The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) was formed in 1983 as an exclusive members club. These days they release whisky from over 125 different distilleries worldwide. Renowned for their single cask, cask strength bottlings, many early SMWS bottles are highly sought after.

SMWS bottlings have a unique coded system to denote the distillery and edition. Many of the early decimal numbers are therefore the most sought after of the editions and their Japanese whisky bottlings are becoming particularly desirable.