Category: Review
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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+…
-
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…
-
Second first impression

A distillery that I have a newfound affinity for is Tobermory. So I was intrigued when I found a 24yo independent bottling, ostensibly similar to the official 24yo that had earned a ❤️. Curiously, this 1994 vintage was bottled already in 2019 and the casks seems to have been shared between Spirit Stock (my version)…
-
Catching up with the calendar – blindly!

In May 2023 I pre-ordered the whisky calendar from Brühler Whiskyhaus for a whopping €224.90. That works out to €9.37 per 2cl sample, on average. So one can expect some quite exclusive drams in there! With the Single Malts of Scotland whisky calendar that I bought last year, I just added the samples to my…
-
The first of first impressions

Samples, samples, samples. Since this blog started in March I’ve cracked open about a hundred little sample bottles. And in my cupboard I have another 120 or so waiting. Samples are great, I get to experience a wide range of whiskies at a tiny fraction of the price of buying a bottle. And I sometimes…
-
Cambus comeback, and a grain surprise

I’ve already introduced my approx. 0 followers to Cambus in this post. More is coming up, to satisfy your insatiable demand for Cambus content. I got both today’s samples from Bad Homburg whisky fair 2023. It seems I didn’t take a photo of the first bottle, and from the info I jotted down on the…
