Craigellachie's entry dram is its only honest price

It is a divisive style, and on purpose. The reviews the model reads for the range come back layered and funky, full of grilled and washed-wool notes and big hits of pineapple, the kind of language you almost never see on a polite Speyside. Craigellachie leaves a little of that old worm-tub weight in the spirit deliberately, and the result tastes like something from an older, less polished era of Speyside. You either fall for it or you back away. Either way it is a dram to taste before you decide, which is exactly where the price of the entry bottle earns its place.

Because that price runs against the usual shape of a range, where the cheapest bottle carries the fattest margin and the age statements do the flattering. Here the entry whisky is the honest number, and the premium climbs hard above it.

Start at the bottom. The 13 Year Old is $111, and the model puts its ten nearest comparisons at a median of $114, so it sits a few dollars under the going rate for what it is. It is also the bottle that defines the distillery. Savoury and sweet at once, vanilla and caramel laid over a milky, meaty middle, with the exotic-fruit lift the brand is known for. If you have never quite understood why people call Craigellachie the odd one out of Speyside, this is the glass that settles it, and it is priced as though the distillery would rather you found out cheaply than took its word.

Priced like that, the 13 is the one I would hand across the counter to settle an argument. It is not a soft, apologetic Speyside. It has a meaty, almost struck-match edge that some drinkers read as a fault and others chase for years, wrapped in enough sweet fruit to keep it friendly. Buying it costs about the same as a decent everyday malt with none of the personality, which is the whole case for it.

The 19 Year Old is the middle rung, new to the shelf this week at $376 against a peer median of $358. That works out to about $18, or 5 percent, over what comparable bottles fetch: a mild premium for a jump of six years. The character deepens with the age. The same sweet, fruity, caramelled core, drier now, the tropical note more stewed than fresh, a little dried-fruit weight settling underneath. For a drinker who took to the 13 and wants it with the volume turned up, the price is fair rather than thrilling, and fair is a decent result at this age.

Then the 23 Year Old, and the arithmetic shifts register. It is $800. The model reads its ten nearest peers at a median of $384, which puts the shelf $416 above what comparable whiskies of its kind command. A little over twice the going rate, or about 108 percent more. The notes are lovely in the way very old Speyside usually is: sweet and spiced, vanilla and caramel, candied and dried fruit, a sherried, tropical richness sitting beneath it all. But loveliness is not the question this far up, and I keep coming back to that $416. The model's read on this particular bottle is looser than usual, a wrinkle I have kept for the end. What the room of comparable bottles says plainly is that you are paying a steep premium for age and rarity here, not a keen price for good whisky.

Set the three side by side and the shape is clean. The brand's mid-shelf this week sits around a median of $376, so Craigellachie is priced as a premium name well before you reach any single bottle. The premium is just spread unevenly. Almost absent at the 13. Modest at the 19. Enormous at the 23. And the distillery's actual character, that meaty, fruity, faintly sulphured signature, is already complete in the cheapest bottle. It does not get more Craigellachie as the price climbs. It only gets older.

So what goes in the trolley. For almost everyone, the 13 at $111. It is the whole personality of the place, it is priced under its peers rather than over them, and it is the one bottle here that rewards curiosity without asking you to gamble. If you already love the profile and want an older, richer version for the shelf you keep for occasions, the 19 at $376 buys the extra years without much of a fashion tax on top. The 23 is a luxury purchase and deserves to be treated as one. Buy it because you want a very old Craigellachie and the money is not the point, not because you expect value against its neighbours. On that count the room is emphatic that there is none.

The happy part, for anyone who just wants to drink well, is that Craigellachie's whole identity is sitting at the front of the shelf, not locked behind its dearest bottle. It is priced as though one taste does the selling. Buy the 13, pour it for someone who thinks Speyside means safe, and let the old bottles be somebody else's indulgence.