Ardbeg’s had a spotty recent history but started officially started out in 1815, distilling on Ardbeg farm on the south coast of Islay. They produced whisky right through until the start of the 80s, when production started to slow until the distillery was mothballed in 1981. Allied Distillers, owners at the time, also owned Laphroaig and felt they had enough ongoing production from there, along with stored whisky from Ardbeg to meet their needs. It started producing small amounts of spirit again in 1989 but closed its doors seemingly finally in 1996, after several years of uncertainty. Allied put the distillery on the market, to great interest, with Glenmorangie buying it and reopening production in 1997. In 2004 Glenmorangie was acquired by the LVMH group (Moet Hennesy – Louis Vuitton) and Ardbeg went along as part of the package, giving it a big corporate backing. Glenmorangie and Ardbeg are generally left alone by the group, although they do get the backing money needed to push their increasingly well known brands. In addition they pool their technical resources, with Glenmorangie’s Bill Lumsden also acting as Ardbeg’s master distiller.

The whisky’s style is quite simple – very peaty. Using malt peated to 50ppm they are one of the peatier on the island and they relish in this distinction, pushing themselves as a peat lover’s dram.

Along with the reopening of the distillery Ardbeg also formed The Committee, a distillery ‘club’ with a bit more to it than many. Starting with the Very Young, their 6 year old bottling released in 2004, many of the releases have first been made available to the members of The Committee first, with their comments being solicited before general release. They go further than many distillery clubs with a members room at the distillery and all members receiving a book of Rules and Regulations, with special attention brought to paragraph 17:

17. The office of a member shall be vacated if:
He becomes of unsound mind to the extent that he develops a preference for a different spirit; or
He is directly or indirectly connected with the dilution of any dram of Ardbeg Islay Single Malt Whisky with any substance other than water.

I recently joined The Committee having heard that they were holding their 10th anniversary celebrations. I’d not tried any of their recent bottlings, but had a sample of one of their new releases and had been occasionally delving into SWMS bottlings when they appeared, so didn’t feel too bad about jumping on a free drink bandwagon a little late. The celebrations also showed me how they’ve upped their game online – the venue for both Edinburgh and London parties was revealed slowly via cryptic clues on twitter, with a goody bag going to the first person to guess -  annoyingly I didn’t have enough of a clue to even guess the London location and was about 2 minutes walk away with my guess as to the Edinburgh one.

In the end the London party was held at The Worx, on Heathman’s Road, near The White Horse in Parson’s Green (from the clues: ‘on the Ardbeg tube line’, ‘down south, however didn’t dare cross the river’, ‘Wretched Rector after a bumpy sail through Corryvreckan‘, ‘Poor Shortie [the Ardbeg dog and mascot] nearly got trampled by a fair stallion on the way’, ‘where the peat cutters of the heath reside’…obvious once you know the answer). The format of the evening was simple – turn up, have a cocktail and wander around the venue playing fairground games (I won a nice cashmere scarf on the hoop-la), eating food and drinking copious amounts of whisky.

The initial cocktail of the evening was simple and remarkably effective, especially as peaty whisky is a very difficult thing to mix effectively (and that act against paragraph 17, above). It was a combination of Ardbeg 10, crushed ice, simple syrup and bruised mint leaves. It was a bit like a sticky mojito with a slab of peat, but was also very refreshing and a great palate cleanser.

On the bar they had a selection of Ardbeg whiskies and I started off with the Ardbeg 10. On the nose there was a touch of acetone with the inevitable peat, along with a strong alcoholic sweetness,  a touch of woodsmoke and some butterscotch. To taste it was buttery with a sweet orangey peatiness and coal dust. Water dropped out a lot of the sweetness, compacted the coal dust into briquettes and brought out a woodsmoke finish. Not a subtle dram, but a good smoky, peaty whisky for those who like it quite sweet.

Next I tried the Rollercoaster, the most recent Committee bottling, bottled for the 10th anniversary, and one that won’t hit the general public because it’ll sell out before it has a chance. It’s a vatting of 10 casks, one from each year between 1997 and 2006 – Chris and Lucas have a complete list of the casks over on The Edinburgh Whisky blog. This was the one that I was most wanting to try, as I suspected it’d disappear before I got another chance. On the nose it had sulphur, sea salt, sea weed, oranges and a very hard edged peatiness, almost stony. To taste it had wood ash, eggs, more stony peat, coal smoke and a smokey sweetness. A bit of water toned everything down a bit and brought out more sweetness, with a hint of smoky bacon and sweet butter. I really rather liked it and have worryingly found that you can still buy it from the Ardbeg shop. I must resist.

Next I went for the Corryvreckan, another former Committee bottling that was brought in to replace Airgh name Beist, their previous top cask strength whisky. On the nose it had the BBQ chicken smell that I’m starting to think is my brain’s interpretation of woody wine/sherry influence, as well as white sherry, eggs and sea weed. To taste it was spicy with apples, burnt toffee, raisins and a lingering smoky peaty finish. Another good’un and one that deserved its win as best single malt whisky in this year’s World Whisky Awards, as well as numerous other gongs.

Finally, as I’d missed the last of the Supernova, Ardbeg’s super peaty whisky, that they had on the bar, I went for the Blasda. This one was described to me as “a lady’s dram”, with only 20ppm of phenols in the malt and a move to a lighter style. On the nose it was light and sweet with a hint of fruit that might have been cherry. To taste it was buttery and prickly, with sour peat and red berries. Most of all it was surprisingly light for a peaty whisky, especially an Ardbeg, even though this is the intention. Water brought out both cream and a bitterness from the wood as well as touch of cardboard and some struck matches. An interesting experiment, but not one that really grabbed my attention.

Overall it was rather a good night, although the free flowing whisky (there were tokens for some drinks, but by the end of the night the giant bottle of Rollercoaster they had on a smaller bar was being tipped into any glass that came near) meant that there was some drunkenness. If Jerry, the nice Glaswegian chap who tried (unsuccessfully) to teach me some Scottish toasts, is reading this then please drop me an email – I owe you a beer or two and I have the glasses you won, you left them in the pub. Yes, there was a pub after, which was probably a mistake.

Some gorillas. It was safer not to ask.

While I may have missed the previous release of Supernova, I added a sample of this year’s one to my most recent Master of Malt order and thought I’d add it on the end here. Supernova is intended to be the peatiest whisky that the distillery produces, using 100+ppm malt, and the last release had a hint of the Marmite effect to it – many people didn’t seem to rate it, but those who liked it really liked it. After the success of the last bottling they’ve rolled out a new one for this year – Supernova 2010. It’s pale gold and has no age statement, but with the intensity of flavour I would guess it has a good range of whisky in it. On the nose it has (as expected) lots of peat, along with salted butter, fresh mulch and some wet grass. To taste it’s spicy and every bit of its 60.1%. It starts with a big burst of sherried caramel sweetness and then moves through coal dust to a bitter burnt wood finish. In the middle there’s a bit of a fizzy citrus flavour which the chaps at Master of Malt describe as being like Starburst chews. I see what they mean but a) still reckon they should be called Opal Fruits and b) reckon that the flavour is more like fizzy orange and lemon Chewits. Water kills a lot of the bitterness as well as bringing out more of the fizzy fruit. This release has generally been considered inferior to the last one from what I’ve read, but as I didn’t get to taste the old one I can only assume it was really good (it does now change hands for about £125 a bottle) – I rather liked this one, with its peatiness being mellowed, but not too much, by some of the younger flavours and with a depth that I didn’t necessarily expect.

Ardbeg 10
Single malt Islay Scotch whisky, 46%. ~£35

Ardbeg Rollercoaster
Single malt Islay Scotch whisky, 57.4%. £50 from the Ardbeg shop

Ardbeg Corryvreckan
No age statement
Single malt Islay Scotch whisky, 57.1%. ~£60

Ardbeg Blasda
No age statement
Single malt Islay Scotch whisky, 40%. ~£45

Ardbeg Supernova 2010
No age statement
Single malt Islay Scotch whisky, 60.1%. ~£80

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It is well known that I consider the adding of whisky to any situation a positive thing and it would be much remiss of me to exclude desserts from the list of situations. So, when the planning of a pudding for this year’s NomNomNom cooking competition came up there was really only one choice for me – Cranachan.

Cranachan is a deceptively simple pud – whipped cream with a touch of whisky, toasted oats and raspberries. It’s the scottish Eton Mess and with the recent revival of that dish at the finer end of dining cranachan has tagged along, adding a touch of regional flair to the creamy dessert spectrum. However, there are a number of variables to consider, so using my finely honed scientific mind (poetic license) I decided to do some experimenting before putting together a final recipe.

First up was the fruit. One of the aims of NomNomNom is to use locally sourced and seasonal ingredients where possible, and while raspberries are in season I thought it’d be good to add a twist. One of my favourite summer fruits is the gooseberry – we had a bush in the garden when I was a kid and due to a distinct lack of enthusiasm for them in my family I pinched many straight from the branch, revelling in the stolen painful sourness. I didn’t want to exclude the raspberry, so my first experiments pitted it against stewed gooseberries (cooked on a low heat in some simple syrup until they started to break up) and quartered raw gooseberry. The plain gooseberry had a good crunch, but was a bit too tart for the sweet dessert that we planned; the raspberry was good and classic, but again slightly too sour; the stewed gooseberry was perfect – a centre of caramel sweetness surrounded by the rounded sourness of the gooseberry.

Next was the oats. Plain toasted oats were a bit boring and the large quantity of floury bits in the bag I bought led to a dusty oatiness that wasn’t really what I was after. A quick think later and a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar went into a dry pan with the toasting oats. I stirred it carefully as it heated, keeping the oats moving so they wouldn’t burn, until the sugar melted, at which point it came off the heat and I stirred a bit more frantically to mop up the dust to make a simple, crunchy, sugary granola. This was a bit of a winner and I may have eaten most of it on its own once it had cooled.

Finally we came to the cream – whipping cream is easy, but what whisky should I use? I dragged out 4 to choose from – Greenore 8 year old, Laphroaig Cairdeas, Benromach Organic and Yamazaki Sherry cask. The Greenore was, as might be expected, very light and added a pleasant whisky sweetness to the cream without overpowering it too much; the Cairdeas lost a lot of its flavours when combined with cream but the iodine peatiness came through, which was quite unpleasant; the Benromach was almost excellent, but the main flavour to cut through the cream was the woodiness of the new barrels used for maturing, overpowering the sweetness I was looking for; the Yamazaki was also really good, but not what was needed here – if I ever need to make a sherry trifle then this will be going in with the cream, as it had a very concentrated sour sherry flavour that cut through the fat. In the end I decided on the Greenore, although this would mean that I was making a Scottish dessert using English cream, English gooseberries, English oats and Irish whiskey, which felt slightly sacrilegious.

It’s said that no plan survives contact with the enemy and my recipe was no different. On the day minor issues with exploding stewed gooseberries (they go everywhere when you drop a bowl onto a hard work surface) were quickly swept under the carpet (almost literally) and plans for using Greenore were discarded when my cooking buddy Melanie, the other half of our most excellent team – The Tarragons of Virtue, pulled out a miniature of Glenmorangie 10 year old that she’d got from work – the combination of sweetness and wood cut through the cream perfectly making it the obvious choice. Melanie also added a touch of icing sugar to the cream while whipping to add a little more sweetness.

Recipe:
Some whisky
Some cream
Some oats
Some brown sugar
Some sugar syrup
Some gooseberries

Add the gooseberries to a pan and fill to half way up their side with a 1:3 sugar:water syrup. Cook over a low heat until they are a gooey sauce, although with some gooseberry lumps still present, and then leave to cool. Toast some oats in a frying pan with some soft brown sugar, making sure to keep the oats moving to stop them burning. Once the sugar has started to melt remove the pan from the heat and stir until the sugar starts solidifying again. Leave them to cool, breaking them up with a spoon a bit before using them. Whip some cream until light and fluffy and fold in a little icing sugar and some whisky until it tastes good.

To assemble: place a spoon of stewed gooseberry in the bottom of a serving glass. Fold together some cream and oats until slightly crunchy, then add some gooseberry and stir once to give a gooseberry swirl. Spoon into the serving class and top with more oats and a quartered fresh gooseberry.

We didn’t win, but I did eat a lot of whisky cream.

NomNomNom is an annual cooking competition and charity raffle in aid of Action Against Hunger. I also did it last year and didn’t win, ho hum. There will be a post up about our efforts on the day on the main NomNomNom website soon, along with some audience award voting. Please vote for me and Melanie, we’re lovely.

There’s also a post on my other blog about our main course – a stuffed pork loin. It was very nice.

Now be good and go and buy some raffle tickets.

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The Whisky Squad is a monthly meetup set up by Andy of Good Drinks Etc and Jason B. Standing to be more informal than most of the tastings out in the wild, with a focus on learning, talking about whisky in a small group and generally having a good time. With assistance from Darren, The Whisky Guy, as whisky expert (a title he veraciously denies, despite working for Master of Malt and having hours of whisky related anecdotes to roll out at the drop of a segue) and moustache wearer extraordinaire, they take over the upstairs room at The Gunmakers (thanks to Jeff the easily bribed with whisky landlord) on the first Thursday of each month to taste through a bunch of whiskies focused around a theme. This month’s was Islay, Andy having just returned from a weekend up there and thus laden with bottles.

Islay is one of the most concentrated areas of whisky production in the world, with 8 distilleries dotted around the 240 square miles of the island floating just off of the Kintyre peninsula on the west coast of Scotland. Famed for their peaty whiskies it’s a bit of a whisky connoiseurs paradise, with each of the distilleries a short drive from each other and each offering something quite different.

I wandered along certain that my worst day of hayfever in about ten years wouldn’t hinder the tasting of pungent island malts. However, within seconds of the first dram being placed in front of me my worst fears were realised – I could smell nothing at all. Even the strongest snort did nothing but hurt the back of my nose as the physical reaction to the alcohol remained, but no twitch of sensory cells to inform me of what I was sniffing. Luckily, Andy acted as my seeing nose dog, pinging me tasting notes, and I grabbed a couple of samples to take home and try later on.

First up was a sample from Master of Malt to keep us going while Andy and Darren kicked off the evening with some talk of Islay and the makings of whisky. The Master of Malt 12 Year Old Islay is a blend of malts from the island and is peated to about 15ppm. On the nose it has bitter-sweet peat, a touch of sweet wood oil and digestive biscuits. To taste the peat is more subdued and joined with a hint of woodsmoke and wet cardboard. There’s a bump of malty sweetness in the middle, with a touch of orangey citrus, before a it trails off into a subdued, short caramel orange finish. Water brings out some vanilla sweetness to fight against the wood smoke, adding a prickly damp bonfire edge to the taste. It’s smoky and peaty, with a hint of citrus and some sweetness – a classic example of what is thought of as a ‘typical islay malt’, even if such a statement doesn’t really mean anything, as the whiskies to follow will demonstrate.

As a special treat before we started the tasting proper was a very small amount of Master of Malt Bowmore 26 Year old, accompanied by a parma violet. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything off the glass other than a burnt nose, but it was quite obvious to everyone else why a parma violet had accompanied it – it has a distinct sweet violet smell sitting in amongst the other flavours of a sweet shop.

The whiskies that are put on for the tasting, excluding random samples and donations, are tasted blind, with paper wrapped around the bottles to obscure labels and details, in an attempt to remove prejudices and prejudging of the flavours. Unfortunately for me I recognise the bottle shapes of most Islay distilleries, but having no sense of smell this was my main way of trying to work out what everyone was drinking before the big reveal.

Next up was a bottle that I didn’t recognise, the Bunnahabhain 18 Year Old. The Bunnahabhain (bunna-har-ven) distilleryis unique amongst those of the island in that its standard expression is pretty much unpeated , coming in at 1-2ppm. They do, however, produce a good quantity of peated spirit but other than for special bottlings this generally goes to other companies for blends, including Black Bottle which it makes up a significant component of. Andy had picked this up at the distillery, along with an armful of leaflets, maps, tasting note cards and other assorted propaganda, and had really liked it due to it being so different to the peat heavy assortment that he tried up until then. From everyone else’s tasting notes it had cheap chocolate brownies, honey and sherry trifle on the nose and was dry and woody to taste, with a salty buttery finish.

To follow this we moved on to the Bruichladdich Peat, a whisky that was difficult to tell from the bottle shape alone due to the distillery’s habit of doing so many releases – it was suggested around the room that it’s almost as if whenever Jim McEwan, the production manager, has a crazy idea they drop what they’re doing and make a batch of it. The Peat is a back to basics version of Bruichladdich – peated to ~35ppm, matured in bourbon casks for an unspecified amount of time and bottled without any of the finishes that have become their trademark in recent times. The notes I have for this are that it combines peat and wood smoke on the nose, with a nice balance of the two combined with some sweetness and dry vanilla wood to taste. One that I want to revisit, as I’ve been a fan of all the ‘Laddies I’ve tried so far.

This one brought up a point for discussion – the difference between peat and smoke. As peat is introduced into the malt by way of smoke people often assume that the two flavours are the same, but there is a distinct difference. In addition to peatiness there is also smokiness in the flavours introduced by the barrel used for maturation and this is a different kind of smoke to that introduced by the peat. Generally the peat will bring in more medicinal flavours, such as the TCP-like tang that Laphroaig is known for, or a sweet smoke, such as with Bowmore, whereas the wood will bring in more campfire tastes and smells. As ever, the various different bits of the whisky making process, from water to finishing, all have their effect on the finished product, all working together to produce interesting flavours.

After this I threw my contribution to the evening into the ring – the remains of my young Kilchoman sample, which Darren identified as having been in wood for 6 months. Kilchoman have recently produced their first 3 year old bottlings to quite a lot of acclaim (I have a bottle of an upcoming Royal Mile Whisky single cask bottling reserved, as recommended by Jason, which I’m very much looking forward to) and their new spirit is a great indicator of how Islay whiskies mature in the barrel. I usually describe this as tasting like ‘cattle feed and death’, but with a bit more delicacy it has lots of malty grain with sweet peat and a hint of woodiness that isn’t particularly developed in this young sample.

After that interlude we got back on to chosen whiskies with a Caol Ila 10 year old ‘Unpeated’ expression. Strangely for an evening of Islay malts half of the whiskies we tried weren’t heavily peated, with this one having little or no peat in at all, rather than the usual ~15ppm that the distillery uses. I grabbed a dram of this to take home, Caol Ila being a whisky that I’ve been intrigued by in the past (with a cask strength Tokaji finish being one of the most orangey whiskies I’ve ever tasted). On the nose there’s candy floss, a wisp of smoke and something almost toffee appley. To taste it has dry prickly wood, orange juice concentrate (a flavour that I’ve found to be especially strong in the Caol Ila’s I’ve tried) and sweet wood smoke. It’s cask strength, at 65.8%, so can happily take some water which opens the nose to add more oil and sweaty socks and a slab of sweetness to the taste, along with some coal dust, bitter oak, sweet butter and orchard fruitiness. A fearsome dram neat, but one that mellows nicely with water.

The citrus nature of many of the Islay whiskies seems a bit strange, but Darren explained it as coming from the saltiness inherent on being matured on the island. The salt interacts with the wood of the barrels creating citrus-like flavouring compounds which are picked up by the wood, thus introducing not only briney notes into the whisky but also the lemon and orange flavours that are often present.

Next was the last of the night, which by a process of elimination was the distillery only edition that Andy had promised us – Lagavulin Distillery Only 2010. This is a cask strength bottling that you can, as the name suggests, only get from the distillery. 6000 bottles were produced and it was released in time for this year’s Feis Ile. Along with the limited nature of the bottling it’s also quite special as it was finished in port casks. On the nose it’s pure Lagavulin, with seaweed, brine, a background of sweet peat and a hint of meatiness. To taste it’s spicy, with the port wood very obvious at the back of the mouth. It has seafood risotto, seawater, caramel covered twigs and a mixed spice tail. A drop of water takes the edge off of the prickle, bringing out big sugary sweetness, revealing the background woody savouriness and adding a chunk of smoky sweetness, like burned sugar. This is a really rather special dram and one that it’s worth going to the distillery to grab.

An interesting array of whiskies, with only 2 of the 4 actually being particularly peaty, showing just how big a range Islay actually produces. The guys know how to run an evening and having finished the tasting the conversation continued in the Gunmaker’s bar until the pub closed. I’m signed up for the next one (and am even missing a day of the GBBF to make sure I can go) which should be an evening of summer whiskies with Diageo’s Colin Dunn, who led the Talisker tasting I went to last year, which promises to be an event – putting Colin in a small room strikes me as a recipe for enthusiasm overload, in a good way.

Master of Malt 12 Year Old Islay
Islay Blended Malt Whisky, 40%. £34.95 from Master of Malt

Master of Malt 26 Year Old Bowmore
Single cask Islay malt whisky, 53.4%. £99.95 from Master of Malt

Bunnahabhain 18 Year Old
Islay Single Malt Whisky, 43%. £48.95 from Master of Malt

Bruichladdich Peat
No age statement Islay Single Malt Whisky, 46%. £31.95 from Master of Malt

Caol Ila 10 Year Old ‘Unpeated’ 2009
Islay single cask single malt whisky, 65.8%. £51.95 from Master of Malt.

Lagavulin 2010 ‘Distillery Only’
Port wood finished Islay single malt whisky, 52.5%. Only available from the distillery – £70 for one or two for £130.

If you want to come along to a Whisky Squad tasting then keep an eye on their website and sign up when they announce the next event. The group is small (~15) and it’s first come first served, so you need to be quick. They do run a waiting list so it’s worth letting them know even if they have run out of spots.

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I’d known of the existence, although not the composition, of the drink for many years, having heard it mentioned in a film sometime. It was embedded in my brain as a drink to be ordered in a hotel in the USA, basking in hot weather, perched at a bar, wearing a shirt unbuttoned a little bit too far down, messily eating shrimp cocktails and hearing the life story of man who travelled the 48 contiguous states selling brushes to gullible housewives. I wasn’t sure what a whiskey sour was, or even really what a shrimp cocktail was other than it involved something that looked like prawns and McDonald’s special sauce, but it stuck in my head as a romanticised drink attached to my obvious future as an internationally jetsetting business man.

Luckily for the first few years of my career I did do quite a lot of travelling to the USA, although confined to Connecticut (with occasional jaunts to New York), and shortly after starting I was confronted with an opportunity to turn my American dream into reality. I was visiting to attend my company’s first worldwide engineering conference, dragging all of us computer pounding folk from all over the world together in a hotel and letting us talk crap together for a few days. These days that’s a logistical nightmare, with our last conference involving me coordinating 62 flights from the UK as part of our 550 strong worldwide party, but back then it was a much smaller affair and all 5 of us from UK turned up a few days early, staying in the Old Greenwich Hyatt Regency.

The Gazebo Bar, from the Hyatt website

This was my first proper US hotel and being used to the more family run affairs found in the seaside resorts of the UK and the plasticky package holiday filled hell holes of the Mediterranean it was a bit of a shock – the hotel is an enclosed courtyard containing a small forest, complete with river. My room’s window opened onto the inner courtyard, a 100m long ‘room’, and looked down onto the leafy canopy. Downstairs, once you had walked over a bridge to it, there was the ‘Gazebo Bar’ which I found myself sitting at on my first night. To my right were a couple of guys, shirts unbuttoned just a bit too far, messily eating shrimp cocktails, drinking Martinis and laughing. This was the time for me to unfurl my dream – I ordered a whiskey sour. Rather than the look of respect I expected from the barmen, a young englishman asking for a drink with such history should inspire something, I got a cherry plonked in a glass with a handful of crushed ice, some whiskey and a cloudy green liquid that squirted out of a postmix tap.

It tasted marvellous.

I may have been assisted back to my room by my boss that night, his offer to buy me a drink leading to the largest ’shot’ I have ever experienced being poured, but my love of the whiskey sour continued. However, after a while it waned as I spoke to barstaff and realised that I was just getting something about as sophisticated as a whiskey and coke, and that the green sour mix that they were pouring was just citrus flavoured sugar water. I then discovered that not all American beer was rubbish and the whiskey sour disappeared from my internal menu, replaced by the works of Magic Hat, Dogfish Head and the questionable output of the Southport Brewing Company. This weekend I suddenly remembered their existence and having a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of limes to hand I decided to have a go at constructing one.

The first step to making a whiskey sour is the creation of the sour mix. I did a bit of research to find out what was actually in this green nectar and found that in general it is just powdered citric acid, green food colouring and sugar (with foaming agents), rehydrated and then poured into an unsuspecting glass. However, ‘real’ sour mix is not hard to create – equal parts of citrus juice and sugar syrup. As ever, proportions are quibbled over and some like to add egg whites to make sure that you get a foamy drink when it’s shaken, but I decided to leave that out (especially as my simple syrup is quite sugary and foams nicely on its own with a bit of a hard shake). My first attempt used a couple of rather wrinkled limes and tasted a bit stale, but I went out with a mission to find good citrus fruit and obtained 3 limes and a couple of lemons to make attempt number 2.  Unfortunately my mission didn’t lead to my finding a juicing device (specifically something looking like this, but I couldn’t even find a standard fruit reamer) so I squished my fruit using a hand and a fork (which is a) painful on the squishing hand after a bit and b) really painful if you have a cut on your hand) producing about 200ml of juice. I then mixed this with 200ml of syrup and made it up to 500ml with more syrup and some water (previously poured on the skins of the squished fruit and shaken around a bit to get as much citrusyness as I could), tweaking the taste to be sweet and sour, but not too strong.

To construct the whiskey sour I put 50ml of whiskey in a shaker with 100ml of sour mix and a good handful of ice. I shook until the ice had cracked into smaller pieces and it had all gone a bit foamy, serving it unstrained in a round bottomed tumbler (cos it looks pretty) and garnished with a cocktail cherry.

It tasted marvellous.

This post was written while sitting on my balcony, drinking the pictured whisky sour and listening to The Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main Street, which I think might actually be the best album ever created. It’s getting cold now though, so I’m going inside.

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One of the way that people judge whisky is by its age. Now at first that seems quite sensible but, as the press release I just got sent by Chivas brothers points out, not everyone actually knows what a whisky’s age actually means. By the current regulations for most whiskies in the world (including at least Scottish, American, Irish and Indian whisk(e)y and probably most others) the age statement on the bottle has to list the minimum age of the whiskies that are used to make it. So in a blend like Teachers, which is specifically marked as 8 years old, you can be certain that no whisky that has gone into the bottle is less than 8 years old even if you can’t tell much more than that. When you get to the world of premium whiskies people take a lot more notice of the number on the bottle.

Single malt whisky just means that all the whisky in the bottle is made from malted barley at one distillery. Any whisky that isn’t a single cask, and it’s very rare for a single cask whisky not to be marketed as such, can come from any number of different barrels of varying ages, blended together to produce a consistent product. The consistency is the important bit, as every cask will taste a bit different due to differences in the wood, location in the warehouse, temperature variation during maturation, wind direction, number of times knocked by a fork-lift going round the corner, phase of the moon and pretty much anything else. This inconsistency leads to the thriving market in single cask whisky bottlings as well making the role of master blender something more than a button pushing job. In order to maintain a constant output of consistently flavoured product the blender needs to not only understand how to mix the various different whiskies together to make something that tastes nice, but also tastes the same as the last batch of thousands of bottles. This involves painstaking management of casks, constant tweaking of the recipe on a batch by batch basis and forethought when it comes to laying down spirit to mature to ensure that there is enough of the correct flavour components to make the whisky that’s needed. It’s an impressive job and one that people pay tribute to every day without realising it when they open a new bottle of whisky and it tastes the same, or at least pretty much the same, as the last one of the same type.

So, what am I wiffling on about? The key point of Chivas Brothers’ new campaign is that the age of whisky is important, which I agree with, and that older whisky is better, which I don’t. To be totally accurate they said this:

One of the greatest influences on the flavour of whisky comes from maturation. Much of the complexity of Scotch whisky comes mainly from its time in oak casks in Scotland; with outstanding spirit and excellent wood management, it follows that the longer the maturation period, the more complex the whisky.

Which is pretty much what I said if you equate complexity with quality, which I don’t necessarily agree with.

In the end all an age statement gives you is an indication of what has been done to the whisky. Something marked as a 5 year old might be made up of a splash of younger whisky and a body of a dodgy 40 year old that got lost at the back of the warehouse until its alcoholic percentage had dropped below 40%, meaning that it couldn’t be sold as whisky on its own any more – a dash of young strong whisky and you’ve got something that can go to market; a 30 year old can consist entirely of some 4th fill barrels that have imparted little but overly woody notes to a dodgy batch of spirit; a 5 year old can have sat in very active wood in the corner of the warehouse with the most constant temperature, maturing extra quickly and producing a fantastic whisky (one of my favourite whiskies of all time was a 5 year old single cask Arran that has more complexity than many whiskies 2 or 3 times its age) – you just don’t know.

Over the years the distilleries have generally settled on the convention that the older the whisky the better it is. This is understandable when you realise that every extra year in the barrel means that more spirit evaporates, another year of ‘rent’ needs to be paid for the storage and another year without realising the capital tied up in the whisky has gone by. This all adds up making older whisky more expensive no matter how good it is – as we all know though, expense doesn’t necessarily equal quality.

In general the distilleries try to ensure that their more expensive bottlings are better quality, but in recent times there has been a move towards putting out both younger whiskies and those without age statements. From Macallan’s Whisky Makers editions to Compass Box’s blends, from Chivas Brothers’ own Aberlour A’bunadh to Laphroaig’s Quarter Cask, more and more producers are leaving behind age statements in favour of producing whisky with certain characteristics and flavours that they hope will appeal to consumers. It strikes me as strangely opportune that just as this fashion is starting to catch on with other distillers Chivas Brothers, who claim to have 85% of the market share of whisky aged of 21 years, decide to come out with a campaign to start placing more importance on the age statement again. I was starting to like Pernod Ricard, the Chivas owners – Phil Huckle, the Chivas brand ambassador, seems like a nice chap and their whisky is generally pretty good (with the A’bunadh especially being very good indeed [in my opinion]), but I don’t like this latest move.

As ever with whisky you can’t tell all that much from the outside of the bottle. You can sometimes see the distiller, sometimes see the age, sometimes even see what sort of barrels it has been in (although with the regulations on what denotes a ‘cask finish’ being quite lax my idea of merely pouring whisky through a funnel made from an old sherry barrel into a holding tank may well count as a legal finish) but you can’t be certain what the whisky will taste like until it’s in a glass in front of your face. Just as we were moving to a more mature feeling market of whisky description, with age just being another factor in describing the process by which it was made, this feels like a regressive move from a big player in the market with enough marketing clout to push things back by years.

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Arran is an island that I visited a few times as a child – popping over on the ferry (and on The Waverley at least once) when up in Scotland visiting people in Ayr. I don’t remember much about it apart from always asking if we could back every time we visited. When I joined the SMWS a few years back I saw that they had some bottlings from Arran and rather liking the style bought most of them until recently. I also picked up one of the distillery bottlings – the limited edition Peacock – and rather liked that as well, all of which has led me towards wanting to try more of their whiskies.

The Arran distillery is quite young, having been built from scratch at Lochranza in the north of the island in 1995, and is currently the island’s only distillery. The Isle of Arran itself is in a rather unique location, sitting between the mainland and the peninsula of Kintyre, home of Campbeltown whiskies, experiencing a relatively constant and mild climate thanks to the influence of the Gulf Stream. This helps in the maturation of the whisky, with the constant temperature increasing the effect of time, with Arran whisky often passing as older than it is (as I discovered with one of my SMWS bottlings – 5 years old, the colour of Irn Bru and tasting as rich as something two to three times its age).

It’s quite difficult for new single malt focused distilleries to pay for themselves to start with, with 3 years before you can call your spirit whisky and generally 10 years before you can start putting a ‘regular’ bottling on the shelves. To help augment the income from limited young bottlings (such as the SMWS ones that I tried, as well as ones from other independent bottlers) they built a visitors centre, opened by The Queen, and have become part of the tourist trail on the island. As a thankyou to Her Majesty they gave a couple of casks to Princes William and Harry which they’ve been looking after ever since, as seen in this video from back in April:

The distillery turns 15 years old this week and to celebrate they are having an open day on July 3rd with various events during the day, a ceilidh in the evening, a special whisky cask aged beer from the rather good local Arran Brewery, 3 single cask bottlings from 1995 and a generally available special edition bottling, but more about that later.

The distillery uses barley that is malted offsite and farmed on the east coast of Scotland between Dundee and Montrose. They experimented with using local barley but it didn’t work particularly well, leading to their initial importing of pre-ground unpeated malt from the mainland. Having decided that they needed more control over the grinding of the barley a mill and silo were built on site in 2007, allowing less frequent deliveries and grinding on the premises.

Their stills are quite squat, with long, thin, tall necks stretching up 3-4m to a right angled lyne arm, giving a light and fruity spirit. Eddie had managed to get some new make to try and there were a few glasses dotted around the tables. On the nose it was sweet with mulchy grain, hay, sweet malt and a hint of sugary fruit – maybe pineapple. To taste it was very buttery in mouthfeel, with lots of sweet cereals.

The first whisky to taste of the night was the Arran 10 year old. A mix of about 80% oloroso sherry cask matured whisky and 20% bourbon, this is the latest iteration of their ’standard’ malt, first produced in 2006 and taking over from the 8 year old which had been the standard until then. Since the first release they have slowly changed the proportions of bourbon and sherry oak, starting with 100% bourbon and potentially moving to a 100% sherry in the near future. It’s bottled at 46%, and, as with all of the distillery’s whiskies, has no added colouring and is not chill filtered. On the nose it has candle wax, salt, milk chocolate, raisins and some lemon sherbert. To taste it has polished oak floors, woody spice, a touch of dried fruit and a dry woody finish. Water opens it up a bit with sweet honey, big tannic winey wood, a hint of chocolate and a spicy finish.

Next up was one of their Icons of Arran bottlings – The Rowan Tree, the follow-up to the Peacock that I have in the cupboard. It’s named for the local profusion of Rowan trees, not a particularly common species in Scotland, more often being found in Scandinavia. It’s bottled at 46% as well and made up of whisky from a batch of 10 second fill sherry butts, producing about 6000 bottles of which 600 are allocated for sale in the UK. On the nose it’s slightly briny with spice and dried fruit. To taste it has black pepper, cumin and a touch of curry, as well as raisins and a dry spicy finish. Left in the glass for a bit some flavours of grass and stones started to emerge. With water more wood popped out and the fruit turned to candy, with sticky boiled sweets behind the oak.

Third of the evening was one of their cask finishes – The Arran Madeira Finish. This is bottled at 50% and consists of whisky matured for 8 years and then finished for 10 months in madeira casks. This is part of a limited run of 6300 bottles, but the cask finishes they tried was so popular that they’ve decided to compliment the growing Arran range with 3 of them as regular bottlings – Port, Sauternes and Amarone (a wine that I’d not heard of, made using partially dried grapes to concentrate the flavour). This one was quite spicy on the nose with dried and tropical fruit (pineapple, apple syrup/maybe mango). To taste it had a dry sweetness to start, quickly becoming fruity and syrupy before tailing off into a spicy wood finish. Water brought out more syrup on the nose, and added more wood and a touch of milk chocolate to the taste.

Being so young a distillery it’s quite difficult to have a wide range of whiskies at traditional ages. They will shortly be releasing their oldest regular production whisky – a 14 year old which we couldn’t try as it was still in the cask finishing its maturation. This will lead to the standard range of whiskies being the 10 and 14 year olds as well as the three cask finishes mentioned above. In addition to the single malts they also do a cream liqueur, Arran Gold, and a pair of blends, Robert Burns and Lochranza, the latter of which has been on my ‘to try’ list for a bit. In a few more years they will have an 18 to round out the age selection, but from there who knows what they might do.

In the meantime they’ve already been continuing their experimentation and the fourth whisky we tried was very much in that line – The Arran Pomerol Finish. Pomerol is an area in France near to Bordeaux known for producing expensive wine, making this an interesting finish both for the quality of the previous occupant of the barrel (a wine from Château La Conseillante) as well being a red wine finish, not particularly common due to it being hard to produce one that works well. This one is bottled at 50% and has a pinkish tinge that is surprising for having only been in the wine cask for 6 months. Again this is finished after 8 years in oak, split 50/50 between bourbon and sherry and married together before being put in the wine barrels. On the nose it is quite meaty with lots of heavy red wine woodiness. To taste it has a thick sweetness with more meaty wininess, hints of icing sugar, spice and a touch of lemon, rounding off to a woody finish. Water brings in more sweet vanilla and fruit but also more sour wood. Left in the glass for a while it opens up further with more sherry sweetness and red wine heaviness coming through. A bit of a divider this, with most of the room really not liking it. I was more on the dislike side, although as it developed in the glass it grew on me.

Next to taste was a bit of a treat – The Arran 15th Anniversary Bottling. This one is being specially produced for this week’s birthday, with 5640 bottles going on sale very shortly (although only 500 of them staying in the UK) – Céline had only had a couple of tastes of this before, showing quite how new it is. It’s from a batch of 1999 distilled spirit, matured in oloroso casks for 8-9 years and then finished for 2 years in Amontillado casks, my favourite kind of sherry. On the nose it’s quite savoury, with sherry wood mixing with a slight brininess to give rich salted caramel. To taste it’s thick and syrupy, with red grapes, spicy wood and a chunk of tannin, rolling towards a buttery apple finish. With water there’s more wine fruit and buttery biscuits, and the wood is tamed although still sits spicily in the finish. A tasty whisky and a nice celebration of the first 15 years of production.

The last whisky of the night was a bit of a curveball – The Peated Arran. Having made a point of letting us know that Arran produced unpeated spirit, Céline went on to explain what this dram was all about. It was first produced in 2004 and came about due to an accidental delivery of barley peated to about 14ppm rather than the distillery’s regular unpeated order. Rather than send it back they decided to have a go at making whisky with it, producing 5 casks. It was rather popular and as such the distillery now produce a few casks of peated spirit a year, having now upped the peat levels from the initial mistake to about 20-25ppm. They make them as the last batches each year before closing down for summer maintenance, giving a chance to clean any residual peatiness out of the workings before starting again in autumn with their regular unpeated spirit. This bottling was one of 253 bottles from a 2005 distillation from barley at about 14 ppm, matured in first fill bourbon casks and bottled in 2009 at 57.7%. On the nose it has a light smokiness laying on a background of grassy fields. To taste it was rich with some sweet peatiness as well as sweet oranges and golden syrup. Water brought out the more vegetal notes from the nose, with a some grass appearing, accompanying oily butter and some sweet mulch. It took water well, tasting younger as the water knocked out some of the peat, adding more cereal and mulchy grass. Being a younger whisky the peat overpowered the wood influence, making it taste quite a lot peatier than the 14ppm suggested.

Annoyingly I can’t make it up to distillery this weekend for the party, but it’s definitely on my list next time I’m on the right side of Scotland. Equally annoying is that the whisky doesn’t quite live up to the spectacular single cask bottlings I’ve had over the last couple of years – they’re all rather good, with the Rowan Tree and Madeira Finish coming in as my favourites of the evening, but none quite as rich and complex as the ones that I’ve found at the SMWS. That won’t stop me picking up more Arran in the future, distillery bottlings as well as single casks, as they are also very reasonably priced, with the most expensive whisky of the evening coming in at under £70 and most bottlings being around £30-£50. Excellent value for such good whisky.

Arran 10 year old
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 46%. ~£30

Arran Rowan Tree
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 46%. ~£35

Arran Madeira Cask Finish
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 50%. ~£40

Arran Pomerol Cask Finish
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 50%. ~£45

Arran 15th Anniversary Bottling
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 54.6%. Available soon

Arran 2005 Peated
Scottish Island Single Malt whisky, 57.7%. ~£45 (limited availability)

Eddie of The Whisky Lounge is Eddie Ludlow and he is in the process of putting together this Autumn’s event calendar. Keep an eye on his website for details.

Master of Malt have a good range of Arran whiskies, although they don’t have the peated. Eddie might have a couple of bottles of that, although I suspect they’re for personal consumption, but The Whisky Exchange have a few which they are more likely to sell you.

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Old Pulteney is distilled in Wick on the coast in the far northeastern corner of Scotland, making it the most northerly distillery on the mainland – they’re 3° north of Moscow. The town of Wick has had a checkered history since the early 1800s, when Pulteneytown was founded on the other side of the River Wick. It grew as a major part of the North Sea herring fishing boom and the distillery, also named for Sir William Johnson Pulteney who had commissioned the building of the town, was opened in 1826 by the James Henderson to serve the increasingly large population of seafaring folk who, in stereotypical fashion, liked their booze. Isolated from the rest of the mainland with few roads, the town became known for its lawlessness, with a potentially apocryphal 500 gallons of whisky being drunk per day by its inhabitants – with approximately 8000 fisherman in town (along with 81 bars, split 40 in Wick and 41 in Pulteneytown) that works out at about half a bottle per person per day. In 1922 the law stepped in and Wick (along with Pulteneytown) was made a dry town, with the distillery continuing production as the only scottish producer making whisky in a dry area. This restriction was lifted in 1947 and the distillery rumbled on quietly, changing hands several times, until 1997 when their first inhouse single malt bottling (as there had been a number of independent bottlings over the years from Gordon and Macphail and others) – their 12 year old single malt.

The distillery is part of the Inver House group, who also own Balblair, Balmenach, Speyburn and Knockdhu (where anCnoc is produced), and also produces a liqueur in addition to single malts. Their style is quite simple – unpeated and using a mix of sherry and bourbon barrels, with no finishes. They are, as all the single malt distilleries are, quite finicky with their wood, going for air dried barrels as much as possible rather than faster produced kiln dried barrels – they generally get these from Jack Daniels and Makers Mark. They seem to prefer second fill casks, both bourbon and sherry (standardly oloroso), to mature their whisky with the less active wood working better with their spirit to produce the whiskies that they want. They do seem to use their barrels for quite a while, with rejuvenation (by planing down the insides of the staves before recharring them) after 2 or 3 fills to give at least another fill before the barrels need to be retired.

Their brewing is quite interesting, using dried yeast instead of the usual wet yeast that most producers use. This is due to their relative isolation which restricts deliveries and makes getting fresh yeast in sufficient quantity very difficult. The dried yeast poses its own challenges as it needs careful temperature controlled rehydration to avoid killing it and it activates faster than live yeast on being added to the wort, starting the brewing process earlier than normal. Pulteney exploit this by using a medium length fermentation (52 hours) but produce a higher alchohol wash, coming in at about 9% rather than the usual 8ish.

The peat-free nature of the current version of Old Pulteney is a more recent change in the distillery’s history. Until 1959 they had on-site maltings that used peat as fuel (sitting on the edge of the Flow Country they had a ready supply of it), but when that was closed they moved to unpeated malt, prepared offsite. They currently use optic and have since the late 90s, but due to varying yields (currently about 410l of spirit per tonne of barley, but in the past it has been as low as 405 and high as 420) are currently experimenting with different varieties. This is done more for yield than flavour, as the variation between different barlies isn’t particularly influential in the flavour of the spirit, but the amount of production is all important. The distillery was at one time part of a group including Ardbeg, so despite there being no peat in the spirit for years some Pulteney has a hint of it after being matured in second fill Ardbeg casks. Malcolm didn’t say much about those barrels, but I suspect that they may well be around somewhere as interesting single cask bottlings.

Their two stills are quite squat, with a long neck on the spirit still and a lyne arm that comes off before the top on the wash still (as can be seen in the pictures on this account of a distillery visit), which all helps produce an oily heavily flavoured spirit. Malcolm had managed to bring along a small amount of the Old Pulteney new make spirit, which was handed around for everyone to nose and taste. It was thick and had a strong grainy smell which cut off abruptly, like with a high quality vodka. There were hints of oil, lemony floor cleaner, oranges and dry cardboard, as well as a whiff of rocket fuel – understandable as it was 67.9%. To taste it was surprisingly leathery, despite the lack of peat, the cardboardy nose taking on a darker turn, and also shot through with lemons. Water brought out some sweetness, especially as it developed in the glass, and tempered the lemon into a light citrus note that was dominated by the leatheriness. I’ve still not tried many new makes but this was yet again entirely different to the others I’ve tasted, with the lemon/leather combo both strange and surprisingly palatable for so strong a spirit.

To start the tasting we were presented with the second whisky on our mat, with Malcolm preferring an order that worked better with the flavours rather than the regular youngest to oldest (plus special editions) order. #2 was the Old Pulteney 17 year old, an 80%/20% mix of bourbon/oloroso casks, bottled at a slightly strong 46%. On those nose it was oily with apricots, liquorice and a hint of sulphur. To taste it was woody, with sherbert lemons and apples. Water tamed the wood a bit, leaving a pleasant apple and lemon combo.

We moved on to the Old Pulteney 21 year old, again a combination of sherry and bourbon casks (although using American oak sherry casks rather than European ones), and also bottled at 46%. This one had much more sherried sweetness on the nose with vanilla toffee, lemons and a hint of salt – almost like a lemony crunchy bar. To taste the wood dominated again to start, with lots of tannin and a heavy drying sensation down the sides of the tongue. Once you pushed through the wood there was butterscotch, apples and a hint of woody smoke (”Like toffee apples on the far side of a field to a bonfire on November 5th”, my increasingly flowery tasting notes suggested). Water turned wood into vanilla, upping the sweetness and bringing out more woody spice and sulphurous struck matches. There was a suggestion that the smoky notes were from the water, flowing through a culvert from nearby Loch Hempriggs (that you can follow to the distillery on Google Maps), but I’m still sceptical that the relatively minor flavour of the water survives not only mashing and fermentation but also the double distillation process.

We then stepped back to #1 on the mat – the Old Pulteney 12 year old. This is the standard distillery bottling and is the only one of their whiskies to be chill filtered (none of them use colouring agents). This is a 100% bourbon matured whisky with about 80% first fill casks and 20% refill. On the nose it’s got brine, oil, some orchard fruit and wood, and a bit of almost ripe banana. To taste it’s sweet and buttery with more banana, some vanilla and a hint of saltiness at the back. With water there’s even more vanilla sweetness and the mouth feel becomes a bit creamy, all rounded out with a woody finish. This is the one that I’d tasted before and the reason why I came along to the tasting – I like briny whiskies and this is the one that introduced me to that flavour. Its appeal has diminished for me as my tastes have changed, but tasting it again for the first time in years I see why I remember it still.

Next up was the oldest whisky that they standardly produce – the Old Pulteney 30 year old, bottled at 43% and matured in refill american oak hogsheads. On the nose it was nutty with mango and orange, very different from the younger whiskies. To taste it was oily with bananas, hazelnuts, dry oak, oranges (maybe some mushy red berries mixed with the oranges), vanilla and a lingering dry citrus finish – quite complex. Water brought out a wheaty, biscuity flavour (a bit like Nice biscuits if you scraped the sugar off the outside), Tropico (the tropical fruit squash that I used to drink on holidays to France when I was a kid – a scarily specific flavour), butterscotch, unsalted roasted peanuts and more vanilla, topped off with a tannic woody finish. I was rather impressed and this was easily my favourite dram of the night. Unfortunately, it also comes in a £245 a bottle, so I suspect it won’t be making its way into my whisky cupboard quite yet.

The final two whiskies were a pair, unfortunately only available to travel retail (although The Whisky Exchange think they might have a few bottles appearing soon) – two 23 year olds. The first of the two was the Old Pulteney 23 year old Bourbon Casked, matured entirely in refill bourbon casks. On the nose it had bananas and butterscotch, and was quite light but with an underlying richness (which could well have just been my nose having been worn out by the 30 year old). To taste it had rich toffee, butter, sour wood and a tannic dry finish. It also had a hint of citrus and some oat cake – overall all a bit like slightly lemony shortbread. Water turned this into banana shortbread, knocking out the citrus, and softened the wood to creamy vanilla. It was similar to the 30 year old but for the more reasonable price of about £150.

The second of the pair was the Old Pulteney 23 year old Sherry Casked, matured entirely in refill sherry casks, and filled and bottled at about the same time as the bourbon casked giving an opportunity to compare the wood influence. On the nose it had dark chocolate, nuts, raisins, stewed apple and oats. To taste it was thick, spicy and tannic with an oaty finish. The sherry influence was clear with sweet dried fruit and plums sitting in the middle of the flavour. A touch of water mixed everything up to give garibaldi biscuits and a spicy wood finish. Very different to the bourbon cask, it reminded me of the Macallan 12, although with much more to it.

A range of whiskies that doesn’t seem to get as much press as they deserve, the Old Pulteneys still tickle my tastebuds, even if not to the extent that they would have in the past. The only problem I see with them is the price, ramping up quickly from £25 for the 12 year old to £40 for the 17 and £80 for the 21. While they’re all good whiskies I’m not sure if for me they’re quite that good, and while the 30 year old is really very good indeed I’m not sure if it’s £245 of very good, especially when there are equally good highland bottlings for significantly less. That’s not going to stop me keeping an eye out for a dram of it, though…

Old Pulteney 12 year old
Highland single malt whisky, 40%. ~£25

Old Pulteney 17 year old
Highland single malt whisky, 46%, ~£40

Old Pulteney 21 year old
Highland single malt whisky, 46%, ~£80

Old Pulteney 30 year old
Highland single malt whisky, 44%. ~£245

Old Pulteney 23 year old, Bourbon Casked
Highland single malt whisky, 43%, ~£145 from travel retail

Old Pulteney 23 year old, Sherry Casked
Highland single malt whisky, 43%, ~£145 from travel retail

Old Pulteney new make spirit
Highland new make, 67.9%. Not available commercially

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On arrival we were presented with a Cocoa Pulp Bellini, part of Artisan’s Chocolateria cocktail menu, a glass with cocoa pulp topped up with prosecco. The pulp was fruity with hints of lychee, peach and fizzy apple, which worked well to create a light, fruity bellini. I’ve noticed Artisan du Chocolat popping up a lot on Twitter, being in with the London foodies as they are and also an active participant in the world of online interaction, but have yet to make it over to one of their shops. They’ve been selling chocolates in London for a while, starting out in Borough Market about 10 years ago (back in the days when it wasn’t quite so well known and there was a lot more fighting for every customer who walked past) and expanding their business to now include a few shops and a concession in Selfridges on Oxford Street. Gerry Coleman, founder and chocolatier, and his team have been making their own chocolate, rather than buying it in, to make their various tasty things since 2007 and are one of the only posh chocolate shops to do so. Basically, I was impressed and may have hung around a bit at the end of the night, interrupting the staff’s well deserved pizza, talking at Gerry and realising that I now have to add chocolate onto my list of things to learn about.

Macallan I’ve generally not been so keen on. While I was quite impressed by their regular 10 year old whisky when I visited the distillery, I wasn’t quite so fond of the 12 year old version and the 12 year fine oak that I bought miniatures of. However, from their style (mainly sherried Speyside) they should fit happily into my likes, so I’ve always thought it must be some kind of snobbery rather than the fault of the whisky. One of their current marketing pushes is to find masters in other industries, to match up with their own Master of Wood and Master of Spirit. So far they’ve released a  Masters of Photography bottlins, with accompanying photographic exhibition, and have done a few events matching up Macallan with other masters, and this tasting was part of that idea – combining the Masters of Wood and Spirit with the Masters of Chocolate.

The plan was simple – Gerry and his team had tasted a selection of Macallans, chosen a matching chocolate bar (or two) from their range, and they would present us with both whisky and chocolate to see what we thought. Leading the whisky side was Maxxium UK’s Toby Shellard along with Annabel Kohler from the Edrington Group (the owners of Macallan), and the whiskies chosen were not a regular vertical tasting.

The first whisky we tried was the Macallan 15 year old Fine Oak, a mixture of Macallan whiskies matured in european sherry, american bourbon and american sherry oak barrels. On the nose there was linseed oil, apple and pear, a hint of salt and some almost banana-like sweetness. To taste the first thing I noticed was a big woodiness, which was tempered by some vanilla and pear flavours as well as lightly toasted bread. Water brought out some smokiness (from the wood rather than any peat) as well as more oil, orchard fruit and a floral note that was hidden behind the wood beforehand. I much preferred this to the 12 year I’d tried before, but it was still a little woody for my liking.

The chocolate selected for this whisky was a single origin Jamaican 72% cocoa dark chocolate, a dark tasting chocolate with overtones of tobacco as well as a floralness. Gerry also pulled out a flavour I was having trouble describing – olives. When pairing the whisky and chocolate I tried it both chocolate first and whisky first and was surprised by the difference. Tasting the chocolate first the oil and wood of the whisky were emphasised, combining with the tobacco and olive flavours of the chocolate. The other way around the floral notes of the whisky combined with the tobacco of the chocolate to bring out a sweet coffee flavour that wasn’t present when tasting the chocolate first.

They had also selected a second backup match for this one, a milk chocolate with lemongrass and ginger. Tasting the whisky first didn’t really give anything new here (leading me to focus on tasting the chocolate first from then on), but tasting the chocolate first coated the mouth and filled a hole in the middle of the whisky, that I hadn’t noticed before, with the gingery citrus sweetness. Very different to the last match but equally good, splitting the room.

The next whisky was the Macallan 12, one that I have talked about before, matured in oloroso casks. To help see what the whisky had got from the wood each table was presented with a glass of dark oloroso to nose – it was fantastically raisiny, like a sweet wine concentrate but without the thickness of PX. On the nose the whisky has the regular oiliness, dried fruit and cereal (that I described before as being like Garibaldi biscuits) and some spicy caramelised orange. To taste it had rounded sherry woodiness (with dried fruit, hints of wine and all the norm) as well as candy floss, tobacco wood and some vanilla – all combining to make something like a dark chocolate Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Water knocked out a lot of the lighter flavours, boosting the vanilla sweetness and the wood and not really helping much. I enjoyed it much more than previously, maybe more than the 10 year old that I was comparing it to last time.

To match it the team had chosen their Mole Chili bar – a tobaccoey chocolate with a long chilli savouriness running throughout the flavour. It was made with more than just chilli peppers, with the 4 types of chilli accompanied by a variety of other mole ingredients including ground tortilla and thyme. I don’t like chilli chocolate usually, but this one was really very nice. With the whisky the leafy tobacco combined with the citrus to provide a background for the richness of the whisky, all wrapped up with a chilli zing. A very good match that enhanced the flavours of both whisky and chocolate.

We then moved onto the more difficult to obtain whiskies, firstly the Macallan Select Oak. Available in the travel retail market (ie. duty free shops)  it’s part of the 1824 collection, a range named after the year of the distillery’s founding and all released without age statement. On the nose it’s got the regular oiliness as well as malt toffee, vanilla wood, and a touch of saltiness and flowers. To taste it’s got linseed, a hint of pear, creamy vanilla, a little bit of hazelnut and a spicy gingery finish. Gerry described it as being like vanilla ice cream cones.

The chocolate for this one was the Artisan Almond Milk Bar, made using almond milk rather than that from cows, and thus vegan friendly. It was very almondy, having a taste that invoked a sensation of grainy almond powder, despite the chocolate being smooth – it was almost like eating unsweetened marzipan mixed with chocolate, which is on the way to what it is. When paired with the whisky it enhanced the light nuttiness and creaminess, turning into a chocolate-whisky combination that was big and flavourful.

There was a second choice chocolate, the Tonka Bar. The tonka bean has a chunk of vanilla as well as the taste of cherry stones which came through quite clearly in the chocolate. Adding cherries to the already slightly nutty, woody whisky brought out a cherry bakewell flavour that was nice, but not as coherent as the Almond bar.

The last paired whisky of the night was the Macallan Whisky Makers Edition, the next in the 1824 collection and bottled a little stronger at 42.8% – the ABV that Macallan’s whisky king, Bob Dalgarno, thinks is the perfect strength for Macallan bottlings. On the nose it has oil, apricots and a hint of raisin, and to taste it has orange juice concentrate, more oiliness and a underlying earthiness. The finish is lightly woody and long, but not particularly intense. This was more delicate than the previous drams and didn’t go down all that well with a room of fading palates, but it struck me as one that definitely needed another go when my tastebuds were a bit fresher.

The chocolate paired with it was their Tobacco Bar, sold with an awareness of the public backlash against the evil leaf – while smoking may kill (says the ex-smoker who sometimes misses cigarettes), tobacco in its unsmoked form can add an interesting leafy, earthy flavour to a variety of food and drink. The chocolate was leathery with liquorice and leafy tobacco, thanks to the two different types of tobacco they use make it – one to bring smokiness and one to bring the leafiness. When tasted with the chocolate the whisky felt more complete, with fruity and smoky tastes mixing in with the oil and citrus to create a well rounded, complex chocolate and whisky combination.

This also had a second choice, the Black Cardamon bar. On its own the chocolate had a strong spicy cardamon feel with a touch of wet wood, but when mixed with the whisky the orange and spice dominated, emphasising the Christmassy middle of the spirit.

Having finished our run of whiskies our next treat was unveiled – Artisan du Chocolat had been experimenting with making whisky truffles based on the various expressions we’d tasted. When they were first made they’d been described as too strong but when we tasted them, two weeks later, much of the whisky flavour had dissipated, leaving vaguely alcoholic truffles. The whiskies were mixed with white chocolate and then combined with various coatings:

• Macallan 12 – Single origin jamaican chocolate ganache
• Macallan 15 – Orange blossom and orchid ganache
• Select Oak – Milk chocolate ganache

They were all very nice but the whisky flavours had faded, leaving only hints of what could have been.

I was quite lucky at the end of the evening, as while speaking to Annabel about how I was surprised that I didn’t like the Macallan whiskies more she recommended that I try the Macallan 18 if I got a chance, as she thought it might fit in with my tastes. Unfortunately she didn’t have a bottle, but Toby overheard, nipped out to his car and brought in one he happened to have knocking around. The cork broke on the way out of the bottle, but a corkscrew was found and I got a taste. On the nose there was loads of raisiny fruit, a savoury leatheriness and the distinctive Macallan oiliness. To taste it had dark chocolate, tannic wood, light fruit without much sweetness and a spicy lingering finish. With water a lot of the sweetness was initially knocked out, although it returned as it matured in the glass, and the wood came on a bit strong. More towards my tastes, but again the wood stood in the way a little bit.

This was a try out event, followed by one for paying customers the next night, and as yet they don’t have any more scheduled. However, after speaking to Gerry for a while I suspect that we might see more of these type of events coming out of Artisan du Chocolat in the future, and I’m tempted to come back for more.

Macallan 15 Year Old Fine Oak
Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 43%. ~£40

Macallan 12
Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 40%. ~£30

Macallan Select Oak
No age statement. Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 40%. ~£50

Macallan Whisky Maker’s Edition
No age statement. Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 42.8%, ~£75

The last two are meant to be exclusively for travel retail, but I found some on the Whisky Exchange website.

Melanie and Whisky for Everyone also have posts up about the evening.

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It’s the longer matured version of the Cooley Irish single grain whiskey, the only of its type commercially available. I rather liked the 8 year old version, picking up a bottle while at Whisky Lounge London, and was intrigued by what some extra time in the barrel would bring.

On the nose it has caramel sweetness with an undercurrent of astringent graininess, a hint of grassy field and some pear. To taste it has even more caramel, with some woody vanilla and a savoury twist on the finish, with a rubbing of butter. It’s got a load of spice on the tongue which, along with finish, gives a sweet pastry taste. It’s quite delicate so doesn’t like lots of water, but a few drops brings out the pears from the nose as well as some tannic wood bitterness, while softening the caramel to a more general mouth coating sweetness. The butteriness still sits at the back of the throat and accompanies a spicy, woody finish.

Engage poetic license: Like walking through a corn field in the evening while eating a slice of pear pie.

An advancement on the regular 8 year old Greenore, with more of everything but continuing on the same theme. Again, even though it’s quite delicate (although more robust than the younger version) I think it would work well with ice, becoming like a light but interesting bourbon. My experiments with the standard edition seem to suggest that some of the astringency (a common feature among the grains I’ve tasted) is softened a chunk by the ice, but the sweetness and more robust flavours still come through, as long as you don’t try and drown a glacier in it.

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Aberlour is a Speyside whisky famed for its heavy use of sherry barrels, using them for complete maturation rather than just finishes. Unlike the way that Macallan traditionally operated they do also use bourbon barrels and their standard expressions are 50/50 mixes of bourbon and sherry cask matured whiskies, but there’s still a lot more sherry here than you will often see. The distillery was founded in 1879 by James Fleming, who became well known in Aberlour for his philanthropy, investing heavily in the local community and helping to build up the area. However, this fame was only after his death, as his involvement with his various was made under strict secrecy. The village of Aberlour seems to be more fully known as Charlestown of Aberlour, although the first bit seems to be generally missed out these days, and sits between Grantown and Elgin, in the heart of Speyside. The distillery is part of the Pernod-Ricard portfolio (hence Phil doing the tasting) and while not that well known in the UK is one of the top selling whiskies in the world, topping the charts in the biggest single malt market in the world – France.

First on the tasting mat we had a whisky unavailable in the UK – the Aberlour 10yr old Sherry Cask, a 100% sherry matured whisky that is on sale in France. On the nose it had red fruit, salt and some woody hazelnuts. To taste it was quite different with a caramel sweetness and oak, digestive biscuits, wax and a hint of mint. Water killed a lot of the sweetness, brought out more of the wood and softened some of it into vanilla. A nice sherried Speyside with a lot of the traditional flavours of the region and a distinctive edge to the nose that I am still trying to describe – almost bbq sauce and cold grilled chicken, but not quite…

Next up we had the regular Aberlour 10yr, 50/50 sherry and bourbon casks, and a good way of seeing how the bourbon cask matured whisky affects the sherried whisky. On the nose it was sweeter than the last, with more light sugar, as well as the sherrylike dried fruit. It also had the distinctive bbq chicken smell that I mentioned before, nuts and a chunk of damp sherry barrel. To taste there was waxed wood obscuring some of the fruit and a soft spiciness. There was also a perfumed flavour not unlike Mr Sheen but, to quote Anna, in a good way. Water added creaminess and bitter oak while dropping a lot of the perfume and starting sweetness, but pushing some dried fruit to the finish. A rounded dram that definitely improves on the raw sherry cask by bringing in some of the lighter bourbon barrel influence.

Next was the Aberlour 12yr, another 50/50 mix with a noticeably deeper bronzey gold hue. On the nose it was quite different to the earlier ones, with a savoury edge, sour cherries and an underlying meatiness. To taste it was quite creamy leading to sweet berries, spice and a woody finish. It also had a cooling menthol flavour that dried the edges of the tongue. Water made it chewier with more cream, vanilla, woody spice, dried fruit and a dry stony ‘granite’ flavour. Definitely developed from the 10yr, there’s quite a bit more complexity to this one and a drop of water really opens it up.

We then moved on to what Phil predicted would be the star of the night, even if not his personal favourite – The A’bunadh. Meaning ‘origin’ in gaelic, it is a no age statement whisky (although generally made up of 8-15 year old whiskies with occasional younger additions) designed with the idea of recreating a victorian style – fully sherried due to the non-availability of bourbon casks in those times. It’s unchillfiltered and contains no caramel, the first of which, at least, is not true about the rest of the range, and is released in small batches, each numbered, which vary in flavour – we tried batch 30, the most recent one, which has just started hitting the shelves. On the nose there was the regular distinctive Aberlour-ness, although not quite so pronounced as usual, masked by sherried fruit, glace cherries and creamy creme brulee. In the mouth it was oily and exploded with nutmeg. Once you got over that (and there was a lot of nutmeg) there was honey and a long spicy finish, with more nutmeg. Water, and it can take a lot, calmed things down a bit, bringing out chocolate on the nose and a chocolate milkshake creaminess to the body. There was more fruit and spice as well as a tannic woody finish. In the middle it quite reminded me of lardy cake, which reminds me – I need to find a supplier of lardy cake… Phil was right – this was definitely the star of the show for me, especially as I can grab it at my local (posh) supermarket.

Next was the Aberlour 16yr, continuing the standard range with a slightly darker colour and evolution of flavour. On the nose it had the normal bbq chicken woodiness but it was very light, with much more in the way of grapes, caraway, red fruit and a hint of butteriness – like something a lot closer to new make spirit than something that’s been in the barrel for a decade and a half. To taste it was very creamy, with sweet vanilla complimented by bitter wood, red grapes and mint, with a tannic finish. Water brought out vanilla to go with the cream, a lemony zing and cinnamon. Not what I expected at all, a much lighter flavoured and more zingy dram.

The last on the mat was the Aberlour 18yr, a deep reddy gold dram that almost rivalled the darkness of the A’bunadh. On the nose it had fruit, heavy cream, prickly spice and the bbq chickeny wood that I now expected. To taste it was quite soft, with creamy wood and a dry toasted wood finish. The middle was filled with apples and pears with cinnamon, along with the toasted finish it was almost like drinking apple pie. Water knocked out the complexity very quickly, giving rise to icing sugar sweetness, vanilla wood and leaving a touch of apple. Phil’s favourite of the evening and well appreciated by many in the room, this was interesting but a bit light for my, by this time, rather deadened palate. Definitely one to try again.

As a special treat Phil also managed to dig up a couple of more rare whiskies to round off the night, first of which was an Aberlour 23yr old single bourbon cask bottling, distilled in 1985 and one of the single casks that you can pick up at the distillery itself (although this one is probably now finished). On the nose this was light with apples, cream and freshly cut oak trees. To taste it was creamy with more apples, wood, vanilla and some hints of spice and nuts – like a very light fruit cake. Water seemed to intensify things, with it becoming apple pie and cream, with a cereal hint pointing to pastry. It was still very lightly flavoured and a hint of citrus helped it along to a woody finish. A beautiful light dram and one that you can imagine taming some of the sherry punch of the 10yr sherry cask and A’bunadh into something more approaching the regular house style.

Last of the evening was a cask sample of 26 year old sherry cask, at cask strength. Being only a small sample there wasn’t quite enough to go round, leading to a quiz with correctly called out answers earning a generous dram. Fortunately my attendance and remembering things from the earlier Chivas Regal tasting helped out, with my correctly identified home city of the Chivas brothers grocery store (Aberdeen) winning me a slug of deep golden spirit. On the nose it was quite overpowering with toffee apples and sulphorous wood, and tasting it was an eye-watering experience with the alcoholic strength backed up with strong flavours of caramel, toast and wood. It was powerfully tannic, taking your breath away and leaving the tongue drying, but it also had quite a hollow taste, with almost everything happening on the front, back and edges of the tongue, with a gap in the center. Water, and as expected it could take a lot, calmed things down, bringing out leather, salt, caramel and softer tannins, with a hint of rubber running down the middle. An interesting whisky but one that shows more what using a sherry cask for too long can do rather than one that you’ll want to drink a lot of.

An interesting tasting, despite my not being won over by the regular range. Finally having got a taste of the A’bunadh I can see why it was recommended as an alternative to the now increasingly scarce Yamazaki Sherry Cask that I served at my last whisky tasting – it has the rich sherried flavours, but also more wood than the Yamazaki, which becomes interesting when you add water. I also saw quite how far into the more overpowering ends of the flavour spectrum things can go, with the 26 year old cask sample being too much for even my sherry loving tastes, blasting through my fatigued palate and definitely ending my chances of tasting anything else – the comment I made about it on connosr was that it was like “being hit in the face with an oar after rowing over a lake of sherry”. However, I suspect a bottle of the A’bunadh will be appearing on my shelf soon enough.

Aberlour 10yr Sherry Cask
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 40%. Available in France.

Aberlour 10
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 40%. ~£20, available in Waitrose.

Aberlour 12
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 40%.

A’bunadh batch 30.
Speyside sherry cask single malt whisky. No age statement (approx 8-15).
59.8%. ~£35, available from Waitrose.

Aberlour 16
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 40%. ~£40

Aberlour 18
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 40%. ~£45

Aberlour 23year old single bourbon cask
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, 47.6%. ~£125, available from the distillery (although this specific barrel has probably run out)

Aberlour 26year old single sherry cask
Speyside single malt scotch whisky, ~60%. Not commercially available

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