Whisky Fun Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Until Now

Are you a Whisky Lover? Are you passionate about it? Probably, yes, but not enough to know some of these amazing facts on Whisky.

Here are a few fun facts about your favorite brand of alcohol that you probably didn’t know:

Single Malts

The three oldest single malts currently sold are Glenturret, Oban and Glenlivet

The five most popular single malts globally are Glenfiddich, The Glenlivet, Glenmorangie Original, Aberlour and Laphroaig with Glenfiddich is the world’s best-selling single malt.

With each bottle of Laphroaig that you buy, you are entitled to a lifetime lease of one square foot of the distillery’s land, along with a personalized certificate of ownership.

Glenmorangie distillery

The Glenmorangie distillery is one of the smallest, in the Highlands and employs just sixteen craftsmen, called ‘The Sixteen Men of Tain’.

Glenmorangie is the best-selling single malt in Scotland.

Scotch Whiskies

Did you know that the most expensive country to buy Scotch whisky, ironically, is the UK, where it is made?

The world’s fastest-growing Scotch today is Black Dog, with India being its major contributor to its sales.

In the UK, the five most popular blended Scotch whiskies are The Famous Grouse, William Grant’s, Bell’s, Teacher’s and J&B Rare.

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In Scotland, The Famous Grouse is the best-selling whisky.

Johnnie Walker

Johnnie Walker Red Label is the world’s best-selling Scotch.

An interesting fact, though, is that Johnnie Walker does not feature in the list of best-selling blends in its own home country, the UK.

Other Facts

The oldest distillery in Scotland is Glenturret (1775), followed by Bowmore (1779)

Bruichladdich’s The Octomore is the most heavily peated whisky in the world (167ppm)

Cadenhead’s Whisky Shop on Canongate has a unique selling point: customers can have a bottle poured straight from a cask and labeled with their name. When sealed it has a label with the ‘born on a date’, as whisky stops ageing as soon as it leaves the wooden barrel, so each bottle is a unique blend.

Edradour is the smallest distillery in Scotland. The entire operation is run by just three people

A closed bottle of Scotch can be kept for 100 years and still be good to drink. After opening, a bottle of Scotch whisky will remain good for five years.

The Australian Wine Research Institute has introduced a measure called a standard drink. In Australia, a standard drink contains 10 g (12.67 ml) of alcohol, the amount that an average adult male can metabolize in one hour.

Although their proof differs, standard drinks of beer, wine and spirits contain the same amount of alcohol – 0.6 ounces each. They’re all the same to a breath analyzer.

18,000 litres of Scotch whisky worth over USD 800,000 were accidentally flushed down the drain at Chivas Brothers’ Dumbarton bottling plant in 2013.

Experts advise you to drink single malt with just a dash of water. The water supposedly ‘releases the serpent’ from the whisky

If there is a serpent, there is also an angel. As it ages, 2-2.5 % of the whisky maturing in a barrel is lost to evaporation every year. Distillers refer to this as the ‘angel’s share’.

There is also a devil. The whisky absorbed by the wood of barrel during maturation is known as the ‘devil’s cut’

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