What is a single cask whiskey
To make a single cask whiskey, a single cask is selected and bottled from the warehouse of a distillery.
Since the barrels develop very differently depending on the nature of the wood, the period of filling and the location in the warehouse, every single cask contains a unique whiskey.
The number of bottles filled is often indicated on the label: these are generally very limited releases.
Single Cask and Single Malt: what are the differences?
Both of them types of whiskey they are usually made with barley malt through the use of copper stills.
The most important difference lies in the selection of the barrels: for a single malt, several hundred barrels from a distillery are often combined in a so-called batch and blended together.
The goal is a bottling with uniform character and taste for all the bottles produced.
The single cask whiskey, on the other hand, is obtained from a single barrel. This allows for a greater variety of flavors and aromas which inevitably varies from one batch to another, and this also makes it more difficult to choose the “perfect” cask.
Do single barrels always contain the best whiskeys?
One could easily think that a single barrel should be superior to a blend of many barrels in terms of taste.
But that's not always the case: not all barrels develop equally well during the years of maturation in the warehouse.
The master distillers and his team identify the barrels containing the best whiskeys and mark them as candidates for single cask whiskey for later bottling.
The preogative is that the distillery also offers this type of whiskey - because the single casks carry with them the aura of a whiskey for connoisseurs.
It is a rather small niche and not all distilleries want to be protagonists.
Because connoisseurs love single cask whiskeys
Un single malt it can be compared to an orchestra in which many instruments and voices perform a work together.
If you choose only one musician from this orchestra and let him perform alone, in our comparison, you are choosing a single barrel whiskey.
Now it is entirely up to this selected soloist to bewitch us with his art: we cannot hear a violin or saxophone in an orchestra more precisely than we can listen to it in a solo.
The connoisseurs of whiskey they have often tasted a series of original distillery bottlings in the form of single malt.
Single barrels open up a great field with thousands of additional variations, all of which more or less follow the style of the distillery, but can also lead the pecker on exciting side paths.
