Bunnahabhain Toiteach
Bunnahabhain was founded in 1881 and was for its first several decades only received supplies by sea. Interestingly, the village of Bunnahabhain itself was founded to house the workers for the distillery, making the two even more intertwined than is often the case. Word began to spread after an actual road was put in during the early 1960s and production expanded. The name of the distillery in Gaelic means “Mouth of the River”. In 2003 the distillery was purchased by Burn Stewart, which is currently folded under Heineken Beverages. The Bunnahabhain Toiteach breaks a little from tradition in being lightly peated, as the distillery is generally more known for making unpeated whisky. Toiteach is pronounced “toch tach” and means “smoky” in Gaelic. It has since been replaced by the Toiteach A DhĂ but you can still find the original floating around in stores on occasion.
Balvenie 14 Year Week of Peat
The Balvenie have been pioneering creative endeavors with scotch for a long time. Taking advantage of a gap in production schedule, the distillery began making peated whisky exactly one week out of the year starting in 2002, which resulted in their first release of Peat Week in 2017 and was a limited release. This Week of Peat, also aged 14 years, is the second part in Balvenie’s Stories range, which was launched in 2019. Balvenie, besides having the legendary David Stewart as malt master, is one of only seven distilleries in Scotland with its own malting floor that is used in at least some of its whisky.
Glenmorangie A Tale of the Forest
The Tale of the Forest is the third in an annual series by Glenmorangie that centers around an idea, whether that is concepts as divergent as Cake or Winter. This single malt takes another creative approach by Dr. Bill Lumsden, where instead of finishing the scotch like the previous two, the barley used was dried – or kilned, to use an industry term – with juniper, birch bark and heather flowers. This mix of woodland botanicals was apparently an ancient way of kilning barley for beer, and is used to infuse elements of the botanicals with the barley, much like how drying barley with peat smoke imparts other characteristics. The art on the box and bottle was illustrated by famed artist Pomme Chan.