Monkey Shoulder Blended Malt Scotch Whisky

Monkey Shoulder is a blend 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 meeting 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 2000s, the team at William Grants recognized 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 was 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 novel 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 that 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 honor our whisky heritage.