The Scotch Malt Whisky Society - AKA SMWS Codes

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 and has since established itself as one of Scotlands leading independent whisky bottlers. The Society started out as a private club led by Pip Hills. Together with his associates, they chipped in and bought a cask which they would enjoy drinking together. Part of that cask, which was from the Glenfarclas distillery ended up getting bottled and indirectly become the very first official bottling for the Society. 

At the time, Glenfarclas would not allow the Society to name the distillery on the label so some genius came up with a coding system - which is incredibly simple but yet very effective. The system works in the following way: Each bottle is essentially assigned two numbers. The first number represents the distillery whilst the second number identifies the number of releases. So the first bottling is 1.1, whereas 27.7 is the seventh bottling from the 27th distillery. Below we have put together a list of all the distilleries and their opposing and all-important SMWS Code.

Over the years we have sold many of the rarest Scotch Malt Whisky Society bottlings via our auction achieving World record prices. We have an unrivalled portfolio of sold SMWS bottles which is currently in excess of 1,100 results.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society has attained its fierce reputation primarily from its early bottlings and the fact all their whiskies are full cask strength and usually bottled as a single cask. Looking back through some old records we have here at Whisky-Online from the original SMWS brochures it is quite scary how far these SMWS bottlings have come in term of desirability.

In issue No.41 - Winter Bottlings 1992 - one of particular interest is 33.13. A 1966 23-year-old. Interestingly it actually mentions it is an Ardbeg and is from only one cask, a hogshead which yielded 220 bottles. In 1992 this would have cost exactly £48 per bottle and if you took advantage of their offer at the time, you would have saved £2 per bottle if you purchased a case of six. In today's market, the same whisky would set you back in the region of £3,000. 

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society Cask Numbers

If you have a bottle of SMWS for sale or even a large collection of them, we are more than happy to provide a free valuation for you. Alternatively you can browse our extensive database of results for all the distilleries in the SMWS portfolio in the table below.