Category Archives: Single Malt Whisky

Balmenach 23yo 1988/2011 (46%, Mo Òr, Bourbon Hogshead #1150, 440 bottles, 500 ml)

Why not try another Balmenach. Earlier I tried a Bladnoch Forum Balmenach from 1983, this time one by Dutch indie bottlers Mo Òr. A lot of those 1988 Balmenachs are bottled by Gordon & MacPhail and by the SMWS (Scotch Malt Whisky Society). There ís a sister cask around of this Mo Òr bottling. David Stirk (Creative Whisky Company) bottled Refill Bourbon Hogshead #1148 this year.

Color: White wine.

Nose: Wow! Spicy, lively, younger than expected. The cask impaired not a lot of characteristics on the whisky, so this is probably a refill Hogshead as well. Dusty and powdery, very dry, but not woody yet. In the back there is some perfume. Dry leaves and cloves. Toffee with mocha and a hint of lemon soap and late wood. Well maybe the cask was inactive, the whisky shure isn’t. Good balanced nose.

Taste: Sweet from the start, toffee, mocha and a hint of wood. Powdered sugar. Dangerously easy drinkable. Some red cherry candy. But the softness in this is fabulous. Dries out a little that adds to the character. Slightly imbalanced finish due to a shift into the sourness of wood, that doesn’t fit the rest of the palate. Finish isn’t too long.

Very nice whisky. I have to say that this may be another great find after those Ardmore’s. I see that a lot of Balmenachs from 1988, 1989 and 1990 are pretty good! Worth looking into some more. Recommended.

Points: 86

Brora 23yo 1981/2004 (48.6%, Ian MacLeod, Dun Bheagan, Sherry Butt #1513, 336 bottles)

Hello November! Looking outside, this month seems to bring us damn close to winter. Here we have a bottle of Brora 1981 bottled by indie bottlers Ian Macleod in their Dun Bheagan range. Ian MacLeod have a few other brands you might know. The Chieftains Range or “As we get it” for instance. The company is also the owner of the Glengoyne distillery, which is one of my favourites. Go!

Color: Orangey Gold

Nose: Green. Sweet, a type of lemonade sweetness. Musty and wet tea leaves. Slightly sherried and a hint of plain oak. Green apples. Vanilla ice cream. Perfumy. Some more wet cold black tea leaves and dried grass.

Taste: Thick and sweet. There are the tea leaves again. Syrupy. Sherry. Nicely round and precisely the right amount of wood to give it some body. Nice warming and the sweetness remains for the finish. Chewy plywood. Not overly complex and dangerously easily drinkable.

Brora is my number one Single Malt Whisky. It’s fabulous stuff and when it’s bad, like this one, it’s still a whole lot better than many others. Once there was a time there weren’t a lot of 1981 casks around, but today the market is swarmed by these, and some are better than others. The casks from this range 15xx are all pretty different. Butts, Puncheons and even some Hogsheads. So there should be some difference. I’ve tasted about four of those, one of them a cask sample of an unbottled cask, and all are comparable in quality. Nice, easy drinking whiskies. Not very complex though.

Points: 87

Ardmore 17yo 1993/2010 (56.2%, Gordon & MacPhail, Reserve, First Fill Bourbon Barrel #5747, 244 bottles)

Let’s do another Ardmore and compare it to the day before yesterday’s offering by The Whiskyman. We all know that 1992 is somewhat of a good vintage for Ardmore. So let’s see what happened in the distillery a year later. This 1993 was bottled by Gordon & MacPhail and they were so kind to do that for Van Wees of The Netherlands.

Color: Gold

Nose: The same meaty, slightly peaty nose as The Whiskyman’s offering. Nice soap with green apples and other fruits. Leather. Dryer and more powdery. A little more wood too.

Taste: Great fruity sweet start, more ashy. Somewhat less complex and a tad more sourness from the wood. Same kind of peat. The peat itself is more chewy and more farmy. Toffee. Some mint in this one too. Rare black fruits in the drier and warming finish, but overall, a little less impressive than yesterday’s Ardmore.

This is an Ardmore, no doubt about it. Just nose it and you’ll smell the family resemblance to The Ardmore bottled by the Whiskyman. It’s from another year, but the nose is quite similar. In the taste department it’s a bit less balanced, but still has a lot going for it. I’m always a sucker for those black fruits in the finish. Like old style Bowmore for instance.

These 90’s Ardmore’s seem to me to be the Brora’s of the modern age. Great stuff. Recommended. I definitively have to look into Ardmore some more. So hopefully to be continued.

Points: 87

Ardmore ‘Peat fighting man’ 20yo 1992/2012 (49.9%, The Whiskyman, 146 bottles)

Dominiek Bouckaert is known for being the billionth ICT guy that does something in whisky. When I started with whisky I was an ICT guy myself and of course was introduced to the stuff by another ICT guy. In fact I was introduced to Whisky by two of them. One was partial to Laphroaig (eventually my first self bought Single Malt), and the other was more into Talisker (I’m something of a Talisker-collector now).

Besides ICT, Dominiek took it upon himself to dabble a bit with distribution of the Malts of Scotland (A german bottler) and play a bit with Luc Timmermans doing their Hand Written Labels. and last but not least, Dominiek has his own label now. The Whiskyman. Nice psychedelic colorful labels with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge to music. Beatles and Stones to start with, and this is an example of the latter called peat fighting man.

Color: White wine

Nose: Sweet, citrussy and malty, but this time with depth. Fishy, salty peat, lemon and wet grass. Given some time, the lemons are replaced by oranges. Fresh. Smoke, soap and latex paint. Ultra clean wood and hay. All elements fit nicely together. Very bold statement. From the name Dominiek gave to this Whisky, I would have expected some kind of peat attack, but far from it. The peat is there, but fits in rather well instead of singing the lead. A bit like how Charlie Watts fits in the Stones.

Taste: Sweet with a lot of liquorice. Again, not in your face peat, but nice warming peat. It’s not quite farmy, but it has an organic quality to it. Toffee, tea and clean wood again. Fruity. Lots going on here. Nice, very nice.

Very well-balanced malt. Great find, well done Dominiek. Now we want another one!

Points: 89

Thanks go out to Jack for handing me this sample.

Glencraig 1970/1996 (40%, Gordon & MacPhail, Connoisseurs Choice, Map label, IF/CCC)

Ahhh, yes, Gordon & MacPhail never cease to amaze me! Next up is this Glencraig 1970/1996 (40%, G&M, Connoisseurs Choice, Map Label, IF/CCC), but now it turns out that the exact same bottle with the exact same code (IF/CCC) was also released with the Old Map label too. Why? Can we conclude from this that 1996 was the year the labels got changed?

Glencraig is the little sister of Glenburgie. Glencraig was the name of the whisky that was distilled from 1956 untill 1981 in a pair of Lomond Stills at the Glenburgie distillery. Another example of a true Lomond pair of stills existed at Miltonduff, where the subsequent whisky was named Mosstowie. Mosstowie was made between 1964 and 1981. A tad different was the case at Inverleven, where only the spirit still was of the Lomond type.

Color: Full Gold

Nose: Grainy. Apples. Every component from apple. Compote and waxy apple skin. Smells a bit thin. Did they reduce this too much? Very elegant wood shines through. Dusty vanilla, almost like smelling airborne powdered vanilla. Slight hints of orange juice. Creamy and some hard candy.

Taste: Wood is the main marker, but not bad. Sweet and fruity with liquorice. Actually the spiciness from the wood carries it. The grainy element is here too. This could have been a very old blend. Hints of french cheese, a Camembert. Funky, I love this cheesy element in this Whisky! Slightly warming. Given some time to breathe the whole gets more sweet. Still the wood stays with its licquorice element. Finish isn’t even bad. It stays longer than expected.

Yes, reduced too much. It is in places weak and watery, and it seems to me, that some areas of the taste got subdued a bit, wich affected the balance. Just let it breathe for a while in your glass and you will be rewarded. This is actually better than we think. Give it some time.

Points: 86

Dallas Dhu 1971/1994 (40%, Gordon & MacPhail, Connoisseurs Choice, Old Map label, ID/H)

Again a distillery that was founded in the Pattison crash year of 1898. Building was finished one year later and the first spirit that came off the still was on the 3rd of june 1899. It’s history is like many other distilleries. Closures during both world wars, and of course a big fire on the 9th of April 1939. The last day spirit came off the stills was the 16th of March 1983. 1983, a dark year when a lot of distilleries were closed. In 1986 the distillery was sold to Historic Scotland who run the place as a museum now.

Color: Full Gold

Nose: Fruity and sweet. Lightly woody. Fresh and a bit rural. Distant farmyness. Wet grasslands. Wet trees. That sort of thing. Hard powdered candy with some liquorice. Woody vanilla ice cream. Smoked bacon with cardboard and almonds.

Taste: Sweet and sherried. Cardboard in here too. There also seems to be some smoke in here. Watery vanilla ice cream. Some sourness of the wood is in the finish and later on some bitterness too. Nothing to worry about.

It’s very easy drinkable. But for me this is an example of those G&M’s from the past where the whisky didn’t stand the reduction to 40%. Also I find that the caramel coloring changed the original whisky considerably. Fortunately G&M know their market and don’t reduce their whiskies that much. Don’t know about the coloring though…

In the past I hated these Map labeled Connoisseurs whiskies and in fact I believe I don’t own even one. For me they got reduced too much and some are that much colored, that the caramel coloring changes the character of the whisky. The industry made you believe that it doesn’t alter the whisky, but having done some tests, it certainly does. It brings some sort of roundness and balance you get from most blends and it makes all of those Connoisseurs Choice Whiskies a bit similar in taste and definitively similar in color. Still the old Dallas Dhu that’s in here shines through.

Points: 86

Again Muchos Grazias to Nico for this sample.

Ardbeg 1999/2012 ‘Galileo’ (49%, OB, ex-Marsala and ex-Bourbon Casks, 15.000 bottles)

And here is Ardbeg. Last of the Islay whiskies to feature on Master Quill. The first Ardbeg is also the last one being released. Ardbeg Galileo. A Whisky that in part was matured in Marsala Casks.

Ok, two difficult words. Marsala? Galileo?

Marsala is a Sicilian red wine which mostly is sold for export as an fortified wine. Port and Sherry are also fortified wines. By the way, the Sicilians themselves drink it as… well a normal wine. We all know the Whisky market is booming, but the Sherry market isn’t. We also know that Sherry Butts and Puncheons made of european oak, are the best casks for maturing Whisky, and that good cask are getting scarse, because we, the consumer, don’t like Sherry too much. Sherry casks made of American wood, but foremost other casks, like Marsala, are used to see if they work.

Galileo Galilei was born on February 15th, 1564 and departed from this earth on the 8th of January, 1642. Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution [Wikipedia]. In the case of Ardbeg, Galileo was best known as an astronomer.

This bottling also commemorates the fact that Ardbeg is part of an Whisky experiment in space. On ISS some Ardbeg (and I guess it’s not the Galileo Whisky) in MixStixs are subject to experimentation on the topic of molecular maturation. (Can we mature whisky more quickly and thus make more money, by maturing it in space or at zero gravity? Or am I just being negative?)

Color: Reddish Gold

Nose: Obviously Peat and a lot of smoke. Non fishy, yet clean and almost industial smelling peat. Winey and wine related ash. Flowery and fresh wall paint. Sweet caramels, dried apricots and a hint of peaches on syrup.

Taste: Sweet. Ashy again. Wood and winey and a quick sour note. A little bit of liquorice and foffee. It actually tastes the same as it smells. Strange unbalanced soury finish with the cold contents of an ashtray and some mint lateron. There is not a lot happening in the finish. Astonishingly simple and short. The wine brings a sort of sourness that is all over the palate and isn’t doing the probably standard bourbon casked Ardbeg any good.

I hate to say it, but aren’t “Ardbeg” putting more money into marketing than in the actual Whisky? Don’t get me wrong, I love Ardbeg, just look at my top 25. Alas, this isn’t my Ardbeg anymore. It became some kind of hype, a brand, a handbag. It’s not bad, but I’m gonna pass on this. It makes my head spin.

I haven’t had any Marsala on it’s own yet, but tasting this Ardbeg, Marsala should be closer to Port than it is to Sherry. When using Marsala casks, don’t overdo it please!

Points: 82

Ladyburn ‘Rare Ayrshire’ 36yo 1974/2010 (46%, Mo Òr, Bourbon Barrel #2608, 261 bottles, 500 ml)

As said before this distillery was briefly opened between 1966 and 1975. As far as vintages go not a lot were released. Officially a lot of 1973’s were released. This vintage was also released by Blackadder and Duncan Taylor. Signatory Vintage released a lot of 1975’s (and one 1974). Two of these 1975’s I have reviewed on these pages earlier. Last but not least in this case, Cadenheads had some releases from the opening year 1966, but that was a long time ago in 1979 and 1980. Besides these few ‘players” not a lot of Ladyburns are to be found. Now here pops up a 1974. As far as I know, there are three 1974’s released. Cask 2607 by Signatory @ 53.9% ABV (in 2011). Cask 2604 by Dutch bottler Van Wees @ 52.1% ABV, (also in 2011), and from 2010, Cask 2608 by fellow Dutch bottler Mo Òr @ 46% ABV. It’s not hard to guess how much (or how little) this got reduced. Rumour has it, these 1974 are pretty good.

Color: Light Gold

Nose: Very aromatic. Sweet and clean. Pops out of the glass. Fruity and lively. Great combination of farmyness and fruity sweetness. On the nose it’s already a lot better than the 1975 Ladyburns I tried before. Nice wood too. Great greenish notes with gravy. If the taste will be anything like the nose, we’ll have a winner on our hands. When this get’s time to breathe the lively fruits make room for something more dark and broody. Meaty and some perfume. Very interesting.

Taste: Fresh, fruity (pineapple) and in nothing you would say this is such an old malt. Not as complex as the nose is. The initial fruits are very quickly replaced by caramelized wood. Finish is good and slightly woody. But considering it’s age you would definitively expect more wood in this.

Very likeable Ladyburn. The nose is very much better than the 1975 Signatories I tried before. Taste wise, maybe not so complex, but less woody than the Signatories. Very nice Ladyburn, one of the best that’s still around, ánd reasonably priced as well!

Points: 86

Thanks again to Henk for this sample.

Dailuaine 17yo 1980/1997 (43%, Hart Brothers, Sherry)

Dailuaine is a distillery that also is around for a long time. Founded in 1852 and rebuilt into a big distillery, for the time, in 1884. Just five years later Dailuaine became a landmark since it got Scotland’s first Pagoda roof, from Charles Doig. Also noteworthy is the fact that Dailuaine and Talisker distilleries merged in 1898. Again the year of the Pattison Crash. Mind you, Dailuaine and Talisker aren’t exactly across the street from one another.

Again we have here a distillery with a fire. But this fire forced the distillery to close for three years! This happened between 1917 and 1920. After that, like with many others, the years of expansion. Today Dailuaine is in the portfolio of Diageo and mainly used for the Johnnie walker blends.

Color: Light Gold.

Nose: Musty, vaguely sherried and sweet. Rather thin. Floral and perfumy, which do not necessarily go together. The nose is quite elegant. Vanilla. Nice clean sour oak. Barley and apple compote. Given some time, the floral part is overshadowed by the sour oak. Otherwise quite nice and good balance.

Taste: Well I got cannabis in there again! Typical sweet and sourness from applesauce. Honey. Very clean otherwise. The woodyness doesn’t need a lot of time to rear its head, pencil shavings. This isn’t bad. Without it, its character would be even less interesting. Still this has a lot of body. The sourness of the oak, dominates this finish. Reduction is ok on the palate, but makes the finish a bit weak and short.

A bit anonymous this one. Taking this blind it could have been anything.

Points: 85

Thanks go out to Serge for handing me this sample a long time ago.

Glenrothes 1979/2002 (43%, OB)

Glenrothes was founded in 1878 by James Stuart & Co. and some partners. James Stuart was the man who at that time also had The Macallan (since 1868). James soon developed some financial troubles, so he was thrown out of the partnership and returned, with his tail between his legs, to Macallan. The rest of the partners formed William Grant & Co. and finished the building of the distillery. The first spirit ran off the stills just one year after its foundation. The rest of the history seems rather volatile, having suffered several explosions and fires. (1897, 1903 and 1922). After this period of ruining the place, came the period of expansion. From the sixties through the eighties, consecutive pairs of stills were added. Now there are 10 in total. Today The Edrington group is the owner of Glenrothes, just as they do with The Macallan.

Color: Copper Gold

Nose: Sherried, Very round and sweetish. Toffee and caramel. Seaside freshness. A bit creamy and no off notes. Smells young like lots of other of these Glenrothes’ cannonballs. Dark chocolate. Reminds me of those cherry bonbons with liqueur. Distant hint of toasted wood.

Taste: Sweet and slightly sherried. The cherry bonbon is here too. Nice toffee flavour and syrupy texture. More character evolves in the glass after letting it breathe. Here come some hints of oak, bitterness and some woody spices. Menthol. Still it remains sweet and syrupy. Also, in my opinion, not a lot of development. Give it more time and the wood kicks in some more. More wood and bitterness that stay and define the finish. Quite unusual for a Glenrothes OB.

At 85 points this is the best OB I’ve tasted from Glenrothes, and look at this extra special luxury packaging!

Points: 85