Top 10 fun Scotch whisky facts
Have you ever wondered how many bottles of Scotch whisky would fit into Loch Ness, or what it takes to be a world record-breaking distillery cat?
Read on and discover some weird and wonderful fun facts about the world of whisky, as compiled by our brilliant number-loving finance team.
1. First up, courtesy of The Scotch Whisky Association: 1.67 billion bottles of Scotch were shipped from Scotland last year (up 21% from 2021). That’s 53 bottles every second!
2. A 25ml measure of whisky contains around 55 calories. That’s the same number of calories as a peach, but with a whole fruit bowl worth of flavours!
3. The Glenturret, Scotland’s oldest working distillery, had a distillery cat called Towser who broke the feline world record, apparently catching 28,899 rodents in her lifetime. That’s around 5 mice per day.
4. Loch Ness is the UK’s largest loch by volume, if you were to fill it with whisky, you would need 10.6 trillion standard 70cl bottles!
5. An American standard Bourbon barrel can hold 200 litres, enough for 300 bottles of whisky! However, those cheeky angels take around 2% of the whisky maturing in a barrel each year (the angels’ share), so it’s actually quite a lot less than that, especially as Scotch whisky legally has to mature for minimum three years.
6. You would need to lay 8,223 standard 70cl-size bottles of whisky end-to-end to span the length of the Forth Bridge. That’s quite a lot of whisky.
7. It would take over 1 million Glencairn whisky glasses to stretch the length of Hadrian’s Wall. However, they’d be on their sides, so you’d need to drink the whisky first (which we definitely wouldn’t recommend doing all in one go).
8. Age Statements on a bottle of Scotch whisky only state the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle: it’s likely that there are older whiskies in there too, to round off the flavours and create the perfect dram. That’s why Master Blenders are so celebrated.
9. There are currently some 22 million casks maturing in whisky bonds/warehouses across Scotland – that’s around 12 billion 70cl bottles! (The Scotch Whisky Association, 2022).
10. Here at The Scotch Whisky Experience, we are home to one of the largest collections of Scotch whisky in the world. The Diageo Claive Vidiz Whisky Collection comprises 3,384 bottles, with the oldest bottle being a James Buchanan’s Scotch Whisky, verified to be from 1897-1900.
What are your favourite Scotch whisky facts?
This list was first collated in March 2019 for World Maths Day (on Twitter). (Facts & figures have subsequently been updated).