Beam is bringing out a 13 yo rye that is to cost $300 and naturally Sku is planning to quit blogging about whiskey as a result. It’s the right thing to do. After all these years of blogging about easily accessible bourbons that anyone can buy and drink and reasonably priced 10 yo single malts, you can see why the prospect of an expensive 13 yo rye just doesn’t sit with him. Naturally, his announcement has set off a great deal of ferment in the whiskey world, nowhere more so than at the TTB, who are now facing the prospect of actually having to pay someone to remind the world of their existence on a regular basis. And K&L are doubtless wondering if doubling down on armagnac right now was a good idea—what if Sku’s malaise spreads and he stops blogging about brandies as well??! And, of course, the rest of us are wondering where we will now get the kind of loquacious, ebullient flights of fancy Sku was known for. Well, I can’t solve all the dilemmas posed by Sku’s threatened retirement but with your help I can at least try to ensure that he doesn’t stop blogging altogether. Please respond to this poll that asks: “What Should Sku Blog About Next?” Continue reading →

This is not a lump of peat…

I went on about this a little bit on Twitter earlier this evening but I can’t resist putting it all together in a blog post as well with a little more detail (this is why I am so beloved). I don’t know if you’ve seen it but the Daily Beast today published a piece by someone named Aaron Goldfarb on Single Cask Nation’s single cask releases that is quite laughable in many respects.Single Cask Nation, if you don’t know, is the independent bottling concern/club started by ex (?) whisky bloggers Joshua Hatton and Jason-Johnstone Yellin of Jewish Whisky Company (they also operate the Whisky Jewbilee events). Goldfarb appears to be someone who writes about spirits on a regular basis but it’s hard to tell from this if he actually knows very much about the ins and outs of the Scotch world. But I do expect a little better from The Daily Beast (is that an error?). Okay, what are my problems with the piece? Read on.

Continue reading →

Prominent in the shared language of whisky geeks is the idea of “distillery character”. It comes up often in reviews, including mine. See, for example, my review of a very old Teaninich where I say that some old whiskies seem “more like examples of “fruity distillates put into refill bourbon wood for a very long time” rather than exemplars of distillery character”; or my review of a port-matured Benromach where I note that not having tried very many Benromachs “I can’t really speak to distillery character”; elsewhere in a review of a port-matured Springbank I put the term in scare quotes that clarify nothing, suggesting that due to Springbank’s approach to double maturation their “distillery character” always comes through in their whiskies of the type. And these are only some of my recent reviews in which I use the term. All of this would suggest that I believe in distillery character. But in fact I don’t. Or rather I don’t really know what it is I, or other people, mean when I/they refer to “distillery character” or if there’s any consistency in how we do it. Continue reading →

The storied Islay distillery, Spewmoor today announced the 3rd and final edition in its successful Chairman’s Butt series. The first two limited editions of 300,000 bottles each sold out within hours of their release in 2012 and 2014, with customers falling over themselves to purchase bottles at £100 each and then to turn around and sell them to each other at £250 each. The first two releases, noted Hamish McGammon, Director of Cynicism at Spewmoor’s parent company Chundery, comprised 10 year old whisky matured in sherry casks specially chosen and blowtorched to impart a colour that would match the darkness of the board of directors’ souls and to distract drinkers from the strong aromas and flavours of sulphur in the whisky itself. Given the excitement with which these releases were consumed (and the breathless reviews and scores they received), the company was persuaded to release one final limited edition of 500,000 bottles in Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa and Antarctica only.

Continue reading →

We all drink Scotch whisky only to appear sophisticated. If you have a bourbon in your hand and someone asks you what you’re drinking you invariably have to say a name that sounds like it belonged to a minor Civil War general and then you worry that they might think you’re wearing confederate flag underwear. And if it is a Canadian whisky then you will likely become the butt of cruel jokes. But if you’ve got a glass of Scotch in your hand you get to hit your interlocutor with an unlikely combination of consonants and guttural sounds that make you sound like Sean Connery, or at least Mike Myers’ impression of Sean Connery. It doesn’t matter how you pronounce names like Laphroaig or Auchentoshan because nobody else knows how to pronounce them either. The problem comes when you’re asked what the name means (and anyone who’s been around drunks knows that we, I mean they are very interested in etymology).

Continue reading →

This is a post in everyone’s favourite genre: blogger blogging about blogging. It’s your lucky day.

As the two or three people who read this blog regularly and read both the new posts and the recent comments know, I sometimes (but not as often as I should) go back to bottles I have previously reviewed and add fresh comments (not to the original review itself but in the comments section); and in some cases suggest a new score based on the later tasting. Sometimes I find the whisky to be unchanged or not significantly changed, but usually I find a shift in emphases in notes (most commonly) or a complete disappearance of some notes (not unusually) or the appearance of completely new notes (rarely). None of this is surprising news to anyone who drinks bottles down slowly over time—whiskies change in the bottle with time and air and their mutability is part of what makes them interesting. But it does raise some (unoriginal) questions about reviewing and scoring (not just on blogs). Continue reading →

This is not a very original line of inquiry. I’m guessing lots of other bloggers have visited it over the years. Indeed, I have a dim memory of having proposed something along similar lines some years ago in a discussion on What Does John Know?–back when it was a daily stop for me. But instead of being all negative and accusing me of beating a long dead and highly boring horse, why not laud me instead for my daring retro post on Throwback Thursday? That’s the spirit!

At any rate, this question occurred to me again after the brief exchange yesterday in the comments on my review of the utterly ordinary Kavalan King Conductor that is to retail in the US for $109.99: what should the price threshold be for whiskies in particular age ranges? Continue reading →

David Driscoll has been on a strange tear on Spirits Journal in the last few months. Bloggers have been the target of his ire but it’s really logic and coherence that have been the victims. One day it’s important to have knowledge and “critical context”, other days all that matters is to have fun and not worry about knowing things and people who know things are a drag, and so on. There’s about as much consistency in his narratives as in those in the professional wrestling world he keeps referencing. I’ve stopped calling this stuff out on the blog as I don’t really have anything personal against Driscoll or K&L–I purchase from them and generally have enjoyed K&L’s selections. Also, even for a blowhard like me it gets tiring saying the same thing over and over again. And at this point I think most whisky geeks are wise to his schtick anyway. But his most recent post is quite something. Continue reading →