I tell you: it is a great feeling having the time and headroom again to share some blends with you all. This first one of (hopefully) a new series is made up out of 3 components which I have reviewed in separate posts: Kilkerran WIP IV, Linkwood 17yo WhB and Clynelish 7yo TU. I chose these malts because they would seem to complement eachother: all are fruity, but in different ways. The blend ratio is not based on any testing but rather on some informed guesses as to how the malts will behave and a whole lot of wishful thinking. Let’s see if the union of these three malts is […]

The second blend in my Maker’s Mark miniseries is ‘Make Mor(angie)’ (the names will only get sillier as we go along I’m afraid). I picked the Glenmorangie as I figured its notes of banana and other fruit would mesh well will the orangy notes in the bourbon. I expect this will be the most candied and sweet of all blends, but as always the proof is in the tasting, so let’s go! 50% Maker’s Mark 50% Glenmorangie 10yo The Original Straight from the top the nose lives up to my expectations, it is almost all fruit that I smell: fried banana, heavy tropical fruit and a hint of orange. Under […]

Welcome to a new mini-series in which I will be blending the classic bourbon Maker’s Mark with a few Scotch whiskies. The Anglo-American marriage of bourbon to scotch whisky is one of those things of which many so-called whisky-afficionados disapprove. I don’t buy it. My blends with bourbon in them have for the most part had great results (one particularly good example being The Meady Blues). So, two months ago I crated five blends of Maker’s Mark (a gentle bourbon with a big influence of corn and wheat) and some of the big Scottish names. Here is the first of those blends: The Whinniemaker: 50% Maker’s Mark 50% Dalwhinnie 15yo […]

Very early on in my whisky education I stumbled across a vlog by Ralfy, in which he described a rum tasting with the Glasgow whisky club. His own contribution was a blend of whisky and rum he called ‘rumsky‘. Intrigued, I vowed to myself to try this one day. And, as you may have guessed, that very day has at last arrived! Ralfy actually aged his rumsky for one and a half years as well as using cask strength spirits. I decided to start a little simpler by simply pouring a rum and a whisky together. Doesn’t really get much easier. Since the rum I selected (Appleton 12yo) is a […]

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?