The Basque Moonshiners X M&H Distillery

Welcome to ‘Behind the bottle’, where we take a deep dive behind the scenes look at M&H’s drams. This week we’ll be uncorking a special blended malt born out of a particularly unusual yet interesting pairing from way up in the Basque Country!

Bikkun is Basque for ‘done together’, a description of camaraderie and cooperation that we’re honoured to bear in our dealings with our new friends. This does however beg the obvious question to many of you: what on earth is ‘Basque’?!?!

The Basques are the indigenous population of the eponymously named Basque Country, a gorgeously hilly region that straddles the French-Spanish border on the Atlantic coast. The Basques are an ancient and unique people, whose language and culture is starkly different from their Spanish and French neighbours. They are a people well known for their good food, fiercely independent attitude, and hopefully soon for their incredible whisky!

Like us, the Basque Moonshiners make single malt in a place typically devoid of the craft. When they reached out to us, noting that they were huge fans of ours and wanted to make a vatted malt together, our team boarded the next flight to Spain and spent an unforgettable weekend drowning in rioja, tapas, and Basque whisky.

We found them to be a deeply passionate team not unlike our own, and eagerly worked on this whisky to increase awareness of other brave and interesting new world distilleries. ‘Bikkun’ is a fitting word in this case as we mixed and matched our whiskies together to create a celebration of frontier distilleries. 

The final question is of course regarding the casks. What did we blend and how?  We are a Jim Swan associated distillery focused on hot climate maturation, so of course we offered our iconic STR casks to the mix.  These were vatted with their highland matured ex-Oloroso casks, because what’s better than sherry casks used to mature whisky IN SPAIN? It’s poetry. We bottled this cooperative experiment at 46%, light enough to capture the bright and lightly fruity notes but still able to capture the more robust choc-chip cookie notes that dance across the finish.

L’chaim and Salud!