Throughout 2024, The Macallan has been celebrating its 200th anniversary – a time to honour the distillery’s history and the figures who have shaped its progress to becoming arguably the world’s most revered single malt. The festivities have not only commemorated all that has come before – they’ve also looked to what’s ahead. In that spirit, its most significant and aspirational release of this landmark year has been announced and the big surprise is that it not only contains the longest aged whisky The Macallan has ever released but also the youngest.

In 1824, The Macallan began life on the same Speyside estate where it still resides, albeit its home now is a celebration of the future as much as it is the past. In 2018, The Macallan launched itself into a new age with its Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners-designed distillery – a stunning departure from the norm. From the outside, the building is a series of low-impact grassy mounds that meld into the landscape. Inside is a luxurious visitors’ centre and a still room that looks like a spaceship, where The Macallan’s signature curiously small stills, much like the ones favoured by Alexander Reid back in 1824, live.

It is this duality – the celebration of past and future – that has shaped the extremely limited creation, TIME:SPACE (appropriately, only 200 are available, price on application). It houses two whiskies – neither of them in anything so mundane as a bottle. In one chamber is some of the first liquid to run off the stills of the new distillery in 2018. In the other is the longest-aged Macallan ever – at 84 years old, it is three years older than the previous oldest release, The Reach.

As master whisky maker, Kirsteen Campbell says of her work and that of her team, ‘We get to time travel – selecting whisky from the past crafted by our predecessors, while simultaneously laying down casks for future generations of whisky makers and consumers.’

There is a further release – TIME:SPACE Mastery (£1,100, available to purchase from selected retailers) –which has been assembled by lead whisky maker Euan Kennedy from 14 different cask types, layering complexity upon complexity. These innovative releases are an indication that The Macallan is not 200 years old but, as it claims, ‘200 years young’.

themacallan.com