A 24-year-old Highland malt released for The Open at Royal Troon, and the cask is the part worth talking about. Loch Lomond has been the official spirit of The Open for years, which usually means a commemorative box and not much more, but here they’ve taken genuinely old whisky and finished it in Manzanilla sherry casks. Manzanilla is the leanest and saltiest of the sherries, aged on the coast at Sanlucar, and it’s an unusual pick for whisky: instead of the dried-fruit richness an Oloroso cask would pile on, it lends a dry, saline, nutty edge that pushes back against two and a half decades of oak. Loch Lomond’s straight-necked pot stills already give a distillery character that runs fruitier and more angular than most Highland malts, so there’s something there to push against. Drink it neat and give it plenty of air. This was made for one specific week of Scottish golf, which is another way of saying it isn’t coming back.