The Year’s Best Whisky Deal Starts November 18, Plus a 40-Year Miniature Collection Hits Auction

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This week’s deals come from Hi Proof in Fullerton, California, which is running some of its sharpest pricing of the year. There are five bottles: a cask-strength 21-year-old for well under half its usual price, a Lagavulin that keeps hitting new lows, a modern classic for about half off, and two Irish single malts for well under their suggested retail price. Shipping thresholds vary by state, so check your destination before ordering.

Scapa is the quieter of Orkney’s two distilleries, and this 21-year-old is its top expression, released once a year as a single batch. It’s matured entirely in first-fill American oak, bottled at cask strength and non-chill filtered. Expect tropical fruit, creamy vanilla and gentle spice, with Orkney’s coastal character underneath. Most US retailers list it around $300, so $135 puts a cask-strength 21-year-old in the price range of many 12-year-olds.

ABV: 52.9% | Age: 21 years | Cask: First-fill American oak | 700ml

Price: $134.99
Typical US Market Range: $165–330
Savings: ~$30–195

Why you should buy this: Twenty-one-year-old single malt at cask strength rarely sells for under $200. All of it comes from first-fill American oak, so you get fruit and vanilla rather than sherry heavy-handedness. And it’s a once-a-year batch, so this price won’t come around again.

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I’ve featured this before, and it’s back because the price keeps dropping. Diageo’s 2024 Special Release Lagavulin is a 12-year-old matured in first-fill ex-bourbon and refill casks and bottled at natural cask strength. It’s classic Lagavulin, with smoke, sea salt and citrus, but brighter and more forceful than the standard 16. At $83, this is less than half what most US retailers charge.

ABV: 57.4% | Age: 12 years | Cask: First-fill ex-bourbon and refill | 750ml

Price: $82.99
Typical US Market Range: $170–180
Savings: ~$87–97

Why you should buy this: It’s a cask-strength Islay special release for about what you’d pay for a standard Lagavulin 16. At 57.4%, it holds up well to water, so one bottle goes further than it looks. And once Special Release stock clears, it’s gone for good.

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Hedonism is the whisky that launched Compass Box in 2000, and it’s still one of the best arguments for blended grain Scotch. Grain whisky is usually filler in blends. Here it’s the whole point: vanilla cream, toffee, coconut and pastry, with a soft, creamy texture. It’s bottled in its natural color and non-chill filtered. At $65 it’s roughly half its usual shelf price.

ABV: 43% | Style: Blended grain Scotch | Edition: 2025 | 750ml

Price: $64.99
Typical US Market Range: $110–140
Savings: ~$45–75

Why you should buy this: It’s the easiest way to learn what grain whisky tastes like on its own, from the bottle that made the category worth taking seriously. It also works as a dessert pour, and it’s soft enough to win over friends who don’t drink whisky. At half its usual price, it’s a low-risk way to try something different.

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Bushmills’ Private Reserve series is where the distillery gets experimental. This single malt spent six years in bourbon and Oloroso sherry casks, then at least six more in Bordeaux casks from Pomerol. Yet the wine stays in the background: expect toasty cereal, caramel and lemon, building toward lemon meringue. It’s bottled at 47% and non-chill filtered, and well below its $74.99 suggested retail price.

ABV: 47% | Age: 12 years | Cask: Bourbon, Oloroso, Pomerol Bordeaux | 750ml

Price: $44.99
Typical US Market Range: $60–75
Savings: ~$15–30

Why you should buy this: It’s a limited, single-vintage 12-year-old at a price below most standard 12-year-old single malts. Six years in Pomerol casks adds depth without burying the Bushmills spirit. And it rated highest of Bushmills’ four 2025 Private Reserve releases at Drinkhacker.

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This is the 12’s sweeter sibling: six years in bourbon and Oloroso casks, then at least four in Portuguese Moscatel casks. Expect orange blossom, apricot, peach and mandarin, with a slightly dry finish that keeps the sweetness in check. At 48.5% and $35, it’s one of the cheapest ways into an age-stated, non-chill-filtered Irish single malt.

ABV: 48.5% | Age: 10 years | Cask: Bourbon, Oloroso, Moscatel | 750ml

Price: $34.99
Typical US Market Range: $45–60
Savings: ~$10–25

Why you should buy this: An age-stated, non-chill-filtered single malt at 48.5% for $35 is hard to find. Moscatel finishes are rare, so it adds a flavor most shelves don’t have. And buy it alongside the 12 for under $80 total: a side-by-side of two wine casks on the same spirit.

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From November 18 to 24, Royal Mile Whiskies is offering free international shipping on orders of £500 or more, after VAT is removed, up to 12 bottles. They run this offer every year. If you’ve been eyeing a few bottles from the UK, this is the week to buy.

Why it matters: Shipping is the main cost of buying whisky from abroad. Royal Mile normally charges £50 for one bottle to the US, rising to £125 for four. During the offer, that’s free, and it still covers all US duties and taxes, so there’s no surprise bill at the door. All international orders also have UK VAT removed at checkout, which takes about 17% off the listed price. Ex-VAT pricing plus free shipping is about as close to UK shelf prices as US buyers get.

Split it with friends. £500 is a lot for one person. It’s easy across three or four people buying a bottle or two each. Pool one order to one address and split the bill.

Know the limits. The offer covers up to 12 bottles per order. Royal Mile ships to most, but not all, US states, so check the list on its delivery page before you build a basket. Orders of more than six bottles ship as two parcels.

Shop Royal Mile Whiskies

Null reviewed all four of Bushmills’ 2025 Private Reserve releases. Each starts as single malt aged in bourbon and Oloroso sherry casks, then gets a different finish. The two on sale this week landed at opposite ends of his ranking. In the Moscatel, the wine does most of the work. He found orange blossom, honeysuckle and camphor over Bushmills’ honeyed, cereal-like base, then a sweet, wine-heavy palate of lemon curd and coconut and a bright, perfumed finish. At times the wine overpowers the whiskey, but it suits the Bushmills spirit. The Bordeaux surprised him: he found no real sign of the wine at all. Instead, he got a toasty, cereal-heavy nose with coconut, caramel and lemon peel, building into a lemon meringue character, then saltwater taffy and a herbal finish of rosemary and thyme. He called it easily the best of the four.

Score: Bordeaux 12: A ($75). Moscatel 10: B+ ($60).

Full Review Here

My take: Both are in this week’s Bottles Worth Grabbing, at $45 and $35. An A-rated 12-year-old for $45 is the standout. And if you like your wine finishes obvious, the Moscatel is the one that delivers it.

Broddy, Dramface’s Canada-based writer, picked up the 2022 edition of Flaming Heart, Compass Box’s seventh, when it dropped to CAD$175 (about £95). It’s a peated blended malt built mostly from Laphroaig, Talisker, Caol Ila, Glen Elgin and Balmenach, aged in recharred hogsheads, ex-bourbon and French oak. On the nose he found cinnamon candy, smoldering coals, bright coastal peat, brown sugar and a soft baked-apple fruitiness underneath. The palate is viscous and creamy, with cinnamon, black pepper and a smoked, sauce-glazed rib character, then a long, slow finish of sweetness and gentle wood smoke. His case for it: none of its component distilleries could taste like this alone, which is exactly what a blend should do. Still, he won’t buy another. The price is too steep, and he thinks Compass Box’s quality and direction have wavered since its founder, John Glaser, moved on.

Score: 7/10 (“Very Good Indeed”)

Full Review Here

My take: I’d pay more for it than Broddy would. At around $120, Flaming Heart is easy to justify: Laphroaig, Talisker and Caol Ila blended into something none of them could be on their own, at 48.9%. Broddy’s line about blends is the right one. Good blending shouldn’t hide weak whisky. It should make something none of the parts could make alone. It also pairs with Hedonism in this week’s Bottles Worth Grabbing: two Compass Box flagships, both worth buying at the right price.

Lagg is Isle of Arran Distillers’ second distillery, on the south of the island, and it makes only peated whisky. This small batch is peated to 50 ppm, matured in bourbon barrels and finished for over a year in first-fill Manzanilla casks. It’s limited to 2,000 bottles, non-chill filtered and naturally colored. Ruben opens with a technicality: the label says “Manzanilla sherry,” but Manzanilla has its own appellation, and people in Sanlúcar don’t call it sherry. On the nose he found rich smoke, lemon pie, iodine, chamomile, sugared almond, vanilla, gooseberry and brine. The palate is raw, phenolic peat with a strong alcohol kick, then dates, vanilla, yellow apple, cracked black pepper, chili and ginger, with the dry, coastal Manzanilla character coming through. The finish is long and smoky, with salty licorice and charred herbs. His verdict: a big whisky where both casks show in fair balance, though the peat dominates.

Score: 87/100

Full Review Here

My take: I haven’t found a US retailer carrying it, but Royal Mile Whiskies lists it at £70.79 ex-VAT, about $95. That makes it a natural candidate for this month’s free-shipping window.

Most whisky miniatures today get handed out on planes or tucked into gift sets. The usual story is that Powers invented them. Powers is an Irish whiskey brand dating to 1791, originally distilled in Dublin and now produced at Midleton in County Cork. That story gives one brand too much credit. Powers turned the mini into a product, but small bottles had been around for decades before it did.

It started as a sales tool. In the 1800s, liquor salesmen carried small bottles from bar to bar so owners could taste before ordering. Those samples weren’t sold to the public, but some survived. The longtime publisher of The Miniature Bottle Collector magazine reported owning one from 1862, nearly three decades before Powers entered the picture.

Powers put it on the shelf. According to the distillery, it launched a 71ml bottle in 1889, and Dubliners quickly nicknamed it the “Baby Power.” It was corked, so Powers sold it with a tiny corkscrew. The bottle became so familiar that for a time “Baby Power” was shorthand for any small drink.

Cheap glass made it common. Making small bottles by hand was expensive, and that changed in 1903, when Michael Owens developed the first commercially successful fully automatic bottle-making machine. As the technology spread, glass got cheaper, making miniatures much easier to produce at scale. After World War II, travel and tourism turned them into souvenirs, and plenty of collections started with a coach trip to a distillery.

The size kept changing. Before 1980, US minis came in 1/10-pint and 1/8-pint sizes. The familiar 50ml became mandatory on January 1, 1980, when the US switched to metric sizes and the old “fifth” became the 750ml bottle.

Then collectors became archivists. Miniature collecting peaked about two decades ago and then fell out of fashion, until a new generation of drinkers wanted to taste whisky that no longer exists. Because most minis were never opened, old ones preserve the label changes, strengths and distillery bottlings of their era. A shelf of them is an accidental record of how whisky used to be made and sold.

That’s why collections like Saul Zelmanowitz’s, covered below in What’s Happening, matter beyond their price. For most of us, a 5cl bottle is one of the more attainable ways to taste whisky from a closed distillery or a 1970s bottling. The small bottle started as a sales tool. It ended up as one of the best records of whisky’s past.

Saul Zelmanowitz has spent almost 40 years collecting whisky miniatures. He’s a New York collector and a fellow member of the whisky community on Instagram, where he posts as @scotchminisz. From November 9 to 12, UK-based WVA Whisky Auctions is selling his entire collection in one online sale. It holds more than 3,200 miniatures from over 100 distilleries, and WVA values it at over £150,000.

The headline names are Macallan, Springbank, Laphroaig and Port Ellen. Among them is a run of Macallan Fine & Rare miniatures in individual oak boxes: a 1949, then every vintage from 1964 to 1972. WVA believes it’s the largest miniature collection ever offered in a single auction. The house bases that on public auction records and notes it isn’t an official record.

My take: For perspective, Brian Marshall’s collection of about 4,000 miniatures sold across two Gildings auctions in 2021 for £29,750. Saul’s collection carries an estimate about five times that. That reflects how far the miniature market has come, and the depth of what he’s built. A Fine & Rare run like his is the kind of set most collectors only see in photos.

For drinkers, this sale is just as interesting. A 5cl bottle holds one or two proper pours. That makes it one of the most realistic ways to taste spirit from a distillery that no longer exists, or that sat silent for decades, as Port Ellen did from 1983 until 2024. If you plan to bid, check WVA’s buyer’s premium, shipping terms and whether your state allows spirits to be shipped to you.

Congratulations to Saul on a remarkable 40-year run, and best of luck with the sale. I’ll report back on how it goes.

That's it for this week.

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— Tim