Tag: nas
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Le Ben du Nevis
Cheeky me brought some Ben Nevis samples for my three-week trip to Paris. Can’t count on the Parisians to offer a anything other than fermented grape juice for a reasonable price. What to mention about this distillery that I didn’t already? Maybe that around 1/3 of Ben Nevis’s new-make spirit is shipped to Japan to…
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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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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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The Helmsman and Smoky Two
At the back of the cupboard I have two driver’s drams that I picked up at Bunnahabhain distillery during the 2023 Islay trip. So they’ve sat in small sample bottles for a worryingly long time. However at some point (late 2023 perhaps) I sealed the cap lining with wax in a hope to reduce oxidation.…
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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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Birthplace of the water of life
“And by payment made to Brother John Cor by precept of the comptroller, as he asserts, by the King’s command, to make aqua vite within the period of the account, 8 bolls of malt.” Exchequer Rolls of 1494 This is widely recognized as the first written record of the production of aqua vitae, or whisky.…
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Blend it up
Sometimes I can be very undecisive. I stand in front of my whisky safe, with a dozen or two different tastings themes to choose from. Young grains. Old Islays. A Glen Garioch horizontal. Another vertical of newbie distilleries. Cracking open a new bottle for a first impression? After a long time hesitating, and trying to…
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Revisiting Edinburgh, my spirit-ual home
Oh Flower of ScotlandWhen will we seeYer like again? In the beginning of July I went on a short holiday in my favourite city that I called home for four years. The purpose of the visit was to attend Zoe’s graduation and meet some old friend (…and while there to enjoy a dram or two.)…
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The Newbies, Pt. III
Bang on to a new set of four distilleries in the new wave (The Newbies, Part I; The Newbies, Pt. II). Eden Mill was founded in 2012 (production started 2014) in St Andrews and runs both brewing and distilling operations. It’s a small independent distillery with 100’000 L yearly capacity (that’s one 150th that of a giant…
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The Barn of the King
We were driving from Edinburgh to St. Andrews on a spontaneous day trip. Somehow fiddling with Google Map I see we are just about to pass close to Kingsbarns, a distillery name I recognized. A little while later we are pulling up to the visitor centre. Bad luck! We are arriving just as the last…
DuckDrams 