A Dallas Dhu 1921 – is it authentic?

A few days ago, I happened to see this bottling while searching the web for other things. It is from an auction back in 2022. It’s a 1921 Dallas Dhu, bottled in 1985. Here is the compulsory link to whiskybase.

This whisky made me…let’s use the word curious, shall we? The bottle has now led me all too deep into the rabbit hole of whisky geekdom. Now that I’m thoroughly lost in that hole, I thought it might amuse you to be let in on all the fun my brain has been having.

So, if the bottle is to be believed: someone laid down cask number 296 of Dallas Dhu new make spirit on the 16th of April in 1921. The cask then rested with the whisky maturing until July 1, 1985, when it was bottled, making it 64 years old.

There were 39 bids for the bottle, and it ended up being sold for £15,500. This very bottle, to be precise, so you don’t have to check it horisonally above:

the rather curious label

First things first. Let’s talk about the label. I mean, come on. On no planet was this label made in 1985. It screams of someone using those fonts on a stationary computer back in the 1990s.

Or, that’s what I first thought. Actually, at least the horrible font ITC Zapf Chancery Pro Italic which has been used for some but not all of the letters was marketed – but as it seems without the italics, which is used here – as early as 1979. And the font was included in Mac OS, which was released in ’84. So, if the italics version had been developed then? It’s not exactly that font, but very close. So, maybe, maybe…?

The modern phrasing ”single Highland malt Scotch whisky”, though, is at least slightly unlikely. Sure, ”single Highland malt” appeared on labels in the 80s, to be sure. However, you would more often find the word ”pure”, not ”single” on there, or a strange mixture of the two. But a label in 1985 written perfectly like the 2009 SWA Regulations were in full effect? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s absolutely within the realm of possibility.

that darned elusive region?

But wait, Highland? you might say. Isn’t Dallas Dhu in the Speyside region?

Well, it is now, and what little stock is still bottled these days certainly would label the whisky as a Speysider.

In the 80s, however, the Speyside region was not geographically well defined, and not many people would have thought of the distilleries around Forres, that far to the west, as being in Speyside. Back then, Dallas Dhu was quite firmly in the Highland region. (And yes I know Speyside is a part of the Highland region and that any Speyside distillery can call itself Highland if it so chooses, but this is another matter.) Over time, beginning in the 90s well before the Scotch whisky regulations of 2009 placed Dallas Dhu firmly in Speyside, Dallas Dhu has been slowly sneaking in from the west and becoming a Speyside whisky. But again, in the 1980s, Dallas Dhu was in the Highlands.

So, don’t worry about the word ”Highland”.

In fact, in stark constrast to what I first thought when I saw the label and my brain went THAT’S A ROARING FAKE HAHA WHAT DUMBASS WOULD EVER BUY THAT BOTTLE, let’s cut that label some slack. Given its look and feel, this is hardly an official bottling, nor is it an independent one. The label is clearly that of a private bottling or even just a cask sample. Such labels cannot be expected to follow official guidelines. Strange cask samples and more or less impossible casks, many of which were even bottled wholly without labels, are hardly unknown to the world of collectors.

According to received wisdom, the firm J. P. O’Brien & Co. Ltd did own Dallas Dhu early in 1921, before selling out to Benmore Distilleries Limited at some point in 1921. Even after quite a few hours on the British newspaper archive, I haven’t been able to find out just when the sale or transfer took place. I did chance upon that they actually bought the distillery in 1918, not 1919 as the literature states, but that’s another matter.

As we shall see, J. P. O’Brien is not on the 1985 documentation. How did the person making that label (in 1985…?) know that the spirit had been distilled under J. P. O’Brien? They would know if they saw the physical cask, which would have been stenciled. Unless we get a photo of that actual cask, whether this was filled by J. P. O’Brien or by Benmore Distilleries Limited which took over in 1921 is, again, moot.

The cask number

Let us keep approaching the bottling with an open but suspicious mind. Could Dallas Dhu have filled cask number 296 in April? Modern distilleries would have burned through that cask number long before April. However, that’s in the modern era of massive factories.

Dallas Dhu was, according to data in 1923 (this outstanding book), capable of producing about 60000 gallons per season. Let’s make the calculation low and assume ”season” meant the whole year, not either the summer or the winter, the very very old distilling seasons. Gallon probably meant proof gallon, as this was the industry standard unit: an Imperial gallon of spirit at 100° Proof.

If so, 60000 proof gallons would mean Dallas Dhu had a capacity to produce 155400 LPA (litres of pure alcohol) per season. (I’ll spare you how one computes from proof gallons to LPA.) Let us assume they filled their casks at the traditional 11° over proof or 63,5% ABV. That would mean 244734 litres of spirit at cask filling strength for 1921. (Or double that, if a season meant one of two seasons.)

Let’s say every single drop of Dallas Dhu was filled into hogsheads and that every single hogshead held precisely 250 litres. 244734/250 = say 979 hogsheads for a year. That would mean 18,8 hogsheads filled per week. By the end of the weekend during which they filled casks on April 16, 1921, a Saturday, the distillery would be at cask #282.

Hey, the numbers are working. There’s nothing strange about that cask number. There are other irregularities, but the cask number is not one of them. (”But what if season means a distilling season, and there are two of them in a given year, then the cask number is impossible!” No it isn’t. Double the capacity and say that Dallas Dhu was primarlily filled in butts and you end up with the same number.)

did such old whisky even exist back in the 80s?

Oh yes it did, although we would expect the stock to have been in Gordon & MacPhail’s warehouses, not in the form of some mysterious private cask owner. No worries there. Actually, we happen to know that such old stock existed at Dallas Dhu in the 80s, because of this photo taken there in 1987:

wouldn’t the colour be much darker after 64 years in wood?

Actually, not really, no. Having tasted whiskies from bygone eras of a similar age, even from sherry casks, the colour of this whisky does not worry me. If anything, if a faker had done this, the colour would in all probability have been much darker. Colour sells.

the certificate of age and the problem of proof

There is, however, one thing which bothers me about that homemade label. It states the alcohol content of the bottle as being 80.6° Proof. 80.6° Proof means 46,1% ABV.

Now, wait just a moment.

Why would anyone who bottled a whisky in 1985 give its alcohol content in the form of Imperial proof?

On January 1, 1980, Great Britain abandoned proof and joined the rest of us, we enlightened people who use things like metres, litres and ABV. Well, the UK and the U.S. aren’t all there yet and by the look of things, both are of late moving from rather than towards civilised behaviour. But I’m digressing. At least the UK switched to ABV. Again, this was when the clock ticked for the final time in 1979 and 1980 was born.

July 1985 is a good five years later, and  then some. If anybody would know that proof was no longer the measurement for alcohol, an exciseman would. Why on the soil of the UK (that’s me joking about the expression why on Earth) would anybody back in 1985 give an ABV in proof? Well, looking closer at that auction, because of this paper. A piece of paper which was included to prove the authenticity of the product:

The document might be a little blurry, but it’s fully readable. An ”Officer of Customs and Excise” named Ksomething P Bsomething, at Dallas Dhu Station, with an H. M. Customs & Excise stamp and dated July 1, 1985, insures that cask number 296 filled on April 16 1921 has been stored in wood until July 1, so 64 years, and that the ”Proof Quantity” as per the form is 80.6.

If I had this certificate of age and it said 80.6 on there, I would certainly put 80.6° Proof on my label.

But… I have two objections.

The first is more of a question. I am simply asking: what does ”Dallas Dhu Station” mean? Dallas Dhu is just outside of Forres. It’s a distillery and also a tiny hamlet. It’s hardly the place for Excise to set up a whole station, right? So in all likelihood, the Dallas Dhu station would have to mean the Dallas Dhu distillery.

Here’s the rub, though. Excisemen at distilleries were abandoned in mid-1982. The Statutory Instrument No. 611 of 1982, also known as the Spirits Regulations 1982, did away with those pesky excisemen who had had to be present at distilleries since the Excise Act of 1823. So why would Ksomething P Bsomething still be hanging around at Dallas Dhu distillery? Why was there an Excise officer there, at all?

I honestly don’t know if this objection is valid or not, but the question needs to be asked.

Let’s say non-working distilleries had to be kept under extra supervision because of some rule I don’t know of. Or even, let’s say excise officers were surely no longer living at distilleries but were called in when casks were emptied. That would be extra understandable at such a very special occasion, when the cask to be emptied contained 64 year old whisky. I don’t know if this was so, but it does seem reasonable, no? Or one could go with the hypothesis that even though excisemen were supposed to disappear quickly in 1982, it took a while for the industry to develop new habits.

But…even if an exciseman was hanging around three years after his kind was supposed to have left the distilleries  – why on Earth would he have measured the alcohol in the cask using proof?

You know how Treebeard gets upset that Saruman cut down the trees in Fangorn, saying ”A wizard should know better”? Well, that’s me and this poor exciseman in 1985. Hey! You there, exciseman! It’s 1985 and you are measuring the alcohol content of a cask. Stop using the proof scale, fool! ABV has been king for many years now!

I’m repeating myself. At this point, you are all just listening to my brain leakage. I’m sorry.

Anyway, let’s say that exciseman was really old school. Let’s say people were so used to measuring by proof, the final conversion to ABV was only done once whisky was bottled. The 1921 cask was there, an exciseman was there, he measured the proof instead of the ABV of the cask just because, you know, the form he had to fill out asked for proof, not ABV. (But why why why would it still ask for proof in 1985? Ok I’m going to have to let this go.)

So, we leave the peculiar eyebrow-raising strangeness of the Certificate of Age, and move on to…

The Whisky despatch advice

This document is the next piece of evidence from the auction, something called a Whisky despatch advice. Here goes:

I am honestly unsure about what a whisky despatch advice is, so I might be walking into all kinds of trouble here. I’m thinking it’s like the modern Delivery Order needed when a cask needs to be moved, or the contents of it need to be emptied? It certainly seems so.

The document is from Scottish Malt Distillers Limited, Dallas Dhu distillery, to Scottish Malt Distillers Limited, 1 Trinity Road, Elgin. Perfect: that’s where the SMD were situated at the time. Also, SMD owned Dallas Dhu, so no questions there.

Although…the license for the distillery was actually still put out to Benmore Distilleries Ltd, a subsidiary of DCL since they swallowed up the firm in January of 1929. Strange as it may seem, casks at Dallas Dhu were not stenciled Scottish Malt Distillers, but Benmore Distilleries Ltd (see also here).

However, two years after the distillery was closed, I am guessing the name of the licensee was a rather moot point. Let’s move on.

The piece of paper is dated June 24, 198[5, one would assume].

The duty has been paid, there is a warenhouse signature by E J MacKsomething?, to be collected at Dallas Dhu distillery.

I would have assumed someone else to sign a document about a cask in 1985 at Dallas Dhu. After the departure of the distillery manager F. Curr in March of 1983, there was either the managing director A. Gibson or possibly the warehouse foreman who would sign such an order. But his name, surely, was Willie Dawson? Or am I now going completely mental, being like two steps from citing QAnon or claiming things like the moon landing never happened? (If you are asking yourself how on Earth I know about F. Curr, A. Gibson, Willie Dawson and what they were doing, the answer is because of Phillip Morrice’s 1987 book, one of the best books on whisky ever written. Shoutout to Louis Reps for letting me lend it, it’s a treasure trove.)

Anyway…somewhere in the middle there, it just says HOME USE. I find that a little strange, especially given the amount of duty, potential bottles and just, well, weird.

We have a despatch number, an order number, a receipt warehouse co[something], a warehouse code, a location (Dallas Dhu).

The cask would appear to have been a hogshead, for H? B would be for butt, of course, but is O for Other? Please enlighten me.

Then we have the following columns:

B[or D?] W T IND Str. Content O.P. Ullage L. Alc. duty.

I’ll be honest, much of this is Greek to me. I’m guessing Str. is probably Strength? But 42.6, that would have been 74.5° Proof, not  80.6°?

Content, though, is easy: 73 and three quarter gallons or 324 litres. Those two number don’t add up 100% but it’s close enough. O.P., in my world, means over proof, but the whisky is no way near 1.004 over proof so that one I’ll have to let go; in this context, O.P. clearly means something other than over proof. Original proof? Unlikely, how would they know the cask filling strength and it wouldn’t have been as low as 1.004 over proof. OK, again, I’m letting this go.

Ullage, I do know what that is. In this context, it refers to what was later dubbed the angels’ share, i.e. how much liquid was lost during maturation. 139 litres. L. Alc. must be what is today called LPA or in this context of a mature cask of whisky, RLA: how many litres of pure alcohol are still in the cask after maturation. That number is 59.5.

So, even with the columns I don’t understand, there are some tangible data that we can work with. There are 59.5 litres of pure alcohol in the cask, and the whisky is at 42,6%. That means that there are 139,67 litres of whisky in the cask (59,5/0,426=139,67). That would make for a fine 199 bottles of 64 YO Dallas Dhu, minus what you always lose during bottling. Or, I am wrong about Str. and the whisky was instead 46,1% (remember the old Proof). 59,5/0,461=129 litres of whisky making for a fine 184 bottles (minus what you lose during bottling) of 64 YO Dallas Dhu.

It seems the hogshead in question was fairly large, at a capacity of 268–278 litres (given the ullage and the different ABVs).

The ABV is shifting wildly between the documents, and they are only days apart. That’s strange.

But even more: if the duty has been paid – someone has shelled out £938.32 – then the bottle which was for sale was not just a cask sample from a cask, it is from a cask that was emptied and bottled in full. For home use? Really? That would mean that:

• Someone back in 1985 had a stash of more than 180 bottles of 64-year-old Dallas Dhu.
• None of those bottles were ever heard of.

This seems to me to be…unlikely. Bordering on the impossible. If the evidence that comes with this bottle shows a whole cask was bottled, how could so many bottles have existed, for only one to surface? I mean, a 64 YO Dallas Dhu with a 1921 vintage is just not your everyday occurrence. The bottle would have made a splash.

Or am I just not at the cool kids’ table in whisky, and whisky royalty like Angus MacRaild, Geert Bero, Emmanuel Dron, the Thompson brothers or Serge Valentin have been secretly imbibing the sweet nectar of that Dallas Dhu 1921 vintage, it’s just that they never told us mortals about it? (No they haven’t, at least Serge would not have been able to resist the urge to post his notes here.)

So, given this silence, these other non-existing bottles, I must say I am now feeling more throughly skeptical of the bottling. At least that’s what I think I think.

But wait. It turns out at least one cool kid actually has had a taste of that whisky. It happened in 2011. The cool kid was the Swedish whisky importer Thomas Kuuttanen. The imbibing took place at…drum roll… Gordon & MacPhail. Precisely the firm which one would have expected to hold a cask like this. The firm that has had the most Dallas Dhu stock. The firm that was doing licensed bottlings of Dallas Dhu for decades.

I’m happy for Thomas to have tried the whisky. As always with these more extreme kinds of whiskies, there is always a tinge of that dark jelaousy that it wasn’t me. But also, I’m perturbed. What does this mean for my whole investigation into this darned 1921 Dallas Dhu investigation-possibly-turned-into-debacle?

Thomas didn’t get his dram from a bottle. It’s from…I don’t know what it is I’m looking at. Something with tape on it? Here’s the photo from Thomas’s Facebook post:

So, some drops from at least one other bottle appears to exist, after all. I mean, it’s not like that could have come from another 1921 Dallas Dhu, also bottled in 1985…

The one in the auction is not totally alone.

The mystery deepens.

But if ”HOME USE” in that document we looked so hard at meant ”LET’S NOT SAY WE BOTTLE THIS FOR GORDON & MACPHAIL”, why haven’t G&M bottled it?

Like a deranged madman now, I keep coming back to the cask being measured by an exciseman at a distillery, three years after excisemen at distilleries were abolished, and that that exciseman used a measurement for alcohol abandoned five and a half years earlier. The number of bottles being too high for it not to have surfaced…more, at least. The despatch advice about the cask being off by more than three percentage points in the ABV information. And what is that cask sample doing at Gordon & MacPhail’s more than two decades later? And heck, I know Thomas personally, why don’t I just ask him what he knows or remembers about that 1921 Dallas Dhu, or better still, get him to ask people at Gordon & MacPhail? I should do that, right? We need to know? Right?

Yeah, I’m losing it.

Hey guys…did we land on the moon?