One of the missions of our KOTQ website is to not only facilitate knowledge about single malt scotch but to make it personal and facilitate decision making around single malt purchases for group or individual enjoyment. Availability may be the ultimate factor in whether or not most of us even have a dram of certain single malts. Therefore, I have found it important to be able to identify rarer single malts using our distillery filter so that, throughout our walks of life, we might better sieze opportunities to sample rare single malts; be it from a retail shelf or a fine restaurant’s spirits menu.

The flip side of the coin is true as well. Our distillery filter should also be able to highlight those distilleries which are active and commonly available vs. active and with a small capacity thereby making those bottlings potentially harder to come by. Rarity can also be a factor in whether or not you opportunisticly buy an independent bottling or patiently wait for the “official” distillery bottling to show up at your local Binny’s.

So, in order to best understand the data, I thought you would need to know what the industry definitions were for the operational statuses in our database. These operating statuses often correlate to rarity or at least would be a component in a distillery filter setting you specify in trying to understand if that bottle you saw/see at Binny’s is rare enough to invest in. These operational statuses are written in my words but follow closely the statuses used by the annual Malt Whisky Yearbook. There are essentially two categories of operations: “Active” and “Not Active”. I have provided three classes of status within each of these two categories:

  1. Active: fully operational distillery producing malt for its various bottling and blending purposes
  2. Building Stock: new distillery which has commenced a continuous production of spirit but is too new to have matured any whisky for active status
  3. Mothballed: temporary stoppage of production. Can recommence production quickly, if needed, to match demand. Relatively common practice in the industry, however, some mothballed distilleries never make it “off the mat” and do end up dismantled.
  1. Stills Removed: refers to sets of stills, that created their own brand of single malt, that existed entirely inside of another’s distillery. Distilleries with this status, despite having their own distillery brand name, never had their “own distillery” or distillery building
  2. Dismantled: distillation equipment removed, but the exterior building remains; somehow re-purposed. Although sometimes continuing to be used within the scope of the whisky industry (warehouse, maltings, visitor center, museum) usually it’s to be used outside the scope of the whisky industry entirely (condo, restaurant, studio, live music venue, etc.)
  3. Demolished: entire building, and all of its contents, are destroyed and are no more