Loch Lomond's Waypoint 31 Year Old is its oldest peated malt

Loch Lomond has bottled Waypoint 31 Year Old, its oldest peated whisky to date, with 2,600 bottles reaching specialist retailers worldwide from 1 September at £750 each.

The single malt is the third release in the distillery's Waypoint series, which began in 2024 with a 16 year old and continued in 2025 with a 17 year old. Thirty-one years pushes the range into rarer territory, and into a price bracket the earlier two releases never touched.

How Waypoint 31 Year Old was made

Thirty-one years is a long time to trust peat to behave.

Distilled in 1992, the whisky spent most of its life in ex-Bourbon casks before a 12-month finish in Tawny Port pipes. It is bottled at 44.1% ABV, non-chill filtered and left in its natural colour, with nothing done to smooth over three decades of cask character.

That process gives Waypoint 31 Year Old a deep, rose-tinted colour and a flavour profile the distillery lists as dark chocolate, raspberry, cedarwood and woodsmoke, an unusual combination for a peated malt more often built around smoke and brine alone.

Peat this old is rare because most distilleries use their oldest peated stock sparingly, wary of how heavy smoke can soften unpredictably over decades. Releasing a peated expression at 31 years, rather than holding the casks longer or folding them into a blend, is itself a statement about where Loch Lomond sees demand heading.

A price built on scarcity

At £750 (about $1,010) a bottle, Waypoint 31 Year Old sits well above Loch Lomond's standard range, though still short of the four-figure prices some 40-year-old Scotch commands. With only 2,600 bottles worldwide, most specialist retailers will carry no more than a handful.

The bottle carries some of that price on the outside too: an etched, handcrafted wooden case with an internal copper tube and artwork by illustrator Brett Breckon, closer to a collector's object than a bottle meant for a shelf.

It lands the same month a US import ban shuts Canadian whisky out of American bars, a reminder that governments and distillers can treat the same spirit very differently: one restricting it at the border, another distilling it more carefully than ever.

Whether the Waypoint series goes past 31 years is an open question. For now, it is Loch Lomond's clearest signal yet that its oldest peated stock has more to offer than a blender's vat.