Sheep Dip takes its name from a piece of Highland farming slang. In the days when whisky was routinely made and stored at farms, casks marked 'sheep dip' on the invoice were unlikely to attract the exciseman's scrutiny. The brand, launched in 1974 by M.J. Dowdeswell at the Old Mill Inn in Gloucestershire, borrowed the gag and turned it into a label.
It is a blended malt — a marriage of single malts with no grain whisky. After a period of ownership by Whyte & Mackay and then Spencerfield Spirit, it passed to Ian Macleod Distillers in 2016, alongside its sibling Pig's Nose. The current expression remains an unpretentious, approachable dram pitched at drinkers who want malt character without the ceremony of a single malt.
On the nose it is gentle: honey, vanilla, a little orchard fruit. The palate follows the same easy logic — malt, toffee, apple — and the finish is short enough to invite another sip. There is nothing startling here, and that is rather the point. Sheep Dip is a session malt, the sort of bottle you keep for a working man's dram at the end of the day.
At around £32 it sits well below most single malts of comparable quality, which makes it an honest purchase. The name still raises a smile; the liquid delivers rather more than the joke suggests.
