April 1, 2024

The Macallan Butt Heart, at the very heart of innovation

Whiskyfun exclusive

This isn't the first time mysterious butts of The Macallan bearing enigmatic circles painted on their heads with the inscription 'BH' have been spotted in Edrington's warehouses, without anyone ever providing a real explanation.

However, today, an email from the company accidentally sent by a marketing intern has just revealed to us that these are actually butts that are part of an innovative program called "Butt Heart". Unlike other casks, which are moved after maturation to the group's blending and bottling lines, which inevitably stirs up their contents, these butts are never moved or even opened after having joined their storage and maturation area in their warehouse. The whisky housed in these very special butts is thus never disturbed and, over the years, the very heart of the casks acquires an aromatic profile very different from that of the malt on the perimeter, or even in direct contact with the sherry-seasoned oak.

Closer to the original distillate, less marked by wood and wine, it seems that these "butt hearts" become much more complex and subtle over the years than the other parts of each cask. Subsequently, after estimating the stage of maturation using a computer program fed by artificial intelligence developed by the Computer Science Department of Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, the butt heart is extracted using a gentle suction pump inserted right into the heart of the cask through its bung hole. The operation takes several hours for each cask, and the very slight mixing with the rest of the butt that occurs during the operation is thus reduced to infinitesimal amounts, with the heart remaining almost pure according to The Macallan. The rest of the cask then joins the blending and bottling areas, as usual. It is estimated that the extraction of the butt hearts will have only an extremely limited impact on the quality of the usual releases of the 12 years, 15 years, 18 years or, of course, the NAS expressions. However, it is stipulated that the older expressions, like the 21 years or the 25 years, will never contain any butt from which the heart has been extracted in this way. The first release of the new The Macallan Butt Heart seems to be planned for the second half of 2024. It will display no age statement and will be bottled at 40% ABV, but the price already seems to be set at around £3,499 per bottle, due to the extreme quality of these butt hearts and the fact that only fifteen percent of the contents of each butt used during this extremely innovative process can be extracted.

As we go to press, no one at The Macallan was available to comment on this exclusive information, but we will keep you updated.

Check the index of all Macallan we've tasted so far