Scotch Malt Whisky Society Scotch Malt Whisky Society The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS), founded in Edinburgh in 1983, is a membership organisation which bottles and sells single cask, single malt whisky. It purchases individual casks from more than 125 malt whisky distilleries in Scotland and throughout the world, bottles them and retails directly to its members. It also runs three private members' rooms in the UK and in several international locations. The origins of the Society lie in Phillip "Pip" Hills' travels around the Scottish Highlands in the late 1970s, during which he sampled several whiskies drawn straight from the cask. Hills was
Scotch whisky and smoother, because a column still can perform the equivalent of multiple distillation steps in a continuous distillation process. Second, the "phylloxera" bug destroyed wine and cognac production in France in 1880. Scotland was traditionally divided into four regions: The Highlands, The Lowlands, The Isle of Islay, and Campbeltown. Due to the large number of distilleries found there, the Speyside region is now also recognized by the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) as a distinct region. The whisky-producing islands other than Islay are not recognised as a distinct region by the SWA, which groups them into the Highlands region. Although only