Strathmill 1996 / Managers' Choice / 70cl / 60.1% / Distillery Bottling
Single Speyside Malt Scotch Whisky
Bottled in 2009 as part of the not-altogether-uncontroversial Manager's Choice series, this Strathmill is one of the more interesting bottlings in the series, as one of only a tiny handful of official bottlings from this very obscure distillery, most of whose output goes into the J&B blend.
Strathmill
Strathmill was originally founded in 1823 (as Glenisla-Glenlivet, confusingly), but had a bit of a stop-start existence originally.
The first distillery had been converted from a flour mill, and was only in operation until 1837, when the distilling equipment was removed and the buildings converted back into a mill.
This continued until the 1890s, when the mill was once again converted back into a distillery.
According to Misako Udo's superb 'The Scottish Whisky Distilleries', after this rebuild Strathmill "...had a "Whisky Fountain" where whisky straight from the still was run into open vessels.
Unfortunately, this no longer exists".
Soon afterwards, the distillery was bought by W & A Gilbey (the English gin company), who would eventuially become part of Diageo.
As a workhorse distillery with a production capacity of 1.7 million litres/year (almost the entirety of which is used for Diageo blends, chiefly J&B), Strathmill is not a high priority for Diageo's marketing department, which is why almost no-one has ever heard of it.
The first and only official bottling (aside from a ridicualously rare Centenary edition and a Manager's Dram for Diageo staff) remains the 10 year old Flora & Fauna edition released in 2001.
Independent bottlings are relatively rare, although Douglas Laing have done a couple recently. Michael Jackson describes the house style as 'The whisky world's answer to orange muscat. With dessert.'
