There are moments in whisky that stay with you, and filling a barrel of new make spirit at Benromach before watching it being loaded into a dunnage warehouse is one of them. The Benromach Champions programme has been one of the most captivating experiences of my whisky journey, and with the second release now bottled and in hand, I want to share what makes this particular cask so special and why the programme itself deserves your attention.
Let me set the scene. Myself, Jeff Whisky, and Terri Lam were sat in a tasting room with Lizzie, one of the head tasters at Gordon & Macphail, surrounded by cameras and lights. We nosed and tasted our way through a bourbon barrel, a sherry cask, and finally this: a 14-year-old, fully matured in virgin Polish oak. It was pretty tense, I won’t lie.
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Terri and I were dead set on the virgin oak almost immediately. Jeff gravitated towards the sherry barrel, and it was excellent quality. But my feeling was that another sherry cask, however good, is just another sherry cask. You want to stand out. You want to be different. And when this virgin oak expression entered the conversation, it simply sang. Not just as a single malt Scotch, but in a way that would resonate with bourbon fans and rye lovers alike.
The whisky itself is unpeated, bottled at 57.7% ABV with natural colour and no chill filtration, yielding just 285 bottles at £85 each.
On the nose, it delivers a wealth of toffee, blossom honey, apple, coconut, and pineapple, with a subtle sawdust quality that hints at the virgin oak’s influence. It smells more like a stunning first-fill bourbon cask than what you might expect from virgin oak maturation.
The palate, though, is where it becomes a bit of a banger. It pushes in with ferocious oak energy, fizzy and spicy, before twirling into custard, dark chocolate, mint, and toffee popcorn.
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The finish clings to every part of your tongue, revealing tangerine, peach, and something reminiscent of those peach ring chewy sweets. With water, it shifts to caramelised white chocolate, tart green apple, and poached pear, with a beautiful savoury barley note underneath.
I’m not scoring either Champions release, partly because of the obvious bias of having my face on the bottle, and partly because the first release is already sold out. But the bigger message here goes beyond what is in the glass.
Benromach operates almost entirely by hand, with just one piece of automated equipment in the filling room. Watching the warehouse team build a new rack and load barrels using the clock face method opened my eyes to how dunnage warehouses truly work.
Meeting the distillery team, the warehouse folk, the brand managers, and even a stranger’s father in a local bar who turned out to be a former Macallan man from the 1960s, reminded me that whisky is fundamentally a communal thing. It is for everyone, and everyone should feel welcome.
If Benromach opens the Champions programme again, I would urge you to apply regardless of your experience level. Whether you are new to whisky or have been exploring it for years, this is an experience that will reshape how you think about distilling, maturation, and the people behind every bottle. Have you ever visited a distillery that completely changed your perspective on whisky?
To see me wax lyrical about the amazing Benromach Champions experience, and see me tasting the whisky, check out my YouTube video.
