Macduff distillery sits at the mouth of the River Deveron in Banff, on the Moray Firth coast of the eastern Highlands. Built in 1960, it is a relatively modern distillery by Scottish standards, and its whisky has been marketed under various names over the decades — Glen Deveron, Macduff, and now The Deveron. The confusion of identity has done the distillery no favours commercially, though its malt has long been valued by blenders, particularly for William Lawson's.
The 12 Year Old is a straightforward expression of the house style — light, malty, gently coastal. At 40%, it makes no concessions to the current fashion for higher bottling strengths, and the result is a whisky that drinks easily but without much conviction. The honey and biscuit sweetness that forms the core of the palate is pleasant enough, and a faint salinity adds a point of interest, but there is little here to linger over or return to.
The Deveron 12 occupies a difficult position in the market — too anonymous to attract the curious, too mild to excite the enthusiast, and priced in a bracket where competition from better-known and more characterful malts is fierce. It is a perfectly acceptable everyday dram, well-made within its modest ambitions. But Macduff is capable of more, as independent bottlings have demonstrated, and one cannot help feeling that a higher strength and less cautious cask selection would reveal a more interesting distillery than this bottling suggests.
