Aberlour Silver A'Bunadh

Aberlour Silver A’bunadh single malt Scotch whisky. These early batches are not numbered like the current editions and are only distinguished by a silver label on the bottle. It’s fair to say these are growing increasingly rare with each passing batch, but what we have here is a rather special and very elusive in terms of details and release numbers. This silver A’bunadh is an extremely limited run of just 37 bottles with this being number 18 produced in 1999 and aged for 12 years. Apart from this details are very scant about this release, with the suggestion that the 37 bottles were as a result of remnants from casks used in an early A’bunadh batch. The whole existence of the A’bunadh owes itself to a bottle that was buried in the foundations of the still room at Aberlour. Distillery guides tell the story that when this still room was extended in 1973 the workmen came across this bottle wrapped in period newspaper and started to enjoy the contents of the bottle. By the time the distillery manager got wind of this discovery over half of the whisky was gone. In other words, what would have been the oldest complete example of an Aberlour whisky in its original bottle had been lost. The remnants were dispatched to the company laboratory for investigation and ultimately acted as the inspiration to the A’bunadh range. From a whisky perspective, while we haven’t tasted this bottle, we have enjoyed some of the earlier releases in the A’bunadh series. These have set the benchmark extremely high, so much so that subsequent releases in the series have failed to meet expectations. This Silver A’bunadh at a strength of 58.07% should be divine.