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 […]

Last week I tried out three possible ways to improve the fairly simple character of the Deanston Virgin Oak. Two of the three showed enough promise to warrant a second look after letting them marry for a bit. Both the Deanfrog and the Dealish have been marrying in small 5cl bottles for 8 days, which should be long enough to allow the flavour and scent of the malts to meld into each other. I´ll go a bit deeper into why and how long of marrying in a future post, but read on below to discover that (at least in these these two cases) it is an essential part of blending.

So, you want to start blending whiskies (you do, really). Good on ya, mate. I suspect by now, however, reality is slowly sinking in and you’re realising that you have no idea where or how to start. Oh, of course you can just randomly put some whiskies together (the ‘blend-n-pray’), and while that can net surprising results at times, most of what you produce will be… not so interesting. A better way to go about it is to have some sort of plan. Decide beforehand what type of blend you want to end up with. You can opt for a single dominant taste: for instance a sherrybomb, a blend with […]

Here’s a fun way to get into homevatting: start a living bottle. A living bottle is a bottle into which you decant small amounts of different whiskies, and in which you always leave a decent level. The nose, taste and finish of the drams you pour from it change with every new whisk(e)y you add. After a while, there may be dozens or even hundreds of different whiskies in the bottle. One of the good things about this (besides it being a hoot) is that the whiskies get the time to grow accustomed to one another, to marry together.