Tag: single malt
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Remarkable rocky hill hooch
Craigellachie — ‘rocky hill’ — distillery, is a Speyside distillery dating back to the 19th century. It’s gained a following among afficionados for it’s traditional and ‘dirty’ style. Despite being owned by drinks giant Bacardi via the Dewar’s subsidiary, the entire single malt core range is integrity bottled — 46%, non-chillfiltered, natural colour — and…
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Try before you buy
Today I will implement the ancient wisdom of trying before buying. Two bottles on the German market have caught my attention recently, and I’ve contemplated a buy but thought I could maybe wait for a sale before I took the chance. Then I found both in 5cl tasting samples, so I ordered them (along with…
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The Jingle Malts of Scotland
It’s been many weeks of hard work, and no whisky tasting. Now I finally have a day off, and what a grand tasting I shall have as a reward for my toil! A 14yo Lowland, 13yo Highland, 31yo Speyside, and 28yo Islay, all single casks with 51-54% ABV. These are the samples from undisclosed distilleries…
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Three Deanies
For no very particular reason, I’m doing a Deanston tasting with the samples I’ve got. Two were thrown in with with other stuff in online shop purchases, and the third one I actually picked up at the distillery last year. Without further ado… Deanston | 11yo (2009) | 46% | Home of Malts 🌐 Scotch…
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Glen Keith im Vergleich
“Glen Keith” must be the least sexy distillery name in Scotland. At least it’s not Glen Kevin… He’s a big boomer boy, Keith, built in 1957 to produce 6 million litres a year for blends geared towards the American market (Chivas Regal, Passport and 100 Pipers Blends). Mothballed in 1999 and reopened in 2013. There…
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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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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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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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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)…
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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…
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