Shetland Reel Single Malt Is From Way, Way, Way Up North

The Shetland Islands, by all accounts, are pretty remote, even by Scotland’s standards. The main port, Lerwick, for example, is more than 100 miles off the north Scottish coast. It seems like a very out of the way place for a Scotch distillery but, in keeping with the theme of late of opening a whisky making operation on every small Scottish strip of land surrounded by water, the first bottlings of a Shetland single malt have just been unveiled.

Now, to be clear, this whisky has only been bottled in Shetland by the Shetland Distillery,  an outfit more known for its gin. The four different cask strength whiskies, according to the distillery, were distilled and matured in Portsoy, a village in Aberdeenshire, before being bottled in Unst, a Shetland island with just 600 brave souls calling it home. This location is also where the distillery happens to be located.

To get this whisky from point A to point B, quite a journey apparently had to occur. The casks were first shipped from the Scottish mainland to Lerwick on an overnight ferry. They were then transported via another two ferries and across the island of Yell before reaching their final destination in the far north of Unst.

This now well traveled Scotch, after what was dubbed “a suitable period of resting,” were labeled as the first ever “Bottled in Shetland” single malts. What’s now called Shetland Reel Single Malt Scotch Whisky draws from two refill Scotch casks and two virgin German oak barrels.

21 bottles have been produced of a peated whisky from one of the German oak casks. This has a price of £130, or around $200 USD, per bottle. The remaining 151 bottles from the other three casks are on sale at £100 per bottle, or around $155 USD. The whiskies are non-chill filtered, bottled at cask strength and no coloring has been added.

Future plans, by the way, call for eventual production of “the first legal whisky from Shetland and the most northerly single malt Scotch whisky” once a whisky making operation is built on Unst.