Speyside Ranked, Kilkerran Back in Stock, and Macallan's Marketing Machine

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This week's picks are all from That's It Booze, a family-owned shop in San Francisco that's been around since 1994. Four of the five are Springbank-family or Bruichladdich bottles — the kind of Campbeltown and Islay stock that's usually allocated, sold out, or marked up the second it lands stateside. Even better, they set up a reader discount: use code TIMWHISKY for 10% off at checkout, which takes most of these from fair-to-market down to a genuine deal. All five are in stock at time of writing.

The annual cask-strength bourbon release from Glengyle — Springbank's sister distillery and one of only three left in Campbeltown. Fully matured in ex-bourbon casks, this is Kilkerran at its most uncut: creamy vanilla, custard, banana, and tropical fruit cut by that coastal Campbeltown salinity and a thread of peat smoke. Natural color, non-chill-filtered, bottled at whatever the cask gave them. If you like Springbank and can't get it, this is the closest seat in the house.

ABV: ~55–58% (cask strength, batch-dependent) | Cask: 100% Ex-Bourbon | Region: Campbeltown

Price: $95.00 → $85.50 with code TIMWHISKY

Typical US Market Range: $90–$110, when you can find it

Savings: Roughly at market — the win is finding it in stock at all

Who's this for: Springbank chasers and anyone who wants Campbeltown character at full power

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The distillery's flagship and one of the best 12-year-olds going. Matured 70% in bourbon and 30% in sherry casks, lightly peated, and bottled at 46%. Expect citrus, marzipan, and pear up front, that signature Campbeltown oiliness on the palate, and a gentle toasted-marshmallow smoke underneath. Natural color and non-chill-filtered, like everything from this stable. A genuine reason to keep a Campbeltown bottle on the shelf year-round.

ABV: 46% | Cask: 70% Bourbon, 30% Sherry | Region: Campbeltown

Price: $90.00 → $81.00 with code TIMWHISKY

Typical US Market Range: $90–$100+, frequently sold out

Savings: At market, but it's often unavailable or marked up stateside

Who's this for: Anyone past the beginner stage who wants a complete, well-built daily Campbeltown

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Worth clearing up the label: despite "Blended Scotch" on the shelf tag, the current Campbeltown Loch from J&A Mitchell (Springbank's company) is a blended malt — no grain whisky in it. Ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks, 46%, natural color, non-chill-filtered, named for the sea loch at Campbeltown. It's maritime, malty, and easygoing, and one of the cheapest ways to get authentic Campbeltown character in the glass. Expect some batch-to-batch variation — it's J&A Mitchell, after all.

ABV: 46% | Cask: Ex-Bourbon & Ex-Sherry | Region: Campbeltown (Blended Malt)

Price: $65.00 → $58.50 with code TIMWHISKY

Typical US Market Range: $60–$65

Savings: At market — the value is style-for-dollar, not a discount

Who's this for: The Campbeltown-curious and anyone who wants a sub-$70 everyday pour with real character

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The peated side of Bruichladdich, made entirely from barley grown on Islay and distilled, matured, and bottled on the island. Heavily peated to 40 ppm but built in the elegant Port Charlotte style — barbecue smoke wrapped around dates, sea-shell minerality, and orchard fruit rather than a peat sledgehammer. 50% ABV, natural color, non-chill-filtered. High-provenance smoke that doesn't beat you up.

ABV: 50% | Cask: Predominantly Ex-Bourbon | Region: Islay

Price: $74.00 → $66.60 with code TIMWHISKY

Typical US Market Range: $70–$90

Savings: Fair to slightly under market on a vintage-dated release

Who's this for: Peat fans who want provenance and finesse, not just a ppm number

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A low-risk way into Compass Box, the blending house that's done more than anyone to push transparency in Scotch — they publish full recipes, right down to using "Williamson" as the open secret for Laphroaig in their disclosures. The pack covers three of their signature blended malts, each pulling a different direction: Story of the Spaniard (sherry- and red-wine-cask richness), Spice Tree (their custom French-oak, spice-forward house style), and The Peat Monster (smoke). Three 50ml pours, three distinct angles, no full-bottle commitment.

ABV: Varies | Cask: Blended Malt | Region: Scotland (Blended Malt)

Price: $25.00 → $22.50 with code TIMWHISKY

Typical US Market Range: $25–$30

Savings: At market — it's a sampler, priced as one

Who's this for: Newer drinkers and gift-givers who want a guided taste of three different styles

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Ranking Speyside is harder than ranking Islay, and it's worth explaining why up front. Speyside is the most distillery-dense corner of Scotland, but most of those distilleries either disappear into blends or only show up as single malts through independent bottlers. The ones that do put out official bottlings are usually aiming at the casual drinker, which means a lot of the core ranges come across thin, polite, and forgettable. So this isn't a list of who makes the best spirit in theory — plenty of Speyside distilleries make excellent liquid you can only find through an IB. It's about which distilleries reward you most when you actually go shopping: official range quality, recurring releases, value, presentation, and how clearly the distillery's character comes through in the bottles you can get your hands on. Filling out a top five that clears that bar is tougher than it sounds.

The entry point here is a meatier, more characterful Speyside than most. Craigellachie still runs worm tub condensers — old-fashioned equipment most distilleries abandoned — and that tends to push the spirit toward a muscular, savory, sometimes meaty profile, often with a thread of pineapple running through it. The malt is unpeated, so all that character is built in the production, not the cask or the smoke. The 13 is the workhorse — robust, fairly priced against similar-aged Speysiders, and a refreshing change from the watered-down norm. The older age statements get expensive, but this is a distillery the independent bottlers love, so there's no shortage of IB options if you want to see what the spirit can really do.

One of the great value plays in all of Scotch, and one of the last true holdouts. The Grant family has owned and run Glenfarclas since 1865 — one of the very few distilleries in Scotland still independent and family-managed — and they've never been shy about it. The whisky is classic sherried Speyside, and the core range is absurdly deep and affordable for an official bottling, with the 15 the sweet spot. They also claim to have pioneered the cask strength bottling with the 105 back in 1968, and the Family Casks — single cask vintage releases stretching back decades — are the crown jewels. Don't sleep on the regional and limited editions either: they're usually bottled at a better presentation than the core range, and most aren't hard to track down online. The lower-ABV core bottlings can feel a little restrained, which is part of why it lands at 4 and not higher — but few distilleries give you this much quality for this little money.

Maybe the most distinctive style on this list. Since Gordon & MacPhail revived the distillery in 1998, Benromach has run a deliberately old-fashioned course — small-scale, hands-on, often just a two-person team on the stills, long slow fermentation, and barley that's lightly peated, just enough to lend a wisp of smoke. The result is "old Speyside": earthy smoke, oily texture, layered fruit. The age-stated core range is solid but doesn't always blow me away — where Benromach really shines is the Contrasts series and the batch-varied Cask Strength releases, which are consistently exceptional and naturally presented. Buy those and you're getting this distillery at its best.

Arguably the highest-quality whisky on this list — it's just young, with fewer releases available. Ballindalloch is one of the very few genuinely single-estate distilleries in Scotland: the spring barley is grown on the property, and the family oversees every stage on site, from milling through fermentation, distillation, maturation, and bottling. It's tiny and entirely hands-on — three employees, no automation, around 100,000 liters a year — with fermentations that run extremely long, up to roughly 140 hours. The Macpherson-Grant family has held the estate since 1546 and was tied to nearby Cragganmore for the best part of a century before returning to distilling here in 2014. The official lineup is still limited, but everything I've tried has felt seriously made. As the stock ages and more gets released, this one climbs.

The clearest turnaround story in Speyside, and the deserving number one. When Billy Walker — the man who'd already rebuilt BenRiach, GlenDronach, and Glenglassaugh — acquired GlenAllachie with partners Trisha Savage and Graham Stevenson in October 2017, the distillery was barely known as a single malt. He went through the warehouses cask by cask and built a serious range from what was effectively a blank sheet. The result is one of the best core ranges in the region: the 10 Cask Strength is a standout (batch depending), the 12 is one of the best entry-level malts on the market, and the 15 delivers a rich, heavily sherried profile. Worth understanding, though — the current core range is built from stock laid down before Walker arrived. He's been leaning on long fermentation and gentle distillation since day one, but that spirit is still maturing, so the releases that really carry his stamp are still ahead of us. On top of the core range there's a relentless stream of single casks and special releases. Top to bottom, nobody in Speyside is doing it better right now.

If you care about flavor in whisky, you probably care about it in a glass with a few other things in it too — and this one's worth a spot on the shelf next to the bottles. Sother Teague, Wine Enthusiast's 2017 Mixologist of the Year and the beverage director at Amor y Amargo, the cult bitters-and-amaro bar in New York's East Village, wrote the rare cocktail book that reads like sitting across from an opinionated bartender rather than flipping through a recipe index. It runs a quick, witty history of the major spirits — whiskey included — alongside more than 100 recipes, and it's built around the same instinct that drives most of us down the whisky rabbit hole: chasing flavor, understanding why things taste the way they do, and not being precious about it.

The throughline for a whisky audience is simple. Cocktails run parallel to what we already obsess over — another way to think about balance, bitterness, sweetness, and how one ingredient reshapes another. Teague's takes lean unique and bitters-forward rather than the same five classics rebadged, so even if you mostly drink your whisky neat, there's plenty here worth stealing for the home bar. Opinionated, flavor-first, and genuinely useful.

No affiliate deal here, and nobody asked me to run it — I just like the book and trust the guy who wrote it.

Check it out here

Ruben reviewed the travel-retail edition of the Bushmills 21 — bottled at 46% and finished differently from the standard release, swapping the usual Madeira for first-fill Marsala casks. The spirit spends around 18 years in bourbon barrels and Oloroso sherry before that Marsala finish. Nose of brown sugar, toasted oak, cherry jam, and a wave of tropical fruit — pineapple, peach, mango — with marzipan and honey behind it. The palate turns winey (clove, chocolate, leather) alongside black cherry, caramelized walnuts, black tea, and toffee, into a long finish of chocolate, candied ginger, and oak. His read: he'd have liked the Marsala dialed back a touch, but it adds real richness and the trademark Bushmills fruitiness survives intact.

Score: 88/100

Full Review Here

My take: Bushmills is a distillery that rewards proof. The standard core always feels like it's pulling its punches at 40% — give it some extra strength and it suddenly has room to breathe and show the fruit it's actually capable of. A 46% travel-retail 21 isn't an accident; that bump is doing real work. Nine times out of ten I'll take a higher-proof Bushmills over the standard-strength version of the same whisky.

Archie took on Costco's Kirkland 15 — bottled for them by Alexander Murray from an undisclosed Highland distillery, matured in bourbon barrels and finished nine months in Oloroso sherry, 46% ABV, $65 for a 750ml. On paper it's almost too good: a 15-year age-stated Highland single malt for that money is nearly unheard of. In the glass, though, it underdelivers — pleasant but faint, with raisin bread, plain pastry, honey, doughy malt, and only a light touch of vanilla. He found some Gala apple and ripe nectarine with time, but even that stays quiet. His phrase for it: a xerox copy of what Highland malt is supposed to be.

Score: 4/10 (Dramface scale — 4 = 'Some Promise')

Full Review Here

My take: This is the trap with spec-sheet shopping. A 15-year Highland single malt at 46% for $65 looks like an obvious win on paper, and plenty of people will buy it on the numbers alone. But age, ABV, and a sherry finish don't add up to a good pour on their own — what's in the glass has to actually deliver, and sometimes the math lies.

Thijs reviewed one of the icons: the Port Ellen 1979 32 Year Old, the 12th official release from the legendary closed Islay distillery, bottled in 2012 at 52.5% from refill American and European oak, just 2,964 bottles. The nose is layered and graceful — quince jelly, grilled apples, tar, a drop of iodine, marzipan, oyster shells, and sea spray over a stunning waxiness. The palate is oily and maritime with mango, yuzu, gentle earthiness, charcoal, and honeycomb, finishing long on almonds and citrus. His conclusion: about as sophisticated a single malt as you'll find — once a vibrant, in-your-face peated whisky, now an elder statesman, respected and valued for all the right reasons.

Score: 9.4/10

Full Review Here

My take: This is the pull of the ghost distilleries. Port Ellen, Brora, Rosebank — the closed names carry a mystique no operating distillery can manufacture, and a bottling like this is why. Thirty-two years in refill casks turned a fierce young Islay peater into something poised and elegant, the kind of whisky that only exists because the stills went silent and the casks were left alone for decades. That mystique is exactly what drove the decision to fire Port Ellen back up in 2024 — the hope of one day capturing even a piece of what made bottles like this legendary. Whether that's possible is the great unanswered question. For now, this is the standard the ghost left behind.

Macallan started the way many Speyside distilleries did — as a farm. In 1824, a barley farmer and part-time schoolteacher named Alexander Reid took out a license to distill at Easter Elchies, on a hill above the River Spey near Craigellachie. It was one of the early legal distilleries after the 1823 Excise Act, though illicit distilling had reportedly gone on at the site since the 1700s. Reid's operation was modest — two stills in a wooden shed. For most of its first century it wasn't a famous single malt at all; it was a quality component sold into blends, and didn't really take off as a single malt in its own right until the 1960s.

The thing that built the reputation came later, and it came from wood. When Roderick Kemp bought the distillery in 1892, he leaned hard into sherry casks, laying the foundation for the identity the brand still trades on. Macallan built its modern reputation around sherry-seasoned oak shipped up from Jerez, and that rich, dried-fruit, European-oak profile is what earned it a place among serious drinkers. That part of the story is real. The sherry-matured Macallan of a few decades ago was genuinely excellent whisky.

The turn toward what Macallan is now started in 2004. That's when the distillery launched the Fine Oak series, introducing bourbon-cask maturation alongside its sherry-seasoned oak — a clear break from the classic distillery style, later rebranded as Triple Cask in 2018. Around the same time, owner Edrington began pushing the brand squarely at the luxury market rather than the whisky market. The portfolio expanded to the point of feeling endless, and Edrington marketed Macallan through collaborations with the James Bond franchise, Bentley Motors, and Cirque du Soleil. In 2018 it opened a new £140 million distillery with a dramatic subterranean design and a grass-and-wildflower roof built to blend into the landscape — a building that looks more like a modern art museum than a place that makes whisky, which is precisely the point.

The collectible side of the brand exploded in parallel. A bottle of the Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60-year-old sold for £2,187,500 — around $2.7 million — at Sotheby's in London in November 2023, a world record for a bottle of whisky. Only 40 bottles of the 1926 were ever produced, and they weren't even sold originally — they were handed out as gifts to top clients of the distillery. Headlines like that are worth millions in free advertising, and Macallan has been better at generating them than anyone else in the category.

Here's where I land on it. Macallan is the best-marketed whisky on earth, and that's a statement about the machine, not the liquid. A lot of longtime fans feel the everyday whisky has slipped as the brand keeps leaning on no-age-statement releases, and that many of those bottles are overpriced for what's in them. I agree. The core range now charges a premium for whisky that's perfectly fine but rarely special, while the great Macallan that earned the reputation has quietly moved out of most people's reach. The name still means something. These days you're mostly paying for it.

Whisky Auctioneer's "Kisetsu: Seasons of Japanese Whisky" sale is live now and runs through June 22. The headliner is the Karuizawa 1960 "The Poet" (Cask #5627) — one of only 41 bottles ever produced and the oldest Karuizawa ever released, distilled in 1960 and bottled in 2013 at 52 years old. Instead of numbers, each bottle is individually named and carries a hand-selected netsuke — a carved Japanese miniature — suspended from the neck. This one is consigned directly by Marcin Miller, founder of Number One Drinks, the outfit that released the final Karuizawa stocks — about as clean a provenance trail as exists in this category. Also on the block: the Yamazaki 55, the oldest Japanese whisky ever bottled. The timing isn't random — on May 30 a Yamazaki 50 "Club Natsume" set a new world record for a single bottle of Japanese whisky at a $842,169 hammer price in Hong Kong, beating the prior 2020 mark by more than 30%.

My take: This is the rarefied end of the hobby, and it's worth understanding what's actually driving these numbers. With Karuizawa, the distillery is closed for good — no new releases, ever — so what's on the market is all there will ever be. The Poet is one of 41 bottles, period. When supply is that fixed and demand comes from a handful of collectors with effectively unlimited budgets, you get prices that have nothing to do with how the whisky tastes. Nobody paying $842,000 is planning to open it. At that level it's an asset, not a dram — closer to fine art than something you'd pour. Interesting to follow, but a different game entirely from the bottles the rest of us are buying.

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.

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— Tim