I’m sure you’ll all remember the frankly fantastic couple of bottlings launched by the irrepressible duo from Caskstrength Neil and Joel in the past year or so?

First up was an Arran – a delight of a whisky with a frankly absurdly low outturn of only 92 bottles. This astonishing bottling rapidly sold out, and is now changing hands for hundreds of pounds on auction sites.

Second was an astonishing Benriach, matured for an impressive 16 years, and finished for 4 of those years in a Pedro Ximenez cask. This too, sold out in incredibly short order.

After ‘A’ for Arran, and ‘B’ for Benriach, must come ‘C’.

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It’s a scary place, the brain of Ben.

It consists mainly of Alan Partridge and Father Ted episodes, cocktail recipes, and rain-man-esque recall of horsepower and torque figures for most production cars. There’s also usually something in there about whisky.

What I can tell you about the brain of Ben though, is that these Boutique-y whiskies have recently been upgraded from ‘a bit of fun’, to ‘something with a lot of potential’.

Because of this, you’re going to see a pretty decent number of new releases from brand spanking new distilleries over the next few weeks / months, and if the results of some of the recent whisky auctions are anything to go by, I think we’ll see them selling out in pretty short order.

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Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Caskstrength.net’s first official whisky! Bottled to mark its 3rd Birthday, this is the first time any blog has released its own single malt, and we’re very proud to be the exclusive stockist!

Caskstrength.net was founded in 2008 by Neil and Joel, both formerly rival A&R men, working at Warner Bros and Island Records respectively. They formed the blog to share their love of whisky with friends and family, but since More...