By the time the 32 Year Old appeared, Brora's surviving stocks were being eked out year by year. The distillery had closed in 1983 and the casks laid down in the preceding decade — the heavily peated period demanded by the Johnnie Walker blenders during the Islay shortage — formed a finite and diminishing library.
This bottling, issued within Diageo's annual Special Releases, is bottled at natural strength from refill casks. The intention has always been to preserve the house character: the waxy, slightly coastal spirit that distinguished the old stillhouse from its larger Clynelish neighbour next door.
At thirty-two years the peat has receded almost to a memory, and what remains is the mineral, wax-polished core of the distillery — the element that made collectors patient in the first place, and that will not be replicated when the present stocks are gone.
