This is a blog about the things I like. Whisky, books, cooking and more.
Sample provided by Best of Whiskies
I’ve reviewed quite a few rums from the now closed Caroni distillery in Trinidad before and have come to like its heavy character quite a bit. Caronis are pretty much exclusively available from independent bottlers and this particular one comes from the Netherlands based “The Duchess”, a brand of the online store Best of Whiskies.
Continue reading “Caroni 1998 – The Duchess”
Whiskybase.com is one of the largest online databases of whisky. They have listings for just about every bottle of whisky ever made as well as forums, online marketplace and their own store with it’s own well established bottling label (The Archives). With every 10,000 bottles added to their database they release a special bottling to celebrate.
This one was on the table at a recent meetup of our whisky Club, Malt Mongers Israel, which was centred around Scottish grain whiskies. Invergordon is probably one of the most commonly found grain whiskies which can be found bottled as such and can really yield quite impressive results with good ageing. This one was an exclusive bottling for Wijnhandel van Zuylen, a well renowned Dutch spirits retailer by Whiskybroker.
Continue reading “Invergordon 43 bottled for Wijnhandel van Zuylen”
I never really thought I’d be making a Port Ellen post. Let alone from my own bottle. For those unfamiliar with the distillery, it was an Islay distillery which shut down in 1983, owned by a company that would eventually become part of Diageo, they left quite a healthy stock of casks which have slowly been bottled over the years. Whisky distilled in a distillery that shut down before I was born is something special indeed.
Continue reading “Port Ellen 1979 Bottling for Whisky Live Tel Aviv 2018”
I’ve had this bottle for a while now, but on account of Winter I’ve been at the smokey things in my cabinet a little more, and trying to put a dent in my very long backlog of samples, but I finally got round to it this weekend. Continue reading “Golan Heights Distillery 2015 Single Malt”
Thanks to Yosi for the sample (and the image)
I sometimes regret how little love I give to Clynelish, for years my favourite distillery, still is I’ve just added several others to the list as well. This is one of many many bottles of mid to late 90’s distillate put out by Signatory as part of their Cask Strength Collection. It’s one of the independent bottling labels I really feel confident when trying as they’re almost always fantastic and when they’re not they’re still pretty damn good.
Thanks to /u/nofansky for the sample
More Ledaig? Of course I’ll have more Ledaig. This was a sample /u/nofansky sent over with a bottle split we did over the Summer. Being Summer it was pushed to the back of my sample shelf but has slowly crept its way forward and the weather could not be more appropriate now.
Aged 9 years. 59.7% ABV. Matured in a bourbon hogshead. No colourant added, non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength from a single cask.
Nose: Ash. Malt. Barley sugar. A bit new makey. Brine. Custard powder. Lychees. Limes. Chemical smoke, like lye in water. Slight sweet woody undertones.
Palate: Milk chocolate. Irish cream. Vegetal peat. Charred wood. Wet campfire. Bit of vanilla and salt going down.
Finish: Long. Very briney and quite creamy along with some herbal honey, ash and peat.
Would I buy this: Yes
Would I order this in a bar: Yes
Would I drink this if someone gave me a glass: Yes
VFM: 3/5
This is a very apparently young whisky, with not a huge amount of complexity, but I can’t really fault it for that because it’s a Ledaig, and Ledaig can work really well like that, all that raw distillate character is there and in your face, yum.
I feel like I’m seeing more and more rum cask matured whiskies around, which is great because rum is good, and whisky is good, and the combination of the right whisky with the right rum cask can be amazing. The problem I have is a lot of whiskies will just use something general like “Caribbean Rum”, but rum is a hugely diverse spirit with so many different character profiles so it can get bloody annoying, because not every type of rum cask would work with let’s say a light Speyside whisky.
Been a while since I’ve gotten hold of some SMWS bottlings. This one’s name doesn’t really evoke any preconceptions for me, as I don’t really know what the hell a Manzana Verde Daiquiri is, but here’s the little story from them about it (I love these):
Image pilfered from the SMWS website because I was silly and forgot to take a picture for this one.
I smelled Islay on this right away but it was odd because it was quite subdued in its peat profile, yet obviously cask strength. The only thing that came to mind was one of Kilchoman’s Cask Strength 100% Islay realeses. I didn’t even think about good old Bowmore. Bowmore is quite notorious for having sub-par distillery bottlings but an excellent base spirit, a lot of the damage being done by chill filtration and low ABV and this is an example of just how good the spirit can be if just left to do its thing.
Continue reading “Bowmore 17 SMWS 3.271 The Perfect Cure – BTC 2017 #17”
