Old Malt Cask Highland Park 17 Year (700 ml)

When Stewart Laing separated Hunter Laing & Co. from the Douglas Laing family assets in 2013, he carried with him the Old Malt Cask range — a series built since 1998 on a single, contrarian principle: standardise at 50% ABV rather than raw cask strength, while refusing chill-filtration and caramel colouring entirely. That deliberate middle ground is what separates OMC from peers like Cadenhead's or Signatory, who default to full cask strength.

Highland Park sits on Orkney's wind-scoured Holm Road, its spirit shaped by the island's maritime air, heather-rich peat, and the cold northern latitude that slows maturation and concentrates complexity over time. Seventeen years in a single cask — cask type, distillation year, and cask number printed on the label — means every molecule of flavour traces back to one vessel, one fill, one unrepeatable interaction between Orcadian spirit and wood.

Hunter Laing's monthly tasting panel selects each cask individually; no blending across casks occurs, and no secondary finishing is applied as a house rule for the OMC range. What reaches the glass is the source distillery's character filtered only through time and oak, then bottled at a strength calibrated for intensity without brutality. Once this cask is exhausted, the expression ceases to exist — the cask number on the label is the true identifier, not the distillery name alone.