Sell Your Cask of Bunnahabhain Whisky
What is my cask of Bunnahabhain worth?
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The History of the Bunnahabhain Distillery
The north eastern coastline of Islay is the location of the substantial Victorian Bunnahabhain distillery. This isolated spot was selected by William Robertson in 1881 to be the ideal site for his island distillery vision. He did not just build a distillery, he also constructed houses, roads and even a pier to allow barley and casks to arrive and whisky to be exported. The total cost of around £2.6 million in modern money. In 1887, the Bunnahabhain distillery merged with Glenrothes and the Highland Distillers (which are now known as Edrington) were formed.
Although the other distillers on Islay produced single malts as well as whiskies for blending, the Bunnahabhain distillery focused on blends. It had a key role to play in three R&B well known blends – Black Bottle, Cutty Sark and Famous Grouse.
During the 1960s, there was a huge surge of demand for Scotch whisky, and this saw the distillery’s stills doubling in number in 1963. However, the good fortune of the distillery would not last and in 1982 it was mothballed like so many others on the island. While this period of mothballing lasted for just 2 years, its production levels remained low for a long time.
By the late 1980s, the distillery was ready to finally produce a single with the somewhat appropriate tag line “the unpronounceable malt”, however most of its production was still being used in blends. In 2003, even though the whisky market had seen an upturn, Edrington still sold the distillery to Burn Stewart. However, the company which owned Burn Stewart, CL Financial, went into liquidation in 2009 and its receivers sold Burn Stewart on to Distill, its South African distributor. Since that time, levels of production have hugely increased, especially in Taiwan and Africa.
Bunnahabhain’s whisky has a milder flavour than that of other Islay whiskies due to the fact that the water used in its production rises through the limestone before being transported by pipe directly to the distillery, preventing it from picking up peat on the way. Its most common bottlings are 25, 18 and 12 years old, with the 12-year-old being the favourite of many of the locals.
