Daftmill 2009 Summer Release (46% - 70cl)

To tell the story of Daftmill means going back in time, not so much for the construction of the distillery itself, which took place in 2005, but for how the distillery works and is conceived. This means taking a leap back in time of at least... two hundred years!

Daftmill actually started in 1987, when the Cuthbert family purchased the Pitlair Estate (which also includes the Daftmill area) from Sir William Walker. The initial idea, and the current one, is the cultivation of the fields and the activities of a real farm. The farm produces excellent barley, almost all of which is sold to other distilleries. So why did we mention going back two hundred years? Because Daftmill operates exactly as distilleries did back in those times—whisky was not the primary source of income, but rather agriculture. For short periods during the year, with surplus barley, distilleries would produce spirits for themselves, and in some cases, they would sell them locally. This is exactly what this small distillery does today.

The distillery, in fact, operates only 2 to 3 months per year, during the off-season when the fields are not being worked: from late spring to the beginning of barley harvest and in winter, between November and February. During these two periods, a small amount of barley (about 100 tons) is malted and distilled on-site. The production is very low, around 20,000 liters of alcohol, and the few hundred casks are stored in small warehouses within the farm.

The Daftmill 2009 Summer Release is a single malt Scotch whisky distilled in the summer of 2009, using Optic barley, and aged for 11 years in a mix of three ex-bourbon casks and one first-fill ex-sherry Oloroso cask. It was bottled in 2020 at the classic 46% ABV, without the addition of colorants and without being chill-filtered, with a total of 1,875 bottles.