Edition No. 5, released in 2019, took the series in another unexpected direction: this time the collaboration was with the Pantone Color Institute, and the bottling was built around the idea of colour as a sensory language. The hue selected for the project — a rich purple — was presented as a visual counterpart to the whisky's flavour profile, and the packaging made much of the chromatic theme.
Beneath the conceptual framing, however, the liquid is what matters. Bottled at 48.5% without chill-filtration, Macallan Whisky Maker Sarah Burgess drew on a selection of sherry-seasoned European and American oak casks to assemble a whisky that leaned more toward the chocolatey and nutty end of the house spectrum.
The nose opens with crème brûlée, candied orange, cocoa dust, and vanilla pod, with a lick of oak spice behind. The palate follows faithfully: milk chocolate, dried orange peel, raisin, and roasted hazelnut, all lifted by a thread of soft cinnamon. It is a notably rounder, more confectionery-inflected Macallan than Edition No. 3, yet less densely sherried than No. 4.
The finish runs medium-long and smooth, with cocoa, toasted oak, and a final twist of citrus. Edition No. 5 was the last to be developed under Burgess's stewardship of the series before subsequent releases took it in new directions. Viewed across the run, it sits comfortably as one of the most approachable — a Macallan whose charms reveal themselves without demand, and whose colour, fittingly, lingers in the memory long after the glass is empty. The Pantone tie-in might have been dismissed as marketing window-dressing, but the liquid itself has the substance to back up the conceit, and remains one of the more drinkable chapters in the Edition story.
