While it’s a challenging time for several of the big blended brands right now (many are reporting rather lacklustre sales figures for 2023/24), a quiet renaissance is also taking place on the sidelines. A new wave of blends has reached the shore, bringing with them a fresh perspective that could challenge the present single malt and bourbon hegemony.

At first, I was tempted to categorise these new blends as ‘boutique’. It’s true that many are small-batch products being released by tiny, independent blending studios. However, size isn’t everything: there are also big names dipping their toe into this emerging sub-category. Rather than thinking of these new blends in terms of case sales or the company backing them, I think it’s more helpful to group them by a common flavour-led philosophy unshackled from the 150-plus years of heritage that many historic blends are tied to. Free from baggage, these blends can be whatever their creators want them to be (even old-fashioned), and what they all want is to capture the attention of whisky enthusiasts.

This is often being achieved through striking contemporary packaging, a distinctive and modern tone of voice, and flavours one might not readily find elsewhere at the same price point. Even better, this is all generally backed by credentials like natural colour, mid-40s and above ABV, and NCF status.

The epicentre of the wave isn’t hard to identify. Its first ripples came from a pebble cast into the whisky loch by the undisputed OG of the new-wave blend, John Glaser. Though best known for blended malts today, Compass Box has also been a purveyor of excellent blended Scotch whiskies since its founding in 2000. First came Asyla (2001), then Great King St Artist Blend (2011) and Glasgow Blend (2014). But Glaser wasn’t alone in seeing a future for a new kind of blend.

There’s the cult sensation that is Ichiro’s Malt & Grain Japanese Blend (2011). Then there are the excellent That Boutique-y (2012) and Lost Distilleries (2014) blends from Atom Brands, which were followed more recently by the same company’s superb Green Isle (2019), offering incredible value at less than £30 per bottle.

Then, largely inspired by Japan’s long history of blending imported and domestic spirit, there’s the emerging ‘world blend’ category of products such as the ‘white-label’ Ichiro’s Malt and Grain (2011), Adelphi’s The Glover (2015), and Beam Suntory’s Ao (2020). We’ve also seen Nikka’s now-correctly categorised From the Barrel (actually first introduced 1985) world blend increase steadily in popularity and, at the opposite end of the locality spectrum, Mount Fuji draws a line in the sand with its delightful Single Blend (2022), which merges only its own malt and grain distillates. This all coincided with the meteoric rise of Suntory’s Hibiki, which it’s fair to say has a foot in both the legacy and new-wave camps.

I believe Thomson Bros of Dornoch began regularly releasing its own delightful blended Scotch, TB/BSW, around this time, too. The pandemic era also saw the launch of Leith blending studio Woven (2021), George Koutsakis and Jenson Button’s Coachbuilt (2022), and Billy Walker’s White Heather (2022). Then, in the past year alone, we’ve seen the debut of Maclean’s Nose from Adelphi, Leith Export Co’s Perpetuity, Turntable Spirits in Glasgow, and Suntory’s viscous and subtly smoky new blended Scotch, Ardray.

It’s worth pointing out that, by and large, these whiskies have been resoundingly well received by even blend-sceptic enthusiasts, with the only niggles from some quarters usually being linked to pricing, which is particularly sensitive across the board right now as inflation pinches us all.

Since the whisky narrative was flipped in the mid-1980s in favour of malt whisky, blends have been somewhat unfairly maligned, often implicitly by their own producers. As distillers chased the attractive margins single malts had to offer, the new ‘superior’ product had to be compared to something, and blends were an easy, and sometimes deserving, target. But, being old stalwarts, the blends took their licks and kept paying the distillers’ bills. Now, 40 years on, it’s time to see what a new generation of new-wave blends can offer us.