Albion AN 1983 6004379

Albion AN 1983 Velier

Velier was founded by Casimir Chaix in Genoa in 1947 as a wine and spirits importer and distributor. By the 1980s they were still a small family-company with less than ten staff. This all changed in 1986 when it was purchased by Luca Gargano, a former brand ambassador for Saint James who was at the time still in his twenties. Under his direction, they selected their first single cask whiskies in 1992, and their first rum in 1996. In the decades that followed, Velier have gone on to become one of the most collectible brands in the industry, and Gargano has positioned them as the one of the foremost authorities and bottlers of rum anywhere in the world.

Velier's earliest Demerara releases were bottled in 1996, laying the groundwork for what would later become affectionately known as the \"Age of Velier's Demerara,\" which began in earnest in 2004 after Gargano was invited to the Demerara Distillers Ltd warehouses in Guyana to select tropically aged barrels to be bottled by Velier for the first time. This 2000 release predates this and is from Velier's second batch of Guyana rum releases, which also included an Enmore and a rare La Bonne Intention marque from Uitvlugt. With the relationship between Velier and DDL strengthened after the 1996 releases, DDL offered to bottle these for Velier despite the cask being located in Europe already, outsourcing the job to their Dutch subsidiary, Breitenstein Produkten. These bottles represent a true milestone on the journey to the first of those legendary 2004 release.

Distilled in 1983, this is a reproduction of the AN cask marque used at the Albion distillery before it closed in 1968. Unlike some of the other distilleries being shuttered around this time, its stills did not survive but the production of the style associated with the distillery did, at Uitvlugt. The distillery's four-column Savalle still is incredibly versatile, today producing nine different marques at Diamond, of which the Albion \"AN\" continues to be one.