you want, dump the rest, clean it, do it again. Because there's a beginning and an end, somebody has to decide where the heads stop and the heart begins, and where the heart gives way to the tails. We covered cut points in August — one of the most consequential acts of judgment in distillation, and it only exists because the run has to stop.

A column still is designed to run continuously. Fermented wash goes in near the top of a tall column and trickles down across a stack of perforated plates while steam climbs the other way. Alcohol lifts off the descending liquid, spent wash drains out the bottom, and spirit comes off the top continuously — for weeks, if you keep feeding it. The classic layout uses two columns: the analyzer, where wash meets steam, and the rectifier, where the vapor gets concentrated before condensing. Each plate is another stage of separation, so a column stacks successive stages inside one continuous process where a pot still needs separate runs. Faster, cheaper, stronger, and it doesn't care what time it is.

Aeneas Coffey's name is on it. He was fixing somebody else's homework. Jean-Baptiste Cellier-Blumenthal patented continuous distillation in 1813. Anthony Perrier was chasing it in Cork. Most directly, the Scottish distiller Robert Stein had a working continuous still running at Kirkliston and then Cameronbridge in the late 1820s — commercially, in Scotland, years before Coffey filed anything. Stein's design had two problems: it fouled constantly and had to be shut down for cleaning, and it gave no way to draw off the heavy fusel oils, so the spirit came off poorly rectified. Coffey, a retired Dublin excise officer who had spent a career walking through distilleries and helping draft the law that governed them, reportedly saw Stein's still demonstrated and set about solving both. He patented his version in 1830. The two-column arrangement he landed on is, allowing for a couple centuries of engineering, what patent stills still look like.

Then came the part that stings if you're Irish. Coffey could not win over Dublin. The great Dublin houses were pot still men, they tasted the new spirit, and they judged it thin — a verdict they were entitled to and never revisited. Smaller Irish distilleries, mostly in the north, did install his stills. But the money and the prestige stayed with the pots, so Coffey packed up and moved his business to London, where he made his living building stills for everybody who wasn't Irish. Scotland bought in at scale. Cheap grain whisky met characterful malt whisky, blending produced something consistent and affordable enough to ship everywhere, and that became the foundation of the blended Scotch trade that went on to dominate global whisky.

You'll hear this told as the tidy tragedy where Coffey personally destroyed Irish whiskey. Resist it. Ireland's collapse had a long list of authors — trade disputes, the loss of Empire markets, Prohibition gutting American demand, and an industry structure slow to consolidate. Passing on the column still didn't help. It didn't do the job by itself either.

Now the myth worth killing: that column spirit has no flavor. There's a legal ceiling here — whisky has to come off the still below 94.8% ABV and retain aroma and taste derived from its raw materials. That number isn't a molecular cliff where 94.81% suddenly turns into vodka. It's a line drawn some distance up a slope, and the further you push toward neutrality, the more congeners you strip on the way. A column still can be run near the top of that slope, and most industrial grain distilleries do exactly that. It can also be run lower, on older and less efficient equipment, and keep a great deal of the grain in the glass.

Nikka is the proof. Masataka Taketsuru learned grain distillation firsthand at Bo'ness in Scotland in 1919, and decades later imported a Coffey still in 1963 and a second in 1966; both moved to Miyagikyo in 1999, where they still run. Nikka's own description of them is almost comically unflattering — hard to operate, inefficient at producing spirit — followed immediately by the reason they keep them: the stills hold onto flavor from the ingredients and give the whisky a creamy texture you don't get otherwise. They bought the slow version on purpose.

Their Coffey Malt is the cleanest teaching example in whisky: 100% malted barley, run through a column still. Under Scotch rules that isn't malt whisky at all. It's grain whisky — the raw material alone doesn't settle the category, the still has a vote too.

Which brings us back to England. "At least one distillation in a pot still with sufficient copper contact" is a middle position, and you can now see exactly what it's splitting. Copper strips sulfur and shapes the spirit; how much of it the vapor meets, and for how long, is a genuine variable in the finished whisky, not a piece of heritage theater. Scotland requires malt whisky to be batch distilled entirely in pot stills. England requires at least one pot distillation and leaves the rest open. Whether that's enough is a question the next few years of English single malt will answer for us.

In the meantime, you've got a new thing to look for. When a distillery tells you what kind of still made the whisky, that's no longer production trivia. It's telling you something about how the spirit was shaped before it ever touched a cask.

England spent two decades building a whisky industry without ever agreeing what the words on the label meant. That ended on September 11, when the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) approved "English Whisky" and "English Whiskey" for protection under the UK Spirit Drinks Geographical Indications Scheme. Registration takes effect October 1, after a 20-day notice period, and the full product specification publishes the same day. The English Whisky Guild filed the application in February 2022. It took more than four and a half years, including a public opposition period and a fight with the Scotch Whisky Association.

What the rules require: UK-grown cereal grain and English water; wort made in England; distillation in England below 94.8% ABV; at least three years' maturation in England in wooden casks no larger than 700 liters; bottling at a minimum 40% ABV. Plain caramel (E150a) is the only permitted additive, and only for color. There are two subcategories, Malt English Whisky and Grain English Whisky, each of which can take a "Single" or "Blended" prefix. The Guild says the requirement that every grain be UK-grown is unique among the UK's whisky GIs — note that's UK-wide, not England-only, so Scottish barley qualifies.

Where it departs from Scotch is more interesting than where it copies. Casks don't have to be oak, provided the wood is declared on the label. A distillery can send its mashing and fermentation to a local brewery and still call the result single malt. And Malt English Whisky has to be batch distilled with at least one distillation in a pot still with sufficient copper contact — which is not the same thing as requiring pot stills throughout, and is written that way deliberately to accommodate modern still designs. Reporting on the final text also indicates bottling isn't tied to England, unlike Single Malt Welsh Whisky, where bottling has to happen in Wales.

Before all this, English whisky answered to nothing more specific than the generic whisky definition inherited from EU Regulation 2019/787: three years in wood, 40% ABV, caramel as the only additive, distilled below 94.8%. Those rules say what whisky is. They say nothing about what English has to mean. Grain could come from anywhere, and nothing made "single malt" specifically English beyond where it was distilled.

The single malt question is what drew blood. The Scotch Whisky Association argued that letting a brewery handle mashing and fermentation would be damaging to the reputation of UK single malt, and lost — the flexibility survived, defended on the grounds that it's how English whisky actually started, since Hicks and Healey laid down England's first modern spirit in 2003 using wort from St Austell Brewery. The louder complaint came from inside England. Liam Hirt of Circumstance Distillery in Bristol spent the consultation arguing that the Guild copied the Scotch template instead of the Welsh one, leaving English single malt unable to distinguish itself from Scotch while pushing the real experimenters outside the category. He wanted tighter provenance in one place — English-grown grain, not UK-wide — and looser rules in others. The final text moved in his direction on distillation. He's appealing anyway.

One thing the GI doesn't do is follow the bottle to America. The US doesn't automatically recognize UK geographical indications, and TTB's list of whiskies that are distinctive products of a particular country names Scotch, Irish and Canadian — not English. What reaches you is the production assurance behind the label: producers have to be verified under HMRC's Spirit Drink Verification Scheme before they can legally use the name, which turns the specification from an industry position paper into something each distillery has to demonstrate. HMRC verifies rather than enforces; enforcement sits with food and port health authorities.

My take: The caramel allowance is the disappointment. England had a clean sheet here and a genuine opportunity to write a rule Scotland can't — no added color, full stop — and instead copied the exception across. E150a exists to make batches look consistent on a shelf. It tells the drinker nothing true about what's in the glass, and a brand-new category with no legacy blends to protect had no reason to keep it. That was the easiest win available and they passed on it.

The wood flexibility is the opposite call and I'll take it. Requiring oak protects a tradition; allowing other woods, with disclosure on the label, lets English distillers actually find out what their whisky can be. Disclosure is the part that makes it work — you know what you're buying.

The brewery provision I'm less comfortable with. "Single malt" has meant something consistent across producing countries largely because everyone followed Scotland's lead, and part of that meaning is that the whole process, from mash through spirit, happened in one place. English single malt now means something narrower: distilled at one distillery, with the front half potentially outsourced. That's defensible on history — it really is how the category started — but it means a drinker comparing an English single malt to a Scotch or a Japanese one is no longer comparing like to like, and almost nobody buying the bottle will know that.

Same caution on the distillation rule. Flexibility is fine when it serves flavor, and there are good stills out there that aren't traditional pots. But "at least one distillation in a pot still" leaves room for a spirit that's mostly column-run with a single pot pass to carry the malt designation, and copper contact across the whole process is a large part of why malt whisky tastes the way it does. The rule permits excellent whisky. It also permits thinner whisky wearing the same words. We'll find out which shows up in three years.

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That's it for this week.

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— Tim