When Scotch whisky met Scotch bonnets

Whisky is all about liquid history, but sometimes it takes quite a bit of digging to find out the backstory of what ends up in a Society bottling. It’s usually easy enough to discover a date of distillation and an age statement – so if a whisky was distilled on April 26, 1995, and bottled before April this year, that makes it 27 years old.

But what happened – when – and why – to remove the possibility of allowing us to put a label on the bottle describing it as whisky?

Later this month, you’ll be able to experience the Society’s Scotch bonnet chilli-infused spirit drink, 27 years in the making. But it isn’t whisky – we’ve given it a label with the intriguing title of Exp.01, and in this issue of Unfiltered you can find out everything you need to know about the drink’s origins, its connections with the world’s only ‘Thrill Engineer’, and how to enjoy it in a variety of ways.

For me, it has been a journey deep into the Society’s past, under previous owners and management who showed the same maverick spirit that drives what we’re proud to say is still the heart of everything we do forty years on. The story stretches from Leith to Louisiana and back, and finally to a bonkers cask slumbering in the Society’s warehouse until we finally decided to unleash it to our ever-adventurous members.

Try and get hold of your own bottle of Exp.01, give it a taste, mix up a fiery highball, dash it in a Bloody Mary or follow one of chef James Freeman’s recipe suggestions. As the label says, we did it for the thrill of it.

Cheers!