Monkey Shoulder Blended Malt Scotch Whisky

Monkey Shoulder is a mix of three different Single Malts – Glenfiddich, Balvenie and Kininvie – and is great with mixers or just on its own. Smooth, sweet and very easy to drink. Super smooth, with zesty Orange meets mellow vanilla, honey and spiced oak; On the palate, it offers mellow vanilla with spicy hints. Monkey Shoulder is born of one of the oldest whisky making Scottish families in the world, William Grant & Sons. Still family owned today, William Grant & Sons has been distilling the finest Scotch whiskies since 1887. Early in the 2000’s the team at William Grants recognised an opportunity to bring the world of Scotch to a much bigger audience through championing cocktails and mixed drinks as a new way to enjoy Scotch. With this brief in mind, an epic blend of Scotch malt whiskies were chosen to create the perfect whisky for mixing and as you will see from our bottle the blend that was chosen was called batch 27. At the time the idea of blending only malt whiskies was a novel one because blends usually included some grain whisky. But our perfect blend didn’t and so we ended up creating a new category of Scotch ‘a blend of malts’ that no one else had ever released before. ‘Batch 27’ didn’t have the snappiest ring to it and instead we named our whisky Monkey Shoulder in tribute to our whisky heritage and in 2003 we set out to give the whisky world a good old fashioned shake up. The rest, as they say, is history! Okay, so where did ‘Monkey Shoulder’ come from? Well, in the traditional malt whisky making process, malted barley is turned by hand by malt men using large heavy malt shovels. Years ago, some malt men would develop a strain injury which had a tendency to cause their arm to hang down a bit like a monkey’s, so they nicknamed it ‘monkey shoulder’. Thankfully, the condition no longer exists but we’re still proud to honour our whisky heritage.