Re: Scotch Whis
Talisker's offerings from the Isle of Skye are a different experience if you're willing to give it a try.
Concur. I finished a bottle of Talisker.
Macallan 12 gets the job done
It does and it is one of the best 12 yo whiskies but it is $$ for its age.
I'm going to look for a bottle of Glengoolie Blue.
...for the best of times
Laphroaig for me. It's like a trip to the seashore.
It is. Huge fan.
This has been my favorite "Scotch" for the past year:
If I drink Scotch it's usually Laphroaig 18 is excellent.
I haven't tried Corsair, but I certainly am a friend of Laphroaig. 10, Triple Wood, Quarter Cask, 18. I think there is a 10-yr cask strength I need to get too.
Any ideas what I should do with a bottle of Ardberg Perpetuum that tastes like concentrated asphalt?
I liked Lagavulin 16, which is a smoky spirit from Islay, so I thought I'd try something even smokier, Ardberg, only to find I can't drink the stuff. Not straight, not mixed with anything I've tried. Don't know what to do with it short of pouring it out, and at over $100 I haven't come to that yet. Any ideas?
Ardbeg is intense. I have a bottle of their Supernova from several years ago. Young whisky with a **** ton of peat/phenolic. Supernova is good, but there is a subculture out there that just tries to see how many ppm of peat they can cram into the whisky. Not unlike the "8 brazillion IBU" fad in the IPA world.
I'm not much for JW, a blended whisky. The unfortunate part is most people's first experience with Scotch is a smokey blended. There's dozens of male whiskys out there and if that one doesn't appeal to you, go find another. Like Canadian or bourbon, each has a different flavor.
My favorite a King Alexander III from The Dalmore. If you're looking to try a Scotch, any Dalmore would be a good start. Even their 12 year old is quite tasty.
I been quaffing Rye whiskey lately. There's a number of tasty ryes out there. Angel'S Envy and Whistle Pig (both fun to order in a bar) are very good.
Whistle Pig.... Whistle Pig.... Whistyle Pig....
I agree. Just like most people start on beer with Miller Lite. JW red is not very good. It and black both have a very short finish. As does the Dewar's White garbage they serve on airliners.
I have several bottles of rye, including Whistle Pig. Tried Angel's Envy at a restaurant but I don't have a bottle yet. Both are fantastic!! I have a local rye by Leopold Bros that is great too. And Bulleit of course. Rye is a very tasty spirit.
Well then, let me just say, 'no true Scotsman' would drink a blend.
Well played.
If you are into rye you should give Templeton Rye a try. Pretty good @ $30 bottle.
wilco
Contract manufacturing is nothing new. Why would anyone be surprised that it happens with our favorite beverage? Coke and Pepsi do it all the time. And I'll skip the clothing manufacturers.
As to Scotch, many now use a common grain malter instead of doing it themselves. Half the distilleries are owned by the massive beverage conclomerates and are more like a GM division than an independent. What used to be aged in their own bonded warehouses are now not just aged in a common warehouse but could be hundreds of miles from the distillery. There is a distillery I visited that does over 100,000 barrels a year, none with their own label on the bottle. You can also look at the large blended varieties. A lot of their products come from contract distillers. After all, an idle plant is a waste of money. And if your current distillery can't handle the rapid increase in demand, contracting out before building more capacity makes sense.
To keep with the true intent of the thread and to get back on track, I offer up Old Pulteney 21 yo. The distillery is in the Scotch town of Wick, which is a coastal town on the cold North Atlantic.
If you drink it for the taste, it doesn't where it is distilled or how much it costs or what the age statement says or what bagpipes-and-peat-bog bull**** they print on the label.
I just bought a bottle of Old Pulteney - 18 or 21 I forget which. Good stuff.
I have several one-off single cask bottlings from AD Rattray, and Signatory from distilleries you don't often see exporting, like Mortlach, Glentauchers, Benriach. I have a Signatory single cask bottling from Laphroaig that has a totally different character than you'd expect - a much lighter whisky with less peat. Illustrates the variability from cask to cask as well as the work of a great distiller to achieve the same consistent flavor profile in their signature range of whiskies.
Two of the AD Rattray bottlings are 22 yo non-chill filtered cask strength whiskies. They illustrate another common marketing trick - color. Ignore color. No one in the industry (so far) ever mentions coloring but E150 or other coloring is a legal ingredient. Those two bottlings are 22 yo and are a pale yellow to straw color. They are not some deep golden amber like many 12 yo whiskies are. The color of a whisky, unless you know it isn't colored, is meaningless.
I tried a few Japanese malts and I'd say they are some of the best outside Scotland. There was one Indian single malt called Amrut Fusion that was amazing too.
On the blended side, I think Compass Box has some great ones. There is no reason that a blended malt should be inherently poorer than a single malt. Compass Box proves this. There is such mythology and lore around the distillery names that it can artificially run up the price without an attendant uptick in flavor. I think swill like JW and the like give blended malts a bad name while crap like Glenlivet 12 gets off 'scot' free on the single malt side. In fact, Glenlivet overall has underwhelmed me across almost its entire range.
I haven't tried many American malts but I'd like to. American whiskies tend to be corn-based and approximate bourbon more than malt.
There are multitudes of craft distilleries now but they all produce clear spirits or young whiskies because they are so new. Here's hoping that a few of these guys have some real malts stocked away in wood and we'll see a surge of American malts in the next 10 years.
