The first Scottish blenders used peated whisky sparingly to give their mellow blends a bit of a ‘kick’ and this time I’m looking to bring this type of blended whisky into the 21st century. I’m not using grain whisky, just malts, to get a fuller taste and upping the amount of peated whisky to match. Caol Morclas is a new version of Far Mor Peaty (which only managed to get 3 drams), containing Caol Ila instead of the more powerful Laphroaig and Lagavulin. I also tweaked the ratio of Glenmorangie to Glenfarclas to allow more of the gentle sweetness in the Glenmorangie to poke through the sherried nature of the Glenfarclas. […]

Like the name? I think it’s a new high in my search for unpronounceable mash-ups. But anyway, to business: today’s blend is a bit of a fluke. I got a bottle of Glenrothes Select Reserve for my birthday and decided to blend it with the closest thing on my whisky-shelf. That turned out to be one of the stars amongst peated whiskies: Lagavulin 16yo. In light of previous experience I thought better of making it a 50/50 blend and instead went for 75% Glenrothes to 25% Lagavulin. It was at this point that I needed to come up with a rationale for putting these two whiskies together. You know, being a […]

As I have hopefully conveyed in the title of the blend, this one is supposed to be quite a bit more peaty than most of the blends on this blog. To achieve this goal I have selected two peated whiskies: Lagavulin 16yo, the sophisticated but savagely peated malt from the southern coast of Islay and, from a few kilometers along that same coast, Laphroaig Quarter Cask. This very medicinal single malt has been aged a further while on small quarter casks, which serves to couple the peat to a strong wood influence. To counterbalance the peat I based the blend on a sweet speysider: Glenfarclas 10yo. And last but not […]

Yes, I know, i’ve been gone for a while. I love you too, I’ll never leave you again and let’s get to the drinking, shall we? Actually, I’ve been working on another whisky related project (my dutch visitors may know it: WhiskyVinder), which has been taking up a lot of my spare time. As a result I’ll be posting a little more infrequently here, but the upside is my experimentation is going on at the same pace, so you will be seeing only the cream of the crop (and occasionally, for comic relief, the bottom of the barrel). Right, this week I have two variations on a theme. Both are based […]

‘Hello peatiness my old friend, I’ve come to taste of you again…’ (from ‘The Smell of Silence’ – MacSimon and McGarfunkel). It has been a little while since I tried blending with peated whisky (and those earlier attempts were… less than sucessful). This week I will present you with two quite different blends using two quite different peated whiskies. Kicking off is Laphroaig QC, which is a full-bodied and fairly complex whisky in its own right. In the past it has proven a fickle component, turning bitter easily and generally overpowering most blend-partners. For this new attempt I have selected Glen Elgin as the major component. I had good hopes […]

The second fruit of the Dalwhinnie testblends is this: Dal Elgin. And fruit is right, since any blend with Glen Elgin in it will invariably have sweet candy-like fruit in it no matter what partners you throw at it. This makes Dal Elgin a very useful blending malt: like peated whisky and the Deanston Virgin Oak I featured a few blends back it never fails to impart its character on a blend. Even better, whereas peated whisky seems to behave oddly with certain other malts, Dal Elgin just works. If all of it is suppressed, there’s still a hint of liquid fruit candy in the background somewhere. So, let’s see what it […]

In the Dalwhinnie testblends last week I managed to find two blends which looked decent enough to let marry for a bit. One of them was Dal Elgin, which I will review later this week. The first and (on first face) most promising one was this: Dalmorangie. Unmarried it had a buttery, caramelized sweetness to it which made it quite yummy indeed. But, as we’ve seen several times already on this blog, blends transform when married, emphasising some aspects of the original taste and suppressing others. So let’s see what happened here, shall we?

Continuing on my ‘peated’ theme this week, I present unto you: ‘Glen Morpeatie’ (pun most defnitely intended). This blend has a base of Glenmorangie, and adds Islay malts Coal Ila and Laphroaig as the peated components (Coal Ila being relatively mildly peaty and spicy and Laphroaig adding mainly powerful peat-smoke). To tone the peat back just a little bit and improve the mouth-feel, the last component is trusty old Clynelish. What I’m going for here is a whisky not unlike the Laphroaig QC itself: peated, but round. Success would be if the roundness could slightly overshadow the peat. Well, after marrying for 5 days, let’s taste it and find out!

Sometimes everything just works. You have an idea which seems decent, you act on it and the result is better than even you expected. You find yourself baffled by this thing you have created. It is no longer a collection of parts, it has become a truly new thing. It is… alive. ALIVE! It is one such Frankensteinish moment I wish to share with you today. Far from a monster, The Meady Blues is actually quite heavenly (which is why I named it after the famed Norse nectar of the gods). It began as an idea: what if I could combine the best parts of two previous blends: the beeswax […]

This week I’ll be using Isle of Arran 10yo single malt as a base for blending. One thing I should tell you first, though: I’m Dutch (okay, stop gasping, it’s not as if I can help it). And one particularly Dutch foodstuff is liquorice. So you can gauge the extend of our preoccupation with this bitter-sweet candy: we tend to have a section devoted solely to liquorice in our supermarkets roughly the size of the coffee-and-tea-shelf. So you imagine my mirth when I first consumed a dram of Arran 10yo and found that it has a distinct liquorice-y taste and finish. Now, I happened to have a bottle of Ardmore Traditional Cask […]