Glenfarclas

Glenfarclas has stood at the foot of Ben Rinnes since 1836, and John Grant bought it from Robert Hay's estate in 1865 for five hundred and eleven pounds and nineteen shillings. It has been in his family ever since — one of the very few Speyside distilleries of that age still independent.

Its stills are fired directly by flame rather than heated by steam. That is not nostalgia: steam was tried in 1981 and, by the account recorded of it, the guts went out of the new make spirit — so they went back. The wood is equally settled — European oak butts and hogsheads, mostly ex-oloroso, and since the late 1980s largely from a single cooper in Jerez.

Then the site does something quietly valuable. The microclimate is cool enough that casks lose very little to evaporation, so stock survives at strength far longer than it should. Forty-two warehouses hold the stock, with six more being built.

That inventory is what made The Family Casks possible: single casks bottled by vintage, released from 2007, with a whisky from every year back to the 1950s.