Tag: single malt
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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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Two Tullies
I discovered Tullibardine no so long ago. It reportedly has an uncommonly floral and bready character. Today, I’ll investigate this character further. Notably no distillation occurred at the distillery between 1994 and 2003 due to mothballing and change of ownership. One should keep an eye out for the 20yo and 25yo at auction, which are…
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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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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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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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Bushy Irish diamond lady
Irish whiskey has thus far been nearly absent from this blog. Time to give a chance to the green island in the west. Irish whiskey was once the most popular spirit in the world. Then it crashed in the 20th century following domestic and world wars, trade wars with the UK, and whatnot, with only…
DuckDrams 