What's New: The Glasgow 1770 2026 Trilogy and Why It Matters

Sebastian Rowe on The Glasgow Distillery's 2026 annual collection — a Bourbon Cask Matured, a Ruby Port Cask Finish now in its second year, and a brand-new Sherry Cask Matured made in collaboration with one of Spain's most respected sherry producers. None of it is on the SlowSip shelf yet. All of it is worth knowing about.

New Release Highlight is a new thing we're doing on the magazine — short, opinionated, and pegged to whatever has genuinely landed rather than to whatever the calendar says should be covered this month. Once a cycle, one release, one honest verdict. Starting with a distillery that most people outside serious whisky circles have never heard of, doing something more interesting than most of the famous ones currently are.

The Glasgow Distillery Company opened in 2015 in Hillington, on the edge of the city, and named its flagship single malt 1770 in tribute to Glasgow's first legal distillery — the long-defunct Dundashill, licensed that year. It is a Lowland whisky in the geographic sense and something closer to an urban craft distillery in temperament: small, independent, more interested in showing what different cask combinations can do to a single house spirit than in building a heritage story around tartan and heather. The 2026 annual collection, announced last month, is the clearest demonstration yet of that approach.

Glasgow 1770 Bourbon Cask Matured — Batch 2

The baseline expression, matured exclusively in first-fill ex-Bourbon barrels and blending equal parts unpeated and peated double-distilled spirit. According to the distillery this is the release built to show what the house style tastes like with the least cask interference — vanilla, floral honey, sweet smoke, citrus, shortbread, tropical fruit, and a long oak-spiced finish. It is the control sample in a trio that's really about demonstrating range, and it's the one to try first if you want to understand what the other two are working with.
Age: 8 Years Old ABV: 54% Outturn: 1,600 bottles RRP: £59

Glasgow 1770 Ruby Port Cask Finish — Batch 2

The most interesting story of the three, structurally. Batch 1 sold out in 2025 and has since become one of the more argued-about bottles in independent whisky circles — Dramface's reviewer described starting at 3 out of 10 and ending up considerably warmer to it after giving the bottle time to open up. Batch 2 has spent almost four years finishing in Ruby Port hogsheads after an initial near-four-year maturation in first-fill ex-Bourbon barrels — a genuinely long secondary maturation for a cask finish, which is presumably why the fruit character is so pronounced: summer berries, dark cherry, almond, a light pink peppercorn spice. This is a whisky that rewards or punishes depending on your tolerance for grape influence on whisky. I'd rather that than something inoffensive.
Age: 7 Years Old ABV: 54% Outturn: 1,200 bottles RRP: £59

Glasgow 1770 Sherry Cask Matured — Batch 1

The headline release, and the one that makes this trilogy worth an editorial rather than a passing mention. Created in collaboration with Ximénez-Spínola — a Spanish sherry house with a genuine reputation, not a marketing partnership dressed up as one — this expression combines unpeated single malt finished in Pedro Ximénez sherry casks with peated single malt matured in Medium Sherry casks, also from Ximénez-Spínola. The distillery's own notes promise cedarwood, orange peel, dark fruits, toffee apple, ground coffee, and a lingering sweet smoke. What's notable is the structural idea: two different whisky styles (peated and unpeated) meeting two different sherry cask types from the same specialist producer, rather than the more common approach of finishing one spirit in one cask type and calling it a day. It is the most ambitious thing Glasgow 1770 has released, and — going on the tasting notes alone, since it isn't on the SlowSip shelf to try — it sounds like the ambition has paid off.
Age: 6 Years Old ABV: 55% Outturn: 1,600 bottles RRP: £59

Why It Matters

All three releases share the same production standard: age-stated, bottled at batch strength rather than diluted down to a round number, natural colour, non-chill filtered. None of that is unusual on its own — most independent bottlers and a growing number of distilleries do the same. What is unusual is a distillery doing it consistently across an entire annual collection rather than reserving it for a single prestige release, and doing so at £59 a bottle rather than the £90–£150 territory that comparable small-batch releases from more established names tend to command.

Glasgow 1770 is not, at time of writing, available through SlowSip. That may change, and if it does this piece will be updated accordingly. In the meantime, the distillery sells directly, and the Sherry Cask Matured in particular is the kind of release worth tracking down before the 1,600-bottle outturn is gone — which, on the evidence of how quickly Batch 1 of the Ruby Port sold out last year, may not take long.

Independent Lowland distillery, Hillington, Glasgow. Founded 2015. All three 2026 releases — Bourbon Cask Matured Batch 2, Ruby Port Cask Finish Batch 2, Sherry Cask Matured Batch 1 — are available directly from the distillery while stocks last @glasgowdistillery.com