Author: emil
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Good grog from Gordon
Gordon and MacPhail: the most venerable of Scotland’s independent bottlers, with over 125 years in the business and an enviable stock of old and rare malts. Today I’ll review some not too enviable stock, but still worthy enough to be bottled under their premium “Connoiseurs Choice” range, instituted in 1968. In both cases, the dram…
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The Newbies, Pt. II
Sound like the second instalment in some Scorsese Gangster thriller? Well, this is a thrilling tasting but but I hope it take less than 3h40 to complete. We’re continuing with the theme of trying out whisky from the New Wave of Scotch (malt) distilleries. There are currently 43 distilleries in this wave (with more in…
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The Nordic casks
For being a Swede and a whisky geek, I’ve tried embarrassingly little whisky from the Nordic countries, where, just like in Scotland, distilleries have been popping up like zits on a teenager’s greasy mug. Indie bottler Berry Bros. have released some rather exuberantly prices bottles in the Nordic casks range, but I got my hand…
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Christmas calendar 2023: second half
It’s time to finish the calendar. One might say, what’s the rush, I missed the Christmas season anyways? Well, I’ve had some bad experiences of whisky samples deteriorating rapidly with time, causing cardboardy off-notes. My hypothesis is that this is mainly related to over-oxidization and that it happens faster in samples bottles in general, and…
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Leapfrog
A month or so ago this “Williamson” (independent bottler alias for Laphroiag) from Asta Morris started popping up in German online stores. Seemed like a decent value proposition at €83-95, but single casks can sometimes take bad or unexpected directions, despite everything looking good on paper. Which is sometimes the reason why the distillery sold…
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Man(nochmore) down!
Mannochmore is one of the lesser known Speyside distilleries. Most of its output goes into blends, most notably it’s the prime component of Haig. The only official single malt from Mannochmore is released as part of Diageo’s Flora & Fauna series. Luckily, Mannochmore is quite available among the independent bottlers. I’ve mentioned the independent bottler…
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Ten more days of blind, belated Christmas
Let’s just dive straight back into the blind tasting from the Brühler Whisky House calendar 2023, that I started on in this post. We have here 10 more reviews, that I of course did not have all in one go , but I’ve collected by reviews from a time window of some weeks (usually I…
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The Departed
In a previous post I tried some of Scotland newest distilleries. Now we go back in time, to distilleries lost to time. Or so one might have thought. Rosebank distillery, “King of the lowlands”, was mothballed in my birth year of 1993. Ever so rarely, some old stock of this iconic, flowery spirit would find…
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The girl with the clarinet: first tune
I have reviewed quite some Ben Nevises on this blog already (seven!), and as can be seen from the results it often — but not always — hits a special spot with my preferences, earning a ❤️ on three occations. I have longed to own a full bottle of an outstanding BN in the 20+…
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The Newbies, Part I
Scotland is in a veritable whisky boom. Never before in the history of Scotch whisky production (legal, at least…) has so many new distilleries been founded. Or so I’ve heard. To test such claims I scraped some data from the internet about opening and closing date of Scotch malt distilleries (mostly from wikipedia, whisky.com, lost…
DuckDrams 