At Glen Grant the age statements are where you overpay

The frame first, so the numbers read straight. Each bottle is set beside the ten whiskies the model rates nearest it on flavour, and the middle price of those ten is the going rate for that style this week. The neighbourhood, I will call it. A Glen Grant can sit under its neighbourhood, level with it, or over, and this week the four of them fan out across all three.

The Arboralis is the floor, and it is about where it should be. At $77 against the roughly $71 its ten nearest cost, it is around 8% over, close enough to call fair. It is the no-age entry malt and it tastes like the house introducing itself: light and honeyed, a note of banana and citrus peel, a floral lift. Easy, clean, the kind of thing that converts people who think they do not like Scotch. The 10 is a small step up and the only bottle of the four tagged under its room, $81 against about $84, so a couple of percent below. The 10 adds a bit of polish to the same soft, floral, honeyed character. Between these two you have the whole Glen Grant pitch, a bright Speyside style at a sensible price, and the 10 just edges it as the pick for being fractionally under its company rather than fractionally over.

Then the 15, where the arithmetic starts to pull away from the whisky. It is $149 against a neighbourhood of about $108, which is roughly 38% over. The glass is genuinely lovely, more serious than the entry pair: lemon and lemon zest, a grassy, hay-like freshness, a cake-and-heather sweetness underneath. This is Glen Grant with a few more years and more to say for itself. But 38% over the going rate for its style is a real premium, and you are paying it for the age statement as much as for the step up in the glass. If you love the house character and want the fuller version, it is a fine bottle. As a value call it is a stretch.

The 18 stretches further. It is $214 against about $120, roughly 78% over, the widest gap in the range by a distance. Here I have to be straight with you about the evidence: no review I trust has settled on this bottle, so I will not describe flavours it may not have. What the model can say is that it stays in the family register, the light, green, grassy orchard style the distillery is known for, rather than turning into some big sherried thing at eighteen years. So you are not buying a transformation. You are buying more years of the same bright Glen Grant character, at close to double what comparable whiskies ask. For a distillery whose whole appeal is easy, honest value, that is a lot to put on the age.

None of this makes Glen Grant a lesser name. The opposite, really. It is one of the great everyday Speysiders precisely because the Arboralis and the 10 deliver that clean, honeyed style without charging for it. What the range does, like most, is load its premium onto the bottles it can sell on a number: fifteen years, eighteen years. The entry pair is priced like whisky you drink. The age statements are priced like whisky you shelve.

So, buying. For drinking and for value, the 10 at $81 is the call, the only one under its room and the house style at its most likeable, with the Arboralis at $77 a near-identical pick if you want to save a few dollars. The 15 at $149 is for someone who wants the fuller, older Glen Grant and has decided the extra depth is worth about a third over the going rate. The 18 at $214 is for a devotee of the distillery who wants the oldest expression and is not weighing it against its neighbours, because the neighbours win that contest handily.

Buy Glen Grant young and you get one of the best-value bright Speysiders on the shelf. Buy it old and you are mostly buying the number on the label.