Smokehead

"Smoke baby, smoke baby

More alcohol baby
Cocaine in Montreal
And back out on the plane baby"

With a cheesy name like smokehead, I wasn't expecting much.  But this was a nice "in between" smoky scotch.  Much more smoky than Bruichladdich 10, but not quite as over the top as Lagavulin.  This is an uncomplicated scotch that is fairly smooth.  

Scotch is an aquired taste, and smoky scotch needs more acquiring!  Some people just don't like it, but others seem to prefer it.  I think it is mood and situation dependant.  I would not want to be stuck on a desert island with only a carton of this, but I do find there is a time and place when the sweet speyside scotches take a backseat to the smoky islay counterparts.  

This Scotch has a bit of a mystery to it.  The distillery behind it is Ian Macleod established in 1933, and claims to be an independent family company.  This scotch is supposed to be from Islay, but some of their other scotches are from the Isle of Skye, and Speyside.  And, there is no Smokehead distillery on Islay.   So if anyone has any insight on this.  Feel free to comment and clarify this enigma.

I am starting to divide scotch into sweet vs smoky, and simple vs complex.  Complex so far tends to have some smoke, such as Laphroiag and Devils Casks.  This is a simple smoky.  With a good balance between sweet, smoke, and salt.  I liked this scotch.  Just not sure what it was!

Dewars's Aberfeldy

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I had read that this was a mild exceedingly sweet scotch, and it is amongst the least expensive bottles of single malts available locally, at about $50.00 a bottle. After buying up the stock on the Bowmore Devils Casks, my scotch account could use some moderation! When I first opened the bottle and tried it, I did not expect the taste. I found it quite salty and not sweet at all. What was with all the "sweet mild" reviews? This was not at all what I had expected, and, to be honest, I didn't really find it too appealing. It was salty and rather ho-hum. But after the bottle had sat for a couple of days, I tried it again. The difference was significant. It WAS quite sweet and mild, after it had had a chance to open up a bit.

The distillery was founded by a fellow who was born in the town of Dull, and that is how I would characterize this whiskey.  It is pleasant and sweet, as one would expect from a Speyside whiskey, and a nice change from something more robust like Laphraoig or The Devils Casks, but this is pretty mild stuff.  I do not like it as much as Aberlour 12, which runs about the same price.  Aberlour is more full flavoured, with a bit more of a caramel taste. If you want something pleasant, this fits the bill.  A good scotch to introduce someone to single malts.  But if you want something more interesting, try one of the more complicated scotches.

Bowmore - The Devils Cask 10 Small Batch

WOW.  This stuff is DARK.   It starts off sweet, and goes to a gentle mild smokiness with a lot of sherry.  The travel between the start and end has a lot of complexity.  It's earthy, with cocoa, smoke and a sweet dirt taste.  At 56.9% I thought it would need some water, but it was quite drinkable straight up.  This is a fascinatingly interesting brew.  A touch of water smooths it out and brings the mild smoke to a more prominent position.

This is a very good scotch.  It is tasty and complex.  6000 bottles released worldwide.  540 in the UK.  1200 in Canada.  I got 2.  I will get at least two more if I can, as this is an experience that might not come again.

After having this whiskey for a few months, and trying a lot of others, I can't over state how much I like this malt.  It is the most interesting whiskey I have had by quite a bit.  The sherry in it is very strong, coming from first use sherry casks.  There is a smoke taste that follows, but is not overpowering, and then there is that third taste that is earthy.  I ended up getting five bottle of this, and will savour this slowly....if I can remember where I hid each bottle!

Springbank 10

Springbank 10 - Campbeltown's scotch.

My first impressions of this were, its very BROWN.  Scotch is normally a lighter amber.  This was, quite....brown.  Taking a sniff of it revealed that there was a lot going on.  Very spicy smelling and tasting.  Much more spicy than anything else I have tried so far.  Straight, it was a little bit strong, so I added a slight bit of water.  It was still very peppery, complex, and slightly sweet and strong.  A bit more water smoothed it out.  But this is a very different scotch with stronger peppery taste, but still with a nice sweetness.  Caramel and hot pepper. I liked the unique flavour of this; my wife was less impressed.

Springbank is Campbeltown's only distillery, and is unlike the nearby Islay scotches that I have tried.

The Glendronachs

I had heard good things about Glendronach, and it was up on my list of to be tried. I bought a bottle of Glendronach 12 original, and a few weeks later, a bottle of Glendronach 15 revival.

Glendronach is a Speyside whiskey, and I have generally thought highly of those that I tried.  Since I bought the Glendronach 12 first, and it did not make an impression on me, positive or negative.  However, when I tried the Glendronach 15, I initially did not like it, and much preferred the Glendronach 12, especially at 2/3 the price of the 15.

But, a few weeks later, as I hadn't enjoyed the Glendronach 15, there was pretty much a full bottle of it, while my other bottles were getting low.  I couldn't waste a full bottle of single malt!  So I tried it again.  Once again, I found it quite strong, and the alcohol overpowered the flavour.   So I decided to do something I had not done - I cut it a little with water.  What a difference.  When cut with water, the alcohol backed off, and gave rise to a nicely balanced slightly sweet flavour.  I had a few drams, and my opinion of the 15 was much improved.  It was a sweet, and was a nice Speyside.

So, I decided to try the slightly cut 15 against the 12.   I tried one, then the other, and  then changed the order of  one against the other.  I still found them hard to differentiate, but the 12 was slightly more sharp.

So the next decision was to cut the 12 ever so slightly.  Although the 15 required more water than the 12, once both had a little water, they became much more difficult to distinguish.   The 15 seems to have more flavour, but both are more sweet than salty.  I would not rank this as high as any of the aberlours, but both were, when cut slightly with water, a decent dram in the end.

EDIT August 2014. -  Had a sprinkle left of each of these so I decided to do one last compare.  They still taste fairly similar, nice sweet sherry taste with little to differentiate the 12 from the 15, although the 15 is slightly smoother.  If you want a good sherry kick, these both have it.   I like the taste of both of these.

Bruichladdich Classic Laddie Ten

This was revealing.

We had been trying to taste Bruichladdich since we had met Jay, who works at the distillery, on our way from Ireland to Scotland on a small ferry.  He had said it was pretty fine, and when I saw the ferry captain trying to get a bottle delivered, I knew that this was a scotch that at least the locals believed in.

We had trouble finding any when we were in Scotland.  So when I got home, I did manage to find a bottle of Laddie Classic Edition_01.  This was the first bottle we drank, when we got home, and we had very little experience.  It was good, but I did not feel that it was quite as good as others that we had had, to me.  My wife, however, really liked it a lot.

So in discussing things with Jay after we returned, he suggested the 10 year old.  "It's excellent."  So we bought both the Laddie 10 and the Bruichladdich 12 (Second Edition) since there was not lot of difference in price between the two.

We decided on blind taste tests.  Of course, since I was pouring, I knew which was which.

The Bruichladdich 12 is labeled as "lightly peated".  The 10 is labeled as unpeated.  So we all know what peated means....it is the smoky taste that gets into the scotch when the barley is dried by peat fires.  Some have suggested it makes the scotch taste like dirt.  Smoky dirt.  Good SCOTTISH smoky dirt!

So there we were with the three glasses.  I had put something I can't recall in the first glass, perhaps the Macallan, followed by the 12 year old, then the ten.  And we tasted.

The first glass was not remarkable.  I don't even recall what it was.  However the second glass (we are talking perhaps a quarter of an ounce in each glass) was VERY smoky.  Strong and bold and somewhat overpowering.  The third glass was still a little smoky, but much more mild.

Well, we concluded.  Jay was right.  (Was there any doubt?)  But then we decided to try each again.  It was then I noticed that the bottle of Bruichladdich 12 was still full.  I hadn't poured what I thought I had.  I had poured BL10 twice.  My jaw dropped.  Those two glasses tasted markedly different!  They were NOT the same.  But we were faced with facts.  They did taste different.  And they were the same scotch.

This was an epiphany for me.  Expectations, mood, what was previously in your mouth, all impact in a SIGNIFICANT way on the taste.  And what was most revealing was which taste was the 'correct' one.  Which could be counted on?

BL10 has a very nice sweet mild smoky taste.  The only other smoky scotch we had tried is smoky 'over the top' lagavulin.  It took me several trips to the BL10 for me to form firm opinions about it. BL10 is much milder than Lagavulin, and it is excellent.  Of the smoky scotches I have tried, I like it the best, by far.  So much, in fact, that when I found out our liquor store was not carrying it anymore, I bought up half the remaining stock in our province.  A week later, there was only one bottle available.  Now, there are none.  I hope my stockpile will last me a few years, but unless I find something that can take the place of this mild smoky scotch, I am afraid that they won't make it through the year.

The BL12, although mildly peated, did not seem to have much, if any, smoky taste.  When we toured the Oban distillery, the tour guide talked of one of the tastes being 'salt'.  I can taste salt quite prominently in the BL12.  My wife really likes the salt taste in scotch, while I prefer something either sweeter or smokier.  The BL12 has a nice bite to it, not overpowering, but not limp.

But between the two, I prefer the warm smoky taste of the BL10.  However, I was confused.  Why is the unpeated BL10 smoky, and the mildly peated BL12 not?  I could not figure that out, so I decided to ask Jay, whom I message with.  If I have understood him correctly (he sometimes writes with an accent!)  t  BL10 is aged in Bourbon barrels, which unlike Sherry or Port barrels, have been charred on the inside. Perhaps the smoky flavour comes, not from the peat, but from the barrels? Whatever the basis for the mild smoky flavour of BL10....."it's excellent!"

Aberlour 12

I had to steal this photo from the Aberlour site, as I will explain later.  I bought this whiskey in our local liquor store because I wanted to see what one could get from a relatively inexpensive bottle.  This was one of the least expensive bottles of single malt that one can buy here, being below $50.00 a bottle.  I believe when I bought it, it was about $43.00.  I had not tried it, and it was cheap.  So that is why I went for this one.  Aberlour is not a name that I recall coming up very often in my travels.

At that price, I did not expect much.  It is a 12 year old double cask Speyside whiskey, matured in both bourbon and sherry casks. 

I had learned that the only way that I could develop an understanding of single malts was to compare them in side by side tests.  At this point in time, I only had three bottles.  Bruichladdich Classic Laddie, I believe a Glendronach 12, and this bottle of Aberlour 12.

We did blind taste tests of these three.  I have to say, I was very impressed with this whiskey.  No water, or ice, at room temperature, this is a sweet whiskey with little to no taste of smoke or any harsh burn.  It was quite smooth, and really tasty. 

When we toured the oban plant, the presenter discussed the flavours typical of single malt scotch whisky - smoke, salt, citrus.  It took me a while to understand the salt flavour, but it is definitely there is some whiskeys that I tried, and not much in this Aberlour 12.  So far, out of the few bottles of Scotch that I have bought, this has been the best value.  It is quite smooth, and sweet.  It made me want to try the other Aberlours that are available here....Aberlour 16 and A'bunadh.  More on those in subsequent posts.

Oh, and the reason I had to steal the picture is because we finished off this bottle fairly quickly.  This is good stuff.

The Macallan

I carried this bottle home in my backpack, from the Orkneys. I knew little about it, other than the fact that the name Macallan came up regularly when discussing malts with the people in Scotland. One day, (well, pretty much when we got in the door)  we decided to crack it open and see what we had. 

The Macallan labels itself as a highland whiskey, from Craigellachie, Scotlaand  It is a Speyside, from the region east of Inverness.

My first impression was that we had found El Dorado. This whiskey was ambrosia. It melted in your mouth like fine chocolate and was incredibly smooth. Macallan Gold was not available in Manitoba - best hide the bottle! I have to say, that even with my uneducated palate, I thought I had found something very special. 

So, as one might do with all rare and momentous things...we hoarded this away for special occasions.

That meant we couldn't drink it.  That meant we had to get something else. 

We had met Jay by chance on our voyage from Ireland to Scotland, and he worked at the Bruichladdich distillery on Islay.  I had never heard of Bruichladdich, and was not aware of the proper pronunciation of Islay (I-La).  So when he spoke of Bruichladdich and I-la, I had no idea what he was talking about.  But he was a good bloke and said it was good whiskey, so we decided to try it.

But we couldn't find it.  Although there was a space for it in many of the stores we tried along the way, there was no stock.  So we checked our local liquor store website and knew we could get some when we arrived home.

Remember, we couldn't drink the Macallan - it was rare and special.  So we drank the bottle of Bruichladdich, Classic Laddie version.  And we finished it off, while the Macallan waited in storage.  Hidden.  While I thought the Laddie was fine, it was no smooth ambrosia Macallan!  But the Laddie was the first bottle that we finished off since we got back from Scotland.

So, we needed something else.  We picked up a bottle of Glendronach 12, because someone recommended it, and a bottle of Aberlour 12 because it was one of the cheapest single malts we could buy.  Now we had a few bottles, and this was important because we could do some comparisons.  One evening, we had some friends over, and decided it was time to do a four way taste test.  Glendronach, Macallan Gold, and the Aberlour.  Of course, I knew which would "win".  (We had found 'Nirvana' after all.)  So there were were, four people,  3 malts and twelve shot glasses I had purchased specifically for the occasion.  Only I knew which was which and I wasn't telling.  We would save the best for last.

So we did the testing, me being confident of the results, and when I hoisted my final glass, containing the Macallan, I had a surprising realization.  It WAS smooth.   We all agreed.  It DID melt in your mouth.  We were unanimous.  But so did water.  There was no guts to it.  There was little taste.  It seemed, when compared to the others, almost....limp.

While I wasn't disappointed, I did make an important realization.  I want something with more boldness.  I actually preferred the Aberlour or the Glendronach.  I now consider The Macallan gold to be a very good whisky, that would be particularly good for introducing someone to Single Malts so that they could enjoy the subtle nature, without being overwhelmed by too much all at once.  In othe words, you would give a neonate Macallan gold, rather than Laphroaig, if you ever wanted them to touch another dram of Scotch.

What I subsequently learned was that these versions of Macallan were their new way of doing things. They no longer defined whiskey by age, but by colour. Hence, this was Macallan "Gold". The colour gold, as opposed to Gold, silver, and bronze…gold being the best. Macallan gold was not available in Canada where I live when I got back from Scotland, but it has subsequently arrived.  So we don't have to hoard it any more.  The new colours of Macallan are Gold, Amber, Sienna and Ruby (ranked in ascending price from about $60.00 to about $300.00. I paid about 40 pounds for this bottle in Scotland, so I didn't get any bargain buying it there as I would have with some of the malts available here.  I noted, in researching this, that there is also a 1969 bottle of Macallan, for a price of $17,000. I think I would prefer a new car.

It's all about the journey.

This blog is not so much about single malts as it is about the path to learning about something that one seeks to understand.   To write about single malts, one should actually know about single malts, which I do not, nor is that my intention.   It is about the path not the destination.  I have nothing to tell, only experiences to share.

I am entirely without credentials.  I know nothing,  and have little in the way of experience, and nothing in the way of background.  I simply want to learn.

And when I left Scotland, though I could claim that I had tried a few single malts, I certainly was not able to even recall how one differed from the other.

I learned a small amount by the tour we did of the Oban distillery.  While the oldest in Scotland, it is a relatively small distillery producing only about 650,000 litres a year.  (A wee bit over half a million might sound like a lot, but that would only keep 2000 hard core bottle a day drinkers intoxicated year round)

Back in the day, Oban was what I bought.  However, back in the day, it was less than $40.00 a bottle.  Now, here in Manitoba, it goes for $125.00.  I guess, that sometime in the last few years, they discovered a magic spring for the water that justified a 300% increase in the price.

But the tour itself was quite interesting.  The things I noted were that Scotch Whiskey is "simple".  There are only three ingredients.  Barley, Water and Yeast.  These are combined in these BIG barrels that look like they are filled with really really weak broth, and they ferment for only about four days.  The yeast works on the sugar in the barley, and alcohol is created.

After less than a week, the liquid is moved to the stills, where it is heated and cooled, allowing the alcohol to be separated.  The liquid alcohol, (spirit)  runs through a clear box with a big lock on it, called a spirit safe.  There are instruments in the safe that can be used to measure the strength of the alcohol.  If the alcohol is too weak, it is sent back to the still, but once it reaches the right strength, it is sent to a collection vessel.  The spirit is then put into casks to be aged for many years, where the true subtle magic occurs.  Everything contributes to the taste of scotch - the handling (drying) of the barley prior to being put into the broth, the water, and the specific casks that are used to store it for many years.

So, during the tour, we got to taste some under matured scotch.  It did not taste very good.  Then, at the end of the tour, we got to taste 14 year old Oban.  It had improved immensely.

We bought the three pack of Lavavulin, Cragganmore and  Talisker and set out to test them on the basis of the cool new chart that we were provided with at the Oban distillery:

And, when we tasted the Lagavulin, we understood what "smoky" meant.  We REALLY understood "smoky".  It was kind of like, and don't take this the wrong way, but it was kind of like drinking very good scotch out of a well used ashtray.  I was fascinated.  Others that I was with who tried it, were much less fascinated.  We ended up not finishing that small bottle, and I still have some.  While I liked the Cragganmore and Talisker much better, I could not decide which I liked better, or now even remember what each was like.  I had no foundation at all.

So not much changed in my exploration, but I had moved slightly along the path.  Very slightly.  But it was progress.

I also asked people along the way, for their opinions on "the best single malt".  "If you had to live on an island for a year, and could bring just one mainstream bottle, what would you take".  As I stated previously, I got a lot of different answers.  But the Macallan, and Laphroaig came up regularly.

I had tried Laphroaig, a small shot, while on a boat, and wasn't able to really form an opinion about it, so, just before leaving, I went to the Whiskey Shop, where there was a self proclaimed whiskey expert, and decided to pick up a bottle of Macallan as the one that I would take home.  I went for the Macallan gold, without any idea of what the gold meant, except that gold should be good....plus it had free cuff links!  Anyways, I was standing at the counter, with my bottle of "Gold" in hand, and along came the whiskey expert.  I posed my question:  "If you had to live on an island for a year, and could bring just one mainstream bottle, what would you take?"  "Oh, I don't know.  There are so many.  Everyone has different tastes.  It would be hard to say"  Then he looked at my bottle of Macallan GOLD and said with deadly seriousness.... "But it certainly would not be THAT"

I bought it anyway.

Where the world turned upside down and then went sideways, was when I finally got home and tried the only real bottle of Scotch that I brought back, which I will write about next.