Pour & Sip December 2025 Box

A huge end to the year here - Merry Christmas!

Benromach Contrasts: High Enzyme 2012: Time to get geeky with this Speyside distillery’s latest experiment! High enzyme barley – or ‘High Diastatic Power (HDP) Malt’ – is usually reserved for grain whisky production, where the enzymes (amylases) from a small proportion of malted barley are still necessary to convert the starch in the corn or wheat into fermentable sugars. “But what would happen if you used 100% high enzyme malted barley to produce a single malt”, you say? Benromach is here to answer that question.

Penderyn Bad Wolf (Icons of Wales): In Aug we mentioned Penderyn’s unique Faraday stills (a cross between a pot and column still), which have been at the heart of the distillery’s light style ever since it was founded in 2000. Except that The Headliner was actually entirely distilled in their traditional ‘lantern-shaped’ pot stills, installed in 2014! This whisky, by contrast, is 65% Faraday still spirit and 35% pot still spirit. Fully matured in suitably festive Tawny Port pipes (which previously held Port for around 60 years).

Scallywag The Winter Edition - Orange Wine Cask Finish: Scallywag is the Speyside blended malt in Douglas Laing’s family of ‘Remarkable Regional Malts’, made up of whiskies from the likes of Mortlach, Macallan and Glenrothes among others. Usually matured predominantly in sherry casks, this limited edition was finished in rare Spanish orange wine casks. Picture “a snowy mountainside retreat” and “après-ski relaxation”. It’s also bottled at natural cask strength!

Bruichladdich 18 Year Old - Re/Define: “The epitome of Bruichladdich's signature unpeated house style”, is how they describe this 18-year-old single malt. Like the Classic Laddie, the 18 Year Old is bottled at a hearty 50% ABV, and is made with 100% Scottish barley. Head Distiller Adam Hannett brings together a cask recipe of predominantly bourbon casks, combined with deftly employed wine casks. Founded 1881, resurrected 2001, and forging an agriculture focused, fully traceable, B Corp certified path ever since.

GlenAllachie 20 Year Old 2005 (cask 5391) - PX Sherry Hogshead: “Specially bottled to celebrate 40 years of Master of Malt”. And what a whisky to celebrate with! One of the oldest single malts to ever feature in Pour & Sip, this exclusive single cask release (just 353 bottles) spent two decades maturing in a Pedro Ximénez sherry hogshead before being bottled in September 2025. GlenAllachie itself was founded in 1967, but was scarcely ever seen as a single malt before master distiller Billy Walker bought the distillery in 2017.