A while ago I ordered some ridiculous samples from WhiskySample.nl and with it came this surprise Blair Athol. Asta Morris is a bottler is somehow like but never keep track of. Strange, because the very first experience I had with them was nothing short of stellar. That was the BenRiach 1975, by the way. More recent experiences were pretty solid too, but somehow, still, I find it hard to spread my attention wide enough to also include Belgium… Anyway, a surprise Blair Athol. I like the distillery and have had a really nice tour and tasting there some years ago. So, that also helps. Let’s find ..read more

Yggdrasil, the world tree in Norse mythology, is based in peat, or so it seems! This very old Laphroaig is bottled by Jack Tar, a Polish bottler that is rather focused on mythology themed bottlings. Not only of whisky, but there’s also brandy and rums and things like that. This one was bottled a couple years ago but only found its way to my glass recently. This weekend I was away with the missus for a couple of days and that was a nice moment to sit down for something as rare as this! Image from Whiskybase Sniff: Coastal, but warming and bonfire like. Glowing embers, salty smoke, shammy leathe ..read more

A couple of months ago Whiskybase was having their Dutch Auction discount and I managed to snag this one up, among at least one other bottle. American whisky (or Canadian, because that is what the distillery started with) isn’t overly popular in The Netherlands and that means that IF (a big if…) stuff comes here it is not unlikely to end up in a discount at some point. A shame if you ask me, but there’s not much to be done about which except for what Norbert / Whisky4All is doing. WhistlePig is a distillery nowadays, but they started out by bottling spirit they bought elsewhere. Production of ..read more

Even though I think Ardnamurchan is a distillery that is doing very, very well, they don’t often find their way to my shelf. It maybe has to do with me not paying attention, or simply that there’s so much out there. I find it slightly hard to navigate all the bottlings from that distillery. Image from Whiskybase However, that does also mean that when someone else does the navigating and offers me a sample I don’t say no. So that’s what happened here too. Someone in the bottle-share club bought a couple of bottles from SMWS (the other one will follow at a later date) and allowed us to chip in a ..read more

A ‘Duty Paid Sample’ of 70cl, or as it is commonly known, a ‘Cage Bottling’. Erik E/H. brought this over last year, and shared this one with the group. And as is quite well known to returning readers, I love me some Springbank! Image from Whiskybase With it being a very limited bottling, although not exactly one-of-one as they once were, there’s not much to say about it except what can be found on the Whiskybase page. So let’s just get to it! Sniff: Even though it’s a fresh sherry cask there are not too many typical sherry notes. There is sulfur though, but I’m one of those folks that can appr ..read more

I always have a bit of a chuckle when one of the biggest, most corporate distilleries in Scotland starts toting things like ‘Illicit Still’. This whisky is about 200 years removed from an illicit still at Glenlivet, but that doesn’t hold back the old marketing department. What did surprise me is that this is a whisky with a title/name AND an age statement. Generally speaking these things are mutually exclusive, so some kudos to Glenlivet for that. Image from Whiskybase Tom, of Whisky Odyssey and from many a guest post here, bought a bottle and was kind enough to supply me with a sample. Let’s ..read more

There is a lot to unpack here. In the world of whisky they often talk about slow maturation and state things like ‘patiently matured’ on labels. It often doesn’t mean much, but if there is anything to go by, this one is slowly matured. If you think about the simple fact that the alcohol content is still 60%, ever after 78 years (!), that is quite miraculous. Mauxion was able to get this far along with such a high ABV by intentionally storing in an incredibly humid cellar and partially burying the cask so that interaction with the air around it was minimal. It change quite a few maturation para ..read more

It’s been ages since I had a Malts of Scotland bottling, and it’s been even longer since I had a Macallan. I was about to rant a lot about why Macallan is no longer regarded as highly as it was 20 years ago, by whisky fanatics at least. Things about age statements, golden promise barley, sherry casks and price points, I think it’s a topic that has been chewed out a bit too much. This one came from a share a very short while ago through another channel than my own. It looked interesting and I didn’t even check which whiskies were in the share. Somehow I must have read it, but this Macallan was ..read more

Old Bruichladdich can be hit or miss. As in, the distillery was highly inconsistent in the quality of its output spirit. Since the reopening in 2001 it still is but the spirit is far more consistent. The new inconsistency is in the use of all kinds of weird casks between 2005 and 2015-ish. It has gotten far more consistent over the last couple of years with more focus on bourbon and sherry casks with far less wine casks and other things mixed in. Personally, I think that’s a good thing because the spirit works so very well with bourbon casks. However, I’ve had some older ones from before it cl ..read more

Image from Whiskybase Going back to a Bowmore I had quite a while ago during a wee online tasting that I’ve been doing regularly with JPH. We dubbed it our ‘quarterly advent’ since we found out we like doing those semi-blind things, but November is always gobbled up by the Blind Tasting Competition. And I know that November isn’t advent yet, but December has lots of holidays and other events. So much so that getting a couple of nights available for whisky tasting is quite tough to arrange. Hence us spreading it out. Recently we had some epic all-time-high drams. A while ago we did a series of ..read more