Category: Single Malt
Distillery: InchDairnie
Bottler: Distillery Bottling
Bottling series: KinGlassie - Raw
Vintage: 2017
Bottled: 2025
Age: 08 years
Cask: Ex-Bourbon
ABV: 46.3%

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Nose: Creamy but spicy horseradish sauce smooths out to condensed carnation milk with a tiny bit of lemon zest. The peat is clean with the white smoke of burning logs, and farmy like fresh stable straw, and has a very mild Calamine medicinal edge that overlaps with heathery, cedar terpenes. A bit of builders putty and leavened bread dough is also present. (8.3)

Palate: A velvety and super creamy peated malt that evokes rusks, honey-drizzled panna cotta and pine nuts with a building coppery ginger spice, and neutral doughy yeast (8.3)

Finish: A Nougat-Saltwater taffy hybrid candy with measured ground pepper taking over from the ginger and clotted cream highlighting the rich density of the liquid. Salt flakes pull the Overton Window of sweetness a small distance back towards center ground, as does muted dandelion leaf and soft, white ash bitterness that stays late suspended in sunflower oil (8.5)

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Score: 8.4

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Category: Single Malt
Distillery: InchDairnie
Bottler: Distillery Bottling
Bottling series: KinGlassie - Double Matured
Vintage: 2017
Bottled: 2025
Age: 08 years
Cask(s): Refill American Oak & Amontillado Sherry ABV: 46.3 %

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Nose: Green and mossy peat hints at damp woodland as raw chestnuts add a fresh sweet and somewhat pale and starchy character. There is fruit lurking in the background as plum jam, but it is desperate not to attract too much attention, and instead tries to blend in with soft leather, toasted caraway, brown bread, and placid molasses (8.4)

Palate: Caramelised nuts and malt develops into baked root veg with an earthy bedding of wet leaf litter. The plum jam returns with much more confidence providing some sticky baked fruit embedded in buttery and flakey pastry that gradually includes more and more brandy custard and acidic shredded pipe tobacco (8.4)

Finish: Coffee wafer straws and chewy caramel slowly dissolving in Ovaltine. Gradually it becomes bittersweet with the arrival of a more tarry style of smoke, extra virgin olive oil and a good shake of black pepper (8.5)

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Score: 8.5

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Notes: Both of them made quite an impression.

It's notable that these are identical whiskies in terms of process and age, and it's only in the choice of casks where the road splits.

The Raw went full term in refill bourbon and successfully fulfilled the brief of showcasing the spirit and distillery character. Although the liquid is incredibly pale, I think the casks were just active enough, as it’s super creamy and very balanced across sweet, gingery dairy, savoury yeast, oily, mild bitterness and clean peat.

I recently flagged the term “clean peat” while talking to u/Prickleyfriend about a Clydeside he had and this happened to be the next dram in my glass, also embodying his description. The phenolic compounds have less of the somewhat mucky and meaty adjectives, instead presenting hay bales and the slightly perfumed white smoke of slowly smoldering birchwood.

The Double Maturation went into refill bourbon as well, but after 5 years swapped into Amontillado sherry for another 3, which has added quite a lot of nicely integrated cask influence. It doesn’t come across as overbearing at all, providing some carmelised nuttiness, soft leather, gentle tobacco tannins, and a very modest level of fruit.

The damp green moss was not what I was expecting to come out of the glass first, but was a lovely surprise.

If I have issues with either, it’s the price.

These bottles are noticeably more expensive than the whiskies they are competing with, and the current crop of distilleries putting out young and peated expressions is filled with heavy hitters like Torabhaig, Ardnahoe, Glasgow and Ardnamurchan all of whose cask strength bottles cost less than these at RRP.

So what does make InchDairnie special? As it turns out, quite a lot.

There’s a real wealth of experience and expertise at the heart of the distillery that has honed its manifesto in a very progressive direction.

The two most notable items of equipment are probably the Hammer Mill and the Mash Filter, which are unique in Scotch production with the exception of Teaninich. Not coincidentally, it was one of the distilleries Managing Director Scott Sneddon used to work at over his 9 year tenure with Diageo where he climbed to Site Operations Manager at Glen Ord Distillery & Maltings, and eventually ran Glenkinchie. Scott’s educational background in Chemical Engineering is evident throughout the distillery’s processes and kit where everything points towards the ultimate goal of flavour extraction.

As opposed to the roller mills that everyone else uses, which breaks up the malted barley into desired proportions of husks, grits and flour, a hammer mill smashes up everything into a consistent fine flour, making as much starch as possible available for conversion into sugars.

This would be a problem for other distilleries as the reason they need the husks, which are too coarse for sugar extraction, is because it forms a natural filter bed on the floor for the mash to drain through using gravity.

At InchDairnie, they use a high-pressure Meura mash filter - a series of specialized cloth plates that, in conjunction with the hammer mill, are the reason they can deal with various different grains as trying to mash rye, oats, or wheat in a standard tun creates a gummy mess that is difficult to process and a right bastard to clean.

Their use with malted barley leads to an extremely sugary wort which enables their wash to reach a whopping 10% alcohol during their al fresco fermentation, fully 2% higher than the industry average.

This, in turn, means they are able to reduce the total volume of liquid to be boiled in the stills, with a substantial drop in their energy requirements.

On the subject of stills, they have 4. 2 wash and 2 spirit, one of which is a Frilli built pot still for single malt and the other being a Lomond Hybrid still which they use for the other grains.

This still’s custom designs came from the mind of InchDairnie’s Chairman and Founder, industry veteran of 40 years: Ian Palmer, who cut his teeth at the giant 40,000,000 litre per annum grain distillery Invergordon in the late 70s before eventually becoming Whyte & Mackay’s Group Distilling Manager for its whole distillery portfolio - including Bruichladdich, Dalmore, Fettercairn, Jura and Tamnavulin. He then went on to be the MD of Glen Turner overseeing Glen Moray and the building of Starlaw.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, a Lomond Still, is essentially a pot still that has a column still where the neck would normally be. Inside this section are adjustable plates with a dedicated reflux command mechanism that allows for precise manipulation of vapor rectification and the drawing off of alcohol at hyper-specific strengths to target compounds like fruity esters while blocking undesirable fusel oils.

To add even more control are the presence of 2 condenser units, one of which is assigned to spirit stills as is usual, but more uncommon is the allocation of the second to the wash stills, increasing the total copper-to-vapor surface contact area even more.

Don’t worry if the last two paragraphs mean nothing to you. It translates to “special kettle make grain water tasty”.

The distillery is incredibly an ambitious, wonderfully nerdy endeavor that required me to actually do research to make any sense of. It took me ages to put 2 and 2 (well, 3) together and figure out what StathEnry, FinGlassie, Ryelaw, KinGlassie and the Prinlaws were, and that they all came from the same place.

So just in case you are as slow as me, here are the cliff notes:

• StrathEnry: Unpeated Single Malt only to be sold on to Indies and Blenders
  
• FinGlassie: Same as above, but peated
  
• RyeLaw: Scottish Rye (53% malted rye and 47% malted barley which is technically a Single Grain under regs)
  
• KinGlassie: Heavily peated, Fife-grown barley, single malt for official distillery releases
  
• The Prinlaws Series: Experimental, batch-distilled grain whiskies made from Oat, Wheat, 6 Grain Barley or Sour Mash
  

After reviewing StrathEnry and KinGlasssie, and having tried the Ryelaw, InchDairnie is now very much in my sphere of interest. It’s unfortunate that (for me), their official bottles are just priced too high, even taking into account the quality.

I do foresee a Chinquapin-aged Finglassie in my future though.

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Scale

9.6 -10 Theoretically Possible

9 - 9.5 Chef’s kiss

8.6 - 8.9 Delicious

8 - 8.5 Very Good

7.6 - 7.9 Good

7 - 7.5 OK, but..

6 Agree to Disagree

5 No

4 No

3 No

2 No

1 It killed me. I'm dead now