What do limited release and edition size mean on a bottle?

No, there is no law that sets how many bottles a limited release may comprise.

Regulation (EU) 2019/787 governs, for spirit drinks, the sales denomination, the minimum alcoholic strength by volume and what must appear on the label. Words like limited release, special release and exclusive do not appear in it. In Scotland the Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009 govern, among other things, the sales denomination, the mention of distilleries and the age statement, but there too there is no upper limit on a bottling. A producer may therefore use the word for 300 bottles and for 30,000.

A bottle number followed by a total, such as 143 of 600, ties your bottle to a counted number.

Such a number is applied at bottling and cannot be changed afterwards without you noticing. A cask number does something different: it points to the cask the whisky comes from, so that the bottling can be traced to a single batch. If it only says limited release, without a number, without a date and without a quantity, there is nothing to check. In that case, ask the bottler or the importer about the number of bottles.

A single cask contains only whisky from one single cask, so the run ends as soon as that cask is empty.

How many bottles that yields differs from cask to cask. During maturation a cask loses moisture and alcohol, and that evaporation increases over the years. A young cask therefore yields more bottles than the same cask after twenty years. Bottlers therefore only put the number of bottles on the label once the cask has been emptied. If a cask number is included, the origin of your bottle can be traced back to that one cask.

Small batch and special release are trade names with no fixed upper limit.

Small batch usually points to a blend of a small number of casks, but how small that number is, the producer decides. Special release and annual release often refer to a series that recurs every year. Here too, the number of bottles is not fixed in any rule. If you want to know how big a bottling was, look at the hard data: number of bottles, bottle number, cask number and bottling date on the label, the tube or the distillery’s website.

Look at four things: the bottle number with total, the cask number, the bottling date and the alcohol by volume.

Together these four tell you whether a bottling is genuinely limited and where it comes from. A bottling date places the bottle in time, even if there is no age on it. A percentage above the usual 40 to 46 percent points to a bottling that has not been reduced with water. If you cannot work it out, bring the bottle to the counter in Bathmen or give us a quick call; we will read the label with you.