Adventures off the beaten track
Ready to embrace your taste for adventure? That’s what The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is all about – and now our Whisky Team has created a series of Two to One ultra small-batch bottlings to take you on a flavour journey you won’t find anywhere else, as Richard Goslan explains
Yin and yang. Light and dark. A jigsaw puzzle that comes together to create something more than the sum of its parts. Those are some of the examples that the SMWS’s ever-curious head of whisky creation Euan Campbell uses to illustrate the thinking behind the Two to One series.
The concept is straightforward: Two to One means taking two casks of single malt from the same distillery and seeing how they can fit together to create an ultra small-batch bottling. The whiskies could have different ages and have undergone maturation in different wood types before being married and bottled at natural cask strength.
Each one of the Two to One bottlings demonstrates the Whisky Team’s skills in experimentation, flavour creation and innovation, with the whisky in each bottle coming from a different journey through a range of cask types to create something unique and delicious.
The actual concept isn’t entirely new – the Society has been marrying single casks as far back as 1991, when Cask No. 63.3 was created by marrying fino sherry casks. More recently, 2023’s Cask No. 6.72: Fruitful mellifluosity started life as two bourbon hogsheads before the Whisky Team transferred them separately to a first fill Spanish oak oloroso hogshead and a first fill American oak Pedro Ximenez hogshead. Then after a couple of years in those casks, they were married prior to bottling at cask strength. But now the Two to One programme is ramping up both in scale and in variety.
“We have two routes that we take with our Two to One bottlings,” says Euan. “Either we will select casks at the peak of their maturation, and marry them together just prior to bottling. Or we can put two casks into one larger cask – for example two bourbon hogsheads or barrels into a larger sherry butt where that then undergoes a period of additional maturation. That would be for a minimum of two years, as is our normal policy. At the end of that period we’ll sample the whisky and if the Tasting Panel approves it then that’s what gets bottled.
PICTURED: SMWS head of whisky creation Euan Campbell is taking different routes with the Society’s Two to One range of ultra small-batch bottlings
“The range is about taking complementary flavours that fit together to explore them and present them to our members in a different way,” he says. “We love a single cask expression, and the journeys that it can take you on. But this is a different kind of adventure for the Whisky Team to go on, to see how two casks can come together and how that combination can create layers of flavour.”
On average there will be around 500 bottles of each Two to One release available, basically the contents of two hogsheads or barrels. Each bottling will be in the Society’s usual green glass with a regular bottling code, but look out for a Two to One stamp on the label. There will also be information about its history and the journey that the whisky has undertaken in its Tasting Notes, as well as detailed infographics to clearly outline that journey.
“Two to One is like stepping up one level from our single casks but on a much smaller scale than something like our ‘Heresy’ small-batch range, where we work with multiple casks to create up to around 2,000 bottles per batch,” says Euan. “So this is a new adventure for us. We love the end result and we hope everyone else does as well.”
The first batch of Two to One releases are coming out in April in the UK and EU – look out for:
Cask No. 95.109: I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts
Cask No. 70.63: Interdimensional pâtisserie
Cask No. 10.284: Ginger rollmop sushi phantasmagoria
Cask No. 80.62: Strawberry sumac scones
Cask No. 46.152: The fruit merchant
Cask No. 18.76: Moroccan pastillia anyone?
