Glasgow 1770 Triple Distilled Tequila Cask Finish Cask# 18/981

Glasgow 1770 Triple Distilled Tequila Cask Finish Cask# 18/981

Note: This article was updated on the 9th December 2024 to take into account my now greater understanding of what a "Single Cask" Edition is.

	Data Sheet
Owner:	The Glasgow Distillery Company
Barcode:	None
Price:	Was £55 when bought in the UK in June 2024
Alcohol:	55.3% abv
Batch No.	01
Cask Types:	Ex-Bourbon Cask, then finished in a Tequila Cask
Single Cask No.	Tequila Cask #18/981
No. Of Bottles	272
Vintage Statement:	Distilled 03 Feb 2018, Bottled 27 Jun 2023
Approximate Age:	5 Years Old
Non-Chill-Filtered:	Yes
Natural Colour:	Yes
Kashrus Issues:	None
Kosher Certification:	None

Introduction to Glasgow 1770 Distillery

The Glasgow Distillery Co. was founded by the partnership of Liam Hughes & Ian McDougall and was established in 2012. The first spirit which would eventually turn into whisky, ran off the stills in February 2015. Based in the industrial estate of Hillington, City of Glasgow, this location makes it a Lowlands Region Whisky.

As you can see, it's not exactly one of the most Romantic spots for a Scottish distillery.

The distillery uses the traditional Lowlands (or Irish tradition) Triple distillation (rather than the usual Double Distillation practiced in Scotland), and utilises both peated and unpeated malted barley.

Triple distillation entails using three stills - A Wash Still, A Spirit still and a second spirit still. This means that the raw new-make-spirit will come out at a much higher strength. Whereas Double Distilled typically produces new-make at around 70% abv, Triple Distilled will be over 80% abv.

Distillery Water Source

Being in the centre of an industrial zone, I was wondering where the distillery gets their water source from. The marketing blurb claims that it’s Loch Katrine, but Loch Katrine is about 45 miles away. Perhaps saying that the "pure natural" water comes from a particular Loch sounds romantic, but my initial guess was that they are actually using filtered tap water and that the tap water originates from Loch Katrine. Sure enough, when I did a Google Search for Loch Katrine water supply, I found that there is an Aqueduct  that goes from Loch Katrine to Greater Glasgow, supplying the area with tap water.

https://www.scottishwater.co.uk/In-Your-Area/Investments-in-Your-Area/Loch-Katrine-Aqueduct#:~:text=The%20aqueduct%20supplies%20over%201.3,the%20central%20belt%20with%20water.

Cask Experimentation

The Glasgow Distillery Company is still very much in the experimental stage as regards casks. They are using primarily Ex-Bourbon barrels as a baseline to mature their whisky but then are experimenting with various types of cask-finishes which includes heavily charred Virgin Oak, Ex-Sherry casks, Ex-Wine, Ex-Calvados Brandy casks, and this one, an Ex-Tequila cask.

Strangely for a distillery in the heart of a major city, there is as yet no visitors’ centre, not even any option for private tours.

 

The New Trend in Exotic Cask Finishes

Calvados & Tequila

For decades, Scottish distilleries matured their whisky almost exclusively in either Emerican Ex-Bourbon or Spanish Ex-Sherry casks, with an occasional appearance of Portuguese Ex-Port casks and Caribbean Ex-Rum casks. Then, around 20 years ago, due to the development of STR cask treatment, we started seeing Ex-Wine cask matured whisky.

When I visited Scotland back in 2022, it seemed as if every Tom, Dick & Harry craft distillery now had a Single Cask edition matured in First-Fill Ex-Calvados Brandy casks. Calvados is an Apple (and or Pear) Fruit Brandy from Calvados in the Normandy region of France. When I checked with Rav Akiva Osher Padwa, the head of the Kosher Spirits department at the London Beth Din, he explained that according to his research, there did not seem to be any kashrus issues with Calvados, being that the alembic pot stills in the traditional Calvados distilleries are used exclusively to distil this non-grape based brandy.

This year (2024) when I visited Scotland, it seems that Calvados has been joined by the latest exotic cask type, that is Tequila! Now this seems to be the “ice-cream” flavour of the month as I noticed that almost every small craft distillery we visited now had a Tequila Cask Single Malt available as a special edition.

Having never experienced a whisky matured in a Tequila Cask before, I ended up buying two examples. The Deanston 15-Year-Old Tequila Cask Finish and this one, from the Glasgow distillery.

What is Tequila?

Tequila is a distilled beverage made from the blue agave plant.

The drink has been around for centuries, and its production process is still largely unchanged today. Tequila was first produced in the 16th century in the town of Tequila, which is located in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. The first tequila distillery was built by the Marquis of Altamira. The spirit has always been made with a type of agave known as Blue Weber Agave (agave azul).

https://breakthrubevca.com/new-gold-rush-cost-tequila-making-agave-rise/

Similar to Rum, there are two basic types of Tequila. The cheap spirit called “Tequila Blanco” or “White Tequila”, which basically means that it’s bottled as clear spirit without maturation in Oak casks. This is effectively an agave-plant based vodka. The most expensive Premium Tequilas are those matured in Oak casks.

Premium Aged Tequilas

What Does Tequila Taste Like?

Most people reading this will hopefully already know what Bourbon, Brandy, Red Wine and Fortified Wine like Port tastes like. Less however, would probably know what Calvados and Tequila taste like. I also have to admit to never having drunk Tequila before.

So, Googling “What does Aged Tequila taste like?” and analysing around ten results, I collected the most commonly mentioned  flavour notes and got the following results:

Green to Yellow Melon fruit. Toasted Bread and Buttery flavours. Mild Tobacco, leather, nutty notes like Pecans and Cashew. Fresh cut grassy flavours, black pepper.

So, it would be interesting to see if we can identify any of these flavours in our Single Malt.

 

The Inverurie whisky shop

The town of Inverurie in the Eastern Highlands (not to be confused with the more famous town of Inveraray on the West coast), lies just off of the A96 going from north to south, between Huntly and Aberdeen. There, in the heart of the town at No.1 Burnside, Burn Lane you’ll find one of the best specialist whisky shops in Scotland and well worth going out of your way to visit.

There in the shop, you'll hopefully be met by the proprietor and founder, Mike Stuart or/and by his loyal assistant, Cat Housley.

Opposite the road there is a pretty well stocked EWM (Edinburgh Woollen Mill) Clothes and Tourist items outlet, one of our favourite non-whisky related shops in Scotland, where your better half can spend some time whilst you are perusing the extensive whisky shelves.

There’s also a large Tesco store next door so you can park your car in the large car park and stock up on some kosher food items.

I originally contacted Mike as he seemed to be about the only shop in Scotland that had the Limited Edition Ardnamurchan AD / Rum Cask in stock, which had been recommended to me as the only current Ardnamurchan with no kashrus issues by the Cask manager at Ardnamurchan. So, after spending most of the day at Knockdhu distillery, I drove the 45 minutes to Inverurie to meet Mike.

There I spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting with Mike about all things whisky (and Kashrus), and eventually walked out with not only the Ardnamurchan AD / Rum Cask, but also a Lagg Kilmory Edition Bourbon Barrel (which incidentally is now available here in Israel) and of course this little beauty, the Glasgow 1770 Tequila Cask Finish.

 

Some Strange Oddities about the Glasgow Tequila cask Finish label

Where's the Barcode?

The most obvious thing I noticed straight away was that the bottle has no Barcode. I searched everywhere including on the base of the box. What’s more, when I searched online on Whiskybase.com, the barcode field on the page for this release was blank. That's really odd. I sent off an email to Mike and within 5 minutes he confirmed that yes, the bottle has no barcode and it had caused a real headache for his stock control system which uses the barcode as its primary index.

Both box and bottle, however, do have QR-Codes and appear visually to be different. However, when scanning them, they both take you to the same web page. So why the two different QR-Codes?

Is this a Single Cask or Small Batch Edition?

It is commonly understood that a “Small Batch” Edition refers to one made up of a small amount of casks which are married or “vatted” together and then bottled. Because all the casks contain whisky distilled at the same distillery, it’s known as a small batch of Single Malt Whisky.

The simplest understanding of what a “Single Cask” Edition is would be the following: The contents of each bottle comes exclusively from a single individual cask. For instance, a Standard American Barrel, after maturation and evaporation (the “Angel’s Share”) would typically give you around 270-290 bottles, whereas a larger 250 Litre Hogshead would produce around 340-360 bottles. Furthermore, for Single Cask Editions, it’s usual to state the actual Distillery Cask No. on the label as well.

So, what do we have here?

On the bottle neck and again at the top of the main label it declares itself to be part of a “Small Batch Series”. Further down, on the right-hand side of the label it tells us that the spirit was “Triple Distilled”.

Then, below that it gives an exact “Distilled” and “Bottled Date” making this (from my understanding), legally a “Vintage Statement Edition”, in this case, a 2018 Vintage Edition. (Doing a simple calculation, we now know that this whisky is approximately 5 Years Old). All good information.

Below the Vintage Statement, it tells us that this is “Batch No. 01”, but then tells us that this “batch” is only 272 bottles. Now, if you know anything about casks and the amount of bottles it’s typical to get from them, you’ll immediately see something doesn’t make sense here. That figure is far too low. It is in fact typical for the amount of bottles one would get from a single 200 Litre barrel, but certainly not a batch of casks.

Higher up on the label (the bit in yellow where it declares itself to be a “Tequila Cask Finish”, that it’s made from unpeated barley and that it’s Triple Distilled), things get weird as it tells us that the whisky was first matured in an Ex-Bourbon Cask and then finished in a single Tequila Cask for 2 years and six months (i.e. half of its total maturation time). It even states the actual cask Number of the Tequila Cask which it was finished in, that being Cask No. #18/981. This would surely make it a “Single Cask” Edition? Now that statement of 272 bottles makes more sense. So, why not call it as such?

So, what’s going on?

One way to understand this is that Glasgow Distillery managed to get hold of a small batch of Tequila casks. They have now released, what they term as “a small batch” of Single Tequila Cask Finished expressions. This is collaborated by the fact that I’ve seen another almost identical bottle for sale but which has Cask No. #18/992 on the label. This one is 295 bottles, so they have managed to get slightly more bottles out of that cask.

In other words, our bottle is the first in what I’d term a small series of Single Cask Editions and that instead of using the word “Series”, they have managed to confuse everyone by calling them “batches”.

However, there is another way to understand why Glasgow 1770 chose not to use the term "Single Cask". Although there have been plenty of examples in the past where a "Finished" Single Malt has been called a "Single Cask", it seems that the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) has now adopted a stricter definition of the term.

The Stricter Definition of the term "Single Cask"

It is unclear to me as of December 2024, whether this new stricter definition has entered UK Law yet but according at least to this article from the Edinburgh Whisky Academy, these are the current SWA guidelines:

"The term “single cask” should only be used when the contents of the bottle have spent the entire maturation period in a single cask. 

The term “single cask” should not be used where there has been a vatting of a number of casks, even if the vatted product has then been refilled into casks, for example for “finishing”. 

The Association believes it would be acceptable for a “single cask” whisky to have been re-racked into another similar cask in the event of, for example, the first cask leaking. However, it would be misleading to decant a cask of whisky into a different type of cask for finishing and then to describe the finished product as “single cask”."

 So, according to this, the following would not be acceptable:

Although initially saying that the whisky should have spent the entire maturation period in a single cask, the guidelines then seem to qualify the last statement by saying that this is when there has been a vatting of multiple casks which are then re-racked into a single cask and then bottled. Only then would it not be acceptable. (?)

But this does not seem to be the situation here. In this case, we have a single cask being re-racked into a single cask for finishing, with no vatting involved!:

However, the third clause then states that it would not be acceptable even when a single cask of whisky is decanted into a different type of cask for finishing. So, although in my humble opinion, the loshan of these new guidelines is very clumsily written, it would seem that even in this case, under the new guidelines it would not be acceptable to call this a "Single Cask" Edition.

The Packaging and Bottle

The bottle comes in a sturdy cardboard box with a very tasteful artwork design. I like the use of colours and lines on the box. I think it’s quite a stylish design. The bottle is reminiscent of Victorian era bottles you’d find in an Antiques shop, with typical vertical ridges going down the length of the bottle, making it easy to grip. I believe they call them “Poison bottles” which usually includes a Skull and Crossbones embossed on the front. I’m glad to say that this whisky bottle doesn’t include that. Another nice touch is that, like Poison bottles, it’s oval (and not round) in shape.

I really like the way that the colour of the release relates to the cask contents. For instance, this Tequila label is a bright yellow and the Ex-Sherry cask finishes are similarly related to the natural colour which the cask type imparted to the whisky.

Quality Control Failure : The Cork Stopper

The distillery obviously has some teething problems regarding quality control as, a few days after opening the bottle, I came to pour a dram and the head of the cork stopper came off in my hand!

The cork stopper came off

Let me give you some really good advice here. When a bottle is empty, don’t throw the cork stopper away but collect them all in a bag. Eventually you will build up a collection of cork stoppers of various sizes for just such an occurrence.

 

Glasgow 1770 Tequila Cask Finish Cask#18/981 - The Review

Appearance

The colour can best be described as a delightful light pineapple juice straw yellow. As stated on the label, it's 100% natural.

At 55.3% abv and non-chill filtered, you’d expect the liquid to be thick and oily, and this is exactly what you get. Rolling the whisky around in my Glencairn glass produces a lovely solid horizontal line which just sits there, sticking to the inside of the glass. What all this indicates is that all the whisky goodness has been successfully preserved inside the alcohol molecules and just needs a touch of water added to the glass in order to release these flavours.

On The Nose

Being 55.3% abv, I naturally added a few drops of water and kept adding until the nose prickle dissipated. I left the glass for a few minutes before assessing its contents.

Putting the glass to my nose elicited an immediate broad smile on my face.

Fresh and vivacious. An explosion of tropical fruit juice, particularly freshly squeezed pineapple Juice and lime citrus.

The feisty freshness of the spirit is probably due to the fact that this is triple distilled.

Fresh floral notes like a rose bush after a summer shower.

Some Lemon Grass.

Creamy white honey.

Vanilla, tropical fruits, lemon and lime flavour sorbet ice cream.

Sweet aromas of freshly toasted oak. Toasted bread with melted honey.

Crème Brulé, caramelised pecans. Stewed Cooking apples with brown sugar.

Mild spices in the background.

I found myself adding more and more water, drop by drop. The more water I added, the more those tropical fruits are magnified.

The Tequila cask they used was obviously highly active and full of flavour. I would have liked to have known which Tequila it was. This is one superb ultra-high-quality cask.

What an absolute delight it is to spend time nosing this whisky.

I could almost recommend you getting hold of a bottle of this Single Malt for the nosing experience alone.

 

Tasting

Immediately upon putting the liquid in your mouth, the Tequila Cask Finish will give you a wonderfully sweet and fruity full mouthfeel experience of Luscious tropical yellow fruits.

Pineapple juice is the most dominant flavour. For the first few minutes, I could think of almost nothing else. Leaving the glass for a few more minutes and eating something helped. When I returned to the whisky, I was able to detect other flavours notes.

Pineapple and citrus-y notes with creamy vanilla ice-cream, a touch of sweet nana (fresh mint), buttered toast, roasted caramelised pecans and wet Tropical Fruit Sponge Cake on the long finish.

This is an utterly delicious whisky. It’s fresh, refreshing, full-bodied and packed with flavour and texture. However the best indicator of a prize-winning Single Malt is if you have the urge to straight-away pour some more after the glass has drained. In other words, the “Moreish” scale is off the charts.

 

Conclusions

This Glasgow Tequila Cask Finish is superb. It is amongst my top three most enjoyable single malts of 2024, and believe me, I've had some really good single malts this year.

As I wrote earlier, I purchased two examples of a Tequila Cask finish. The first being the experimental Deanston 15-Year-Old Tequila Cask Finish and this one, the Glasgow 1770 Tequila Cask Finish. Both have similar Pineapple Juice and vanilla flavour profiles but the Deanston 15 proved to have a much dryer almost pucker-y finish like an unripe Sharon fruit, with dry caramel coated pecan nuts and a touch of black pepper, no doubt caused by its extra years in the cask. This Glasgow 1770 in contrast, is deliciously fruity and fresh sweet.

I think that as an experiment, the use of Tequila casks to mature Scotch Malt Whisky has been well and truly proved to be a success. Not only does it work but results can be superb. I’d like to see what happens when you try and mature new-make-spirit in a Tequila Cask full term instead of using the cask as a Finish. Perhaps we might see Full term Second-Fill Tequila Cask maturation soon? It certainly makes for a delightful change to the Ex-Bourbon Barrel flavour profile.

There are only 272 bottles of this "Single Cask" (which we are not allowed to call it officially it seems now), so if you see it (or any other Tequila Cask Finish in this "Small Batch" series), you should grab it without hesitation. As regards Glasgow distillery, I look forward to other releases suitable for the kosher consumer coming out of this exciting new distillery and hope, Be'ezrat Hashem, that they would consider opening a distillery visitors centre soon.