Month: August 2024
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Bowies and Laphies
One Friday night I was craving the thrill of gustatory exploration, but did not want to have the quantity of alcohol associated with a full comparative whisky tasting. So I blindly took one sample from the increasing pile of forgotten minibottles. It turned out (as I revealed to myself after the tasting) to be Bowmore.…
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Armagnac: a malternative
For the first time on this blog we venture beyond the comforts of whisky! As I remember it, I got lured into the French brandy universe by a bottle of Thompson Bros. 27yo “Early Landed Late Bottled” brandy (most likely Cognac) that I gifted my father with great success. Then I started reading more about…
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New stop light scoring system
I’ve spilt much time and ink on developing a non-standard grading system. What I’ve held onto for some time now is a hierarchy of Bad (❌), Unfulfilling (➖), Rewarding (✔️), Personal Favourite (❤️). I’m finding that almost everything I try ends up in the Rewarding category (because I’m spending my own money, and will rarely…
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Ghost safari #1
I have been trying a lot of newbie distilleries recently (Newbies Pt I, II, III) with the aim of getting through all of them eventually — a task that will take years for the simple fact that new distilleries still keep popping up like malty mushrooms in the ground! Of the 28 distilleries founded in…
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Son of a bad bottom
“Isn’t particularly of any interest… let’s move on.” So said Ralfy recently of Macduff in his overview of Scotch malt distilleries A-Z on his Patreon channel. To the contrary, in the Bad Homburg whisky festival 2023 I tried two Macduffs that were both were really interesting. One was relatively young but had a very distinguished…
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Wiener whisky
Second half of July I spend a week in Vienna for work, a science conference on mathematical modelling in ecology and evolution. Getting there from my home in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany was fairly convenient with the ÖBB Night Jet, with their new sleeper wagons with individual pods. Or shall we call it sarcophagi? Good thing I’m…
DuckDrams 