Tag: 10-14yo
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Bottle kills of 2024
The year is heading towards its end, and so are quite a few bottles that have long occupied the top shelf of my drinks cabinet where all the open bottles live a crowded life. It is indeed a good time to make room for the new immigrants that will be cracked open in 2025, so…
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Belgravia Barley from Glencraigs Farm
One Springbank’s most anticipated (and hence hardest-to-get) annual releases is the Local Barley: The Local Barley is an annual release made from barley grown in or around Campbeltown. Each year a local farmer is commissioned to grow barley on our behalf to continue producing this ‘grain to glass’ limited edition. SB The last two editions…
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Sherry shenanigans
One recurring thought in the collective unconscious of the whisky sphere is: what happens if I add sherry to whisky? It’s not such a wild idea. So much of Scotch is matured in whole or part in ex-sherry casks. Technically, such cask must be completely emptied according to Scotch rules, so that the interaction of…
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Sampling the Whisky Loch
The story goes that the whisky boom in the 1960s and 70s lead to an overproduction of Scotch, a veritable “Whisky Loch”, but with changing economics and consumer preferences in the 1980s, the industry had a hard time, with many now-revered distilleries like Port Ellen and Brora closed or mothballed. If market logic holds, one…
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October Black Box — Nourishing Nc’Nean and nineteen seventy-nine
From my “Black Box” of identity-masked and forgotten sample bottles, here come the blind reviews collected in the dreary month of October: Nc’Nean | “Huntress 2024 – Orchard Cobbler” | 4yo (2019) | 48.5% | Official 🌐 Scotch single malt 🪵 66% STR red wine, 31% ex-Bourbon, 3% ex-Sherry 🔆 unchillfiltered & natural color 💲…
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Craigellachie x2, again
I became quite smitten with Craigellachie a few months back. A rather immediate consequence has been the hoarding of additional samples, of which I now have about six. Time to get to work and knock them down before they proliferate further! For a middle-of-the-week tasting, I’ll restrain myself to two non-CS samples… Craigellachie | 14yo…
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Bowies from three decades
Back for some more of that Bowmore. The not-so-amazing core range was one of my first horizontals on the blog (#13-16), followed up by a special 25yo release (#32), and then over a year later some special Bowmore blends (and one not so special, #200). Tonight’s roster sports a rather random trio of 2cl Bowmore…
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Glenwinnie
Elgin in Speyside, Scotland is home to a handful of distilleries, two of which are among my longtome favourites — Glen Elgin, and Linkwood, both owned by Diageo. The only regular official bottling is from the Flora & Fauna range (colored, chillfiltered, low ABV), but fortunately indie bottlers have me covered. Then there is Glenlossie,…
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The Black Box #1
Tasting blindly is so revealing and so much fun, as I learned especially from the whisky calendar tastings. And in WOLS we always did blind tastings, though on a known theme and in the good company of others and on a time budget, a super carful analysis of the taste experience was not really the…
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A grainy day
Today’s tasting goal is simple: to etch the particular character of grain whisky so deep into my conscious that I’ll never mistake a single malt for grain (or vice versa) in a blind tasting ever again! Well, we’ll see how that goes. Usually, on the unusual occasion that I drink single grain, it’s in the…
DuckDrams 