Whisky Posts

FEW Bourbon

We start this glorious December Of Bourbon with a dram from FEW Spirits. Evanston, Illinois seems an unlikely place to find a distillery considering that it was a 'dry community' as recently as 1972. In these enlightened days there isn't a US State that doesn't have at least one distillery, however. FEW Bourbon is one of ...

The Glenrothes Vintage Reserve

The Glenrothes is a curious Speyside distillery; before a recent move away from 'age statement' whiskies, they were already cutting their own path with 'Vintage Single Malt'. The theory is simple; rather than bottling a whisky made in 2003 and calling it "12 years old", they instead name it "2003 vintage". Partly, this is a ...

Battle Of The Blends

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in judging the Battle Of The Blends, with two carefully anonymous blends put together under some intriguing rules. It's always a pleasure to see a Drinks By The Dram box dropping through my letterbox, but the content was even more ...

Nikka Taketsuru 21 Year Old

After setting up Suntory's Yamazaki distillery outside of Kyoto, Masataka Taketsuru left to found his own company which was to become Nikka. His new company built its first distillery, Yoichi, on the northern island of Hokkaido. Thirty five years later, a second malt whisky distillery was set up further south, on Japan's main island of ...

Smooth Ambler Old Scout Straight Bourbon

Smooth Ambler are a West Virginian distillery, set up in 2009. As is often the way with young distilleries, they produce a range of vodka and gins, but it's their whiskey that is the focus of my attention today. The folk at Master of Malt have an interesting Smooth Ambler taster set (now sadly discontinued) ...

Ardbeg Uigeadail

Whisky has a habit of being occasionally tricky to pronounce for us non-gaelic speakers - none more so than those that hail from the island of Islay. The island's name itself can trip up the uninitiated, correctly spoken as "eye-la" rather than the more obvious "is-lay". Of course, this problem works both ways; when ...

Tasgall 30 Year Old

Blended and supermarket own-label whiskies have a few things in common. There is an assumption that they are (a) cheap, and (b) rubbish While it's undeniably true that they tend to be cheaper like-for-like than single malts from named distilleries it certainly isn't true to say that they're all rubbish. I've been very pleasantly surprised by ...

Lost Distilleries Blend - Batch 6

I've tasted whisky from The Lost Distilleries before, and was pretty impressed by it. As the name suggests, these are blends made from whiskies made in distilleries that are no longer with us. Unsurprisingly, this results in some expensive bottles - around the £350 mark, if you can even find them. The Lost Distilleries Blend ...

Macallan Amber 1824 Series

The 1824 Series from Macallan is a range of sherry-aged whiskies. The range carries no age statement, and each whisky is named simply for its colour - from Gold through to Ruby. 1824, of course, refers to the year in which the distillery was originally founded. Macallan Amber 1824 Series is from the paler ...

Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt - The Journey

The word "hero" is massively over-used today. Being good at football isn't "heroic", and neither is being Miss World. Ernest Shackleton, however, was a genuine hero. In 1914, he set off on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. The whole story of that expedition is ...