"Easily the Greatest Scotch Deal K&L has Offered in its 40 Year History"

After 18 years of buying spirits for K&L, this special parcel may be my crowning achievement. Just a few years ago, it would have been almost unimaginable that we could gain access to stocks of this quality at such low prices. Of course, we’ve bottled similar whiskies before—years back we secured a 1991 version from Hunter Laing, and only last year we offered a Faultline barrel from 1998 that sold out almost immediately. Now we bring you another “Single Vintage Blended Malt,” a full decade older than that barrel, offered at exactly the same price.

It is an absolute coup and, if I’m honest, may get me into a little trouble—but that has never stopped me before. My style has always been to ask forgiveness rather than permission. The true challenge with stocks like this is deciding how to label them. We cannot, under any circumstances, place the distillery name on the bottle, even though it is beyond doubt where the whisky comes from. The once-accepted trade name “Burnside” belongs to our dear friends at Cadenhead, and out of respect (and good sense, given their famously litigious nature) we would never infringe on it. So the question became: what do we call this whisky?

Our friends at Duncan Taylor once sold us a wonderful barrel for our Faultline label that they dubbed “The Huntley,” after their hometown. That option was off the table for us. After some consideration, we settled on a playful nod to our friends in Campbeltown: “The Sideburns.” We are not the first to use the name, but ours is plural—because who on earth needs just one sideburn?

Needless to say, this is one of the most outrageous deals I’ve ever had the honor of brokering for our shop. It represents the pinnacle of my ongoing effort to push back against one of the most damaging trends in our industry: the erosion of value for the end consumer. If you destroy the primary market for great whisky by pushing prices beyond reason, you eventually destroy the market itself. Too many producers have forgotten the first rule of selling anything: give customers what they want at a price they can afford. Start with the customer’s experience and build the system backward from there, rather than forcing corporate projections and marketing jargon down their throats.

And what do customers want? Great old malt whisky. But in today’s marketplace, finding a bottle over 25 years old that delivers real value in the glass is nearly impossible. Yes, brands can create other kinds of value—through lifestyle, image, luxury packaging, or grand storytelling—but if the true measure is taste (and for me it always is), you would struggle to find another whisky that offers what this one does at anywhere near this price.

This parcel is, without exaggeration, one of the finest opportunities ever presented to lovers of Scotch worldwide. I hope this is only the beginning. If we can continue to secure parcels like this through new channels, perhaps we can begin to chip away at the barriers keeping customers from enjoying extraordinary old whisky rather than simply admiring it on a shelf. For now, I am confident in saying this is easily the greatest Scotch deal K&L has offered in its 40-plus year history.

-David Othenin-Girard, K&L Spirits Buyer