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?

Here’s another post to sate your lust for the blend. This time I’ll be chronicling a few testblends I did last night, so in contrast to most of the blends I talk about on this blog, these are unmarried and more or less freshly poured (I let them sit with a cover on the glass for 30 mins before tasting, but that’s it). Dalwhinnie 15yo is a subtly flavoured single malt, so I chose three more or less subtle malts to partner it with: Glenmorangie 10yo, Clynelish 14yo and Glen Elgin 12yo. My expectations beforehand were that the resulting blends would be rather similar, with differences in the nuances, but […]

There’s two ingredients for this  blend: First, I like to one-up people. Second, I saw some tasting notes describing Glen Elgin 12yo as ‘obscenely fruity’. Put those ingredients together and you get me trying to make Glen Elgin fruitier. Is this a good idea? Probably not, but it should be fun! First, I’ve added the Fruitifier™: Elijah Craig. Then, to give it another little kick, a dose of Deanston Virgin Oak, which I hope will make a marriage between the other two because of it’s single malt spirit and bourbon-y production in virgin oak casks.

While doing this blog, two repeat offenders have arisen from amongst the ranks. Both Elijah Craig 12yo and Clynelish 14yo have proven themselves excellent blend-participants, but for very different reasons. Elijah Craig, being a bourbon, has a very powerful taste and (like peated whiskies) is best used in moderation. What it does best is add orange (peel) and vanilla notes. I like to think of it as a finisher (you add just a splash to complete a blend). Clynelish on the other hand is quite the opposite: it works best in larger amounts, imparting a mellow quality and waxy mouthfeel and finish to whatever blend it finds itself in. As you probably […]

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!

I like peated whisky. I also like blending whiskies. So, one of the first things I did when I started blending was try out different blends containing peated whiskies. It turns out peat and smoke are flavours which are hard to work with. If you use just a little it’s not so bad: you get some smoke in the nose and finish and maybe a bit of peat and spice in the taste. Really good if you want to enhance a whisky, but not really peaty. When using larger amount of peated whisky, one of two things tends too happen: either the peated whisky completely and utterly overwhelms the other […]

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 […]