Adelphi. Eighty-two whiskies.

Adelphi began in 1826 as a distillery in the Gorbals in Glasgow, on the Clyde. The brothers Charles and David Gray built it; from 1880 it belonged to A. Walker & Co, who added a Coffey still for grain whisky. Around 1886 the company was among the largest producers in Scotland. In 1903 Distillers Company Ltd bought it up and shortly afterwards malt production stopped. What was still standing was demolished in 1971.

The name lay dormant for almost a century. In 1993 Jamie Walker, great-grandson of Archibald Walker, brought it back, not as a distillery but as a bottler, with the explicit choice to put quality above quantity. Whisky writer Charles MacLean chairs the tasting panel that selects the casks. In 2004 Walker sold the company to Keith Falconer and Donald Houston. And in 2014 the circle closed: Adelphi opened its own distillery on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

Adelphi bottles from a single cask: no colouring, no chill filtering, and the bottles are counted per cask instead of per batch.

A Scottish bottler putting a Japanese whisky on the bottle is a reversal of how things went for decades. Adelphi now buys casks in eight countries outside Scotland and bottles them under the same conditions: single cask, no colouring, no filtering.

For anyone who wants to explore the world beyond Scotland, that is handy: the same bottler, the same way of working, and so an honest comparison between a Swedish, a Japanese and a Scottish whisky.