In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell and the world shifted, Václav Šitner of the Pradlo distillery in Pilzen made his first whisky—without ever visiting Scotland, armed only with a pot still and a handful of translated whisky books. Hammerhead was born from pure ambition: Czech barley, milled with a hammer mill, fermented and distilled in a country with no whisky tradition. The casks in which it would mature were made from 100% Czech oak.

Then the whisky was forgotten. While two decades passed in Pradlo's cellars, the world above transformed. This 23-year-old bottling is what emerged from that unique sleep: limited in volume, never to be remade, a witness to a moment in history.