2012 June » Pete Drinks

This week sees another island whisky, this time from Skye – situated off the west coast of Scotland, a little north of Islay. Talisker 57° North is named for the latitude of the distillery, but it’s also bottled at a robust 57% ABV.

It’s a nice golden colour in the glass. Unsurprisingly, the nose is all about that alcohol at first; give it a little time to clear though, and the character starts to show through – vanilla, toffee and a touch of iodine. Adding water, as ever, cuts through that alcohol and frees up the more subtle aromas – some gentle, fleeting smoke and light, almost perfumed floral notes.

Those toffee vanilla notes come through in the mouth as well, along with a much more pronounced peat smoke. You can certainly taste that 57%, but despite the intensity it manages to remain sweet and smooth. Some pepper comes in towards the end but only briefly; for all that intensity this is a whisky with quite a short finish.

Water reduces the intensity, making it more of a drinking than a sipping whisky. The flavours are still all there – the sweetness, the smoke, that pepper kick at the end – but they’re more reserved.

In either form, it’s delicious – I’m honestly not sure whether it’s better with or without the water. With water, I miss the raw intensity of the neat dram, but the control that comes with it makes it much easier to enjoy by the mouthful.

Kavey and I were recently invited to Dublin by Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board responsible for forging links between Irish producers and potential customers around the world. As well as showcasing excellent Irish produce, Bord Bia also aim to develop markets for Irish suppliers and bring the taste of Irish food to more tables world-wide.

As well as sampling some excellent food during our time there, we also got the opportunity to enjoy the liquid side of life with both beer and wine – although sadly not whiskey on this trip.

The beer list in L Mulligan Grocer, our first dinner stop, is impressively long and would be the envy of the finest London craft beer bar. Although there are plenty of international beers on offer, there are lots of great local brews to be had too – from the traditional (but delicious) Dark Arts Porter from Trouble Brewing, to 8 Degrees‘ Sunburnt which drips with enough New World hops to make any microbrewer proud.

Porterhouse are probably beyond the definition of a microbrewery by now, with a number of their own pubs, all serving their own range of their own seriously tasty brews. They even have a bar here in the UK, where hopefully I’ll get to make a more in-depth exploration of their beer.

If beer isn’t your cup of tea, the Dublin Wine Rooms have the most cunning device for selling wine that I’ve come across – dozens of bottles all plumbed into an automated system that allows you to buy by the glass or even just the sample measure, many for just a Euro or two. Sadly none of it is Irish wine (although there is at least one vineyard in Ireland) but it’s great fun.

Of course, there is that elephant in the room. And it’s almost obligatory to visit to the Guinness brewery – sorry, the “Storehouse”. I would call it a brewery tour, but you don’t actually see any brewing, you don’t hear much about the brewing process and the hop plants growing up the wall are plastic.

My initial thought was that this was a brewery tour the way Disney would do it, but that’s rather unfair to Disney. It was more like a Thorpe Park brewery ride. They did let us all pour (and subsequently drink) a pint though, so it wasn’t all bad. And yes, I really did pour that pint all by myself.

Don’t go there for the “experience” (unless you have a deep need to be told about the evolution of Guinness advertising through the years), but the views across Dublin from their Gravity Bar, perched on top of the brewery, are well worth seeing.

My thanks go to Bord Bia for the trip; I’m certainly looking forward to heading back to Ireland. Perhaps next time I’ll have to do some exploring of the other side of Irish drinking – whiskey!

Pete Drinks was a guest of Bord Bia and of L Mulligan Grocer, Porterhouse, Dublin Wine Rooms and Guinness.

Caol Ila is, as I’ve probably said too often here, one of my favourite distilleries. Not only do they have the prettiest distillery on the island, but I think their whisky sums up the Islay style perfectly – sweet, smokey, powerful.

Here we have an independent bottling from Murray McDavid; a company that knows a great deal about great whisky – in addition to bottling whisky from numerous distilleries, they also own Bruichladdich.

Bottled at a decent 52.5% ABV, it’s a surprisingly light colour in the glass, belying it’s years in the cask. The nose is very heavy on the alcohol, with some nicely restrained peat smoke about it – more the cooling embers than a roaring fire. Under that are some caramel notes and a hint of brine. Water keeps the smoke firmly in charge but reveals some more subtleties, with citrus fruit coming through.

In the mouth, the first thing that comes to mind is… wow! A brief initial sugar sweetness, almost immediately overwhelmed by a great peat hit, which blends with the heat of the alcohol to give you a big bonfire on your tongue. Behind that there’s also a trace of something sharp, fresh, citrus – lime peel perhaps. The finish is spectacularly long, the peat and the warmth lingering for what feels like forever.

As with the nose, water simply cuts back the alcohol burn a little, but preserves that wonderful peat smoke, the lingering finish, that lip-numbing power.

This is a magnificent dram that despite its power is gloriously smooth. It’s good for my liver that I don’t have an entire bottle here; it’s the kind of whisky that could easily disappear in the course of an evening or two.

As I may have mentioned once or twice(!) I somehow managed to win Saveur’s “Best Wine Or Beer Blog 2012″ award a few months ago. At the time, I thought the only prize was the warm fuzzy feeling of success and some new readers but I recently got an email asking for my mailing address and this morning, a real, physical prize arrived!

This is a magnificent engraved 8″ Wusthof cleaver. Now I’ve owned a couple of cheap and cheerful cleavers but this is a very different beast. The blade is around 3/16ths of an inch of beautiful, polished steel alloy, weighs around a ton and a half and is so sharp that I think if you dropped it on your foot you’d not only have no toes, but you’d have to go down to the next floor to get the thing back.

In short, it’s awesome.

Of course, I’m more of a drink blogger than a food blogger so I shall have to find a suitable use for it.

So thank you once again Saveur, both for the award and the totally amazing new bottle opener.

After enjoying their magnificent Queboid last year, Hardknott are a brewery that has been right at the top of my “try their other beers” list. Most of their beer that ends up in bottles is at the strong end of the spectrum, which suits me fine.

Granite is their barley wine – brewed at over 10% ABV, only once a year and in very limited quantities. It is also put into 500ml bottles which for such a strong beer is big – over 5 units!

So when I came across this bottle of Granite 2010 I snapped it up quickly, and then pushed it to the back of my beer cupboard in a bid to obey the instructions on the bottle to “avoid the temptation to consume before it’s best” – the label makes it clear that this is a beer that improves with age. But I’m rubbish at keeping delicious beer in the cupboard, so I opened it today – well in advance of the “irrelevant contradictory semantic” of the Best Before date (which is sometime in 2016!)

In the glass it’s such a dark red as to be almost black, with a nice if fairly short lived tan head on it. The nose is surprisingly gentle; there’s some sweet sugary molasses and hints of blackberry but none of the alcohol hit you’d expect from an ABV of 10.1%. As it warms up there’s even, oddly, a hint of cheese.

In the mouth, it’s a very different story. Dark prune fruit on the tip of the tongue, leading through to a bittersweet black treacle syrup that coats the inside of the mouth before releasing that alcohol heat. There’s more sticky, port-like fruit throughout and then just at the very end, when the stickiness is on the edge of becoming cloying, the big, deep bitter tail puts in an appearance.

As the bitterness nicely cleanses that syrup from your mouth, your lips still sticky from the initial sip, you feel the alcohol warming all the way down your throat and to your belly.

It’s another magnificent monster beer from Hardknott. I wonder how many more of the 804 bottles produced are still available?!

Following on from last week’s partly anonymous bottling, here we have a whisky which doesn’t hide it’s origins at all.

This is the Caol Ila 30 Year Old Single Cask, bottled at cask strength – a fairly robust 57.4% ABV – and obviously a fairly limited edition, being all from the one cask.

The nose is rich; light toffee, vanilla, and with some overripe tropical fruits there too. The peat is there, but subtle, and there are some dark rum notes to be found as well. With a splash of water, those fruit notes are pushed back a little, freeing up more of that Caol Ila smoke.

The alcohol is very big in the mouth; it carries a lot of the smoke through into the flavour. Under that there’s a fantastically rich, burnt toffee, dark fruit taste which lingers into an impressively long finish. Water cuts the alcohol down to reveal some dark honey sweetness, more fruit, hints of rum lurking underneath without shortening that marvellous long finish in any way.

This is everything you’d expect from a whisky with such an excellent pedigree – pure Caol Ila spirit aged beautifully.

Pete Drinks

Whisky Wednesday: Talisker 57 North

Drinking In Dublin

Whisky Wednesday: Caol Ila 17 Year Old 1990

A New Bottle Opener

Monster Beer: Hardknott Granite 2010

Whisky Wednesday: Master of Malt Caol Ila 30 Year Old Single Cask

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