The Cask That Waited for My Birthday – and Now Takes Three New Directions
Some bottles you buy, some are given to you – this one waited fourteen years for me.
When I celebrated my 40th birthday in 2012, a distillation run was taking place at Linkwood Distillery – a refill bourbon hogshead, one of thousands in Speyside. What sets this particular cask apart from all the others? The fact that Nils Hermann and Florian Scherzer of Arcanum Spirits knew what it would one day mean to me.
Fourteen years later, I was standing in the Dandaleith Craft Bottling Hall in Speyside.
Holding the bottle I was about to fill myself – that is a moment that doesn’t translate fully into words. Not because it is too large, but because it suddenly compresses so many years: work, journeys, conversations, tastings, the ordinary rhythm of daily life – and there in the middle of it all, quietly sleeping in the wood, this Linkwood. We designed the label ourselves. We filled the distillate by hand.
40 + 14
A piece of a lifetime, preserved in a cask. Bottled on my birthday, by my own hands.
You can’t buy that, and you can’t really plan it either., – you just have to live it.
But the story doesn’t end there. It takes another step.
What remained in the original cask after the bottling was still waiting. Nils and I didn’t simply leave the remainder to stand – we transferred it. Split into three vessels of 43 to 44 litres each, all 1st fill:
→ Palo Cortado
→ Oloroso
→ Scotch Ale
The same Linkwood 2012 that began its life as a refill bourbon hogshead is now heading in three different directions simultaneously.
What emerges is impossible to say today – and that is precisely the appeal. Three different wood influences, three different characters developing over the years ahead. The same distillate, three new chapters.
Some whiskies are bottlings. This one is a story. And it isn’t over yet.
