After Monday’s discontinued Ardbeg 17 here is the one-off Rollercoaster. This is a vatting released in 2010 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Ardbeg “Committee”, and comprises spirit from each year from 1997-2006. In other words, there’s 3-12 yo whisky in this (you can get the details of the proportions at the Ardbeg Project). This was around in the US for a while at a fairly reasonable price, but, of course, I didn’t bother trying to get a bottle till it was too late. Still, thanks to a sample swap I get to finally try it. Let’s get right to it.

Ardbeg Rollercoaster (57.3%; from a sample received in a swap)

Nose: Well, there’s no shortage of phenolic peat on the nose with this one. Also: seashells, lemon and a big hit of vanilla. Gets quite medicinal as it sits and there’s some wet rope and an organic/rotting kelp note too. The vanilla comes back up again with time and it gets quite creamy. With water the lemon is out on top but the vanilla-cream is still around. Continue reading →

Continuing an unplanned mini-run of discontinued Islays in their late teens, here is the Ardbeg 17, which was, I believe, the first release from the distillery after it was purchased by the Glenmorangie group in 1997. It was discontinued in 2004. I got this miniature in an unlikely swap. A fellow whisky geek offered it in exchange for the tin of a Port Charlotte PC9. I was only too glad to take him up on it. I can’t be bothered to squint for the bottling code, but this is a 43% bottling for the US market and as per the Ardbeg Project there was only one release of the 50 ml miniature in the US and that was in 2000 (well before I’d ever heard of Ardbeg). I’m not sure how much production was happening right before the 1983 closure of the distillery (it reopened in 1989)–it’s possible that this is from even older distillate. It is certainly the case that those who bought the 17 yo released in 2004 were getting much older whisky.

Anyway, I’m very excited to taste this–let’s get started! Continue reading →

The Ardbeg special release for 2014, the Auriverdes, which commemorates the World Cup in Brazil, is already out in the US (odd, as usually the special releases don’t hit the shelves till June 1); and there’s talk as well of a new edition of the Supernova on the way. As such, it seemed like a good time for me to finally taste my samples of the 2009 and 2010 editions of the Supernova head to head—in a few years time I’ll get around to the Galileo, the Ardbeg Day, and the Ardbog.

As you may know, the Supernova, first released to the Ardbeg Committee in 2008 (back when “committee release” meant something) and then in two editions in 2009 and 2010, was Ardbeg’s experiment with very high peating levels. The regular Ardbeg is already peated to a very high level by normal standards (54 ppm) but the barley for the Supernovas was peated to 100 ppm. Of course, this number is dwarfed by those for every release of Octomore from Bruichladdich (which also first emerged in 2008) but the Ardbeg name carries a certain cachet. It does appear though that Ardbeg ceded the peat arms race to Bruichladdich almost immediately. If there is indeed a new Supernova on the horizon it’ll be interesting to see how high it goes with the peat ppm.

Anyway, let’s see what these two are like. Continue reading →

That whisky geeks are obsessive is well known–we chase after and compare batches of Aberlour A’bunadh, Laphroaig 10 CS, Springbank 12 CS etc. etc.. None of this, however, compares to the mania of the Ardbeg obsessives who, in the absence of helpfully provided batch information on the labels, track bottling codes, parsing them not just for the year of distillation but for the exact bottling run. Clear distinctions between years and narrow periods are claimed by many and there are even some who insist on being able to tell differences between batches bottled at different times in the same year. I sometimes idly wonder if Ardbeg would be quite so popular if they just put all the identifying information on their labels. At any rate, it’s very good for their sales as there’s infinite granularity for the collectors this way–instead of just one Ardbeg 10 you can have an Ardbeg 10 from every year for which a bottle code is available, and instead of just one Ardbeg 10 from that year you can have many. It just goes to show that distilleries don’t really need to stimulate mania among geeks; we manage just fine on our own. Continue reading →

This is not a very timely review. The Alligator was Ardbeg‘s special release a couple of years ago and is very much day-before-yesterday’s news, having been displaced first by the Ardbeg Day release, and then by the controversial Galileo—and we’re less than two months away from the 2013 special release. Ardbeg, if you don’t know, currently has three whiskies in their regular lineup—the Ardbeg 10, the Uigeadail and the Corryvreckan—and, in addition, release, with a great deal of fanfare (or nonsense, if you prefer) one or two special bottlings every year. These releases are usually experimental in some way. Last year’s Galileo caused a great deal of underpants twisting among a large segment of whisky geeks. This was on account of it being a vatting of bourbon cask matured Ardbeg (so far, so good) with some marsala cask matured Ardbeg (apparently, worse than genocide, if you go by the outcry in some quarters). To my mind, the objections were largely religious in nature, coming from those who object to wine casks on principle, even if they might not in practice be able to tell a vatting containing marsala cask matured whisky from one containing unobjectionable sherry cask matured whisky. I said as much on a prominent whisky forum and this led to a whisky blogger, who doesn’t seem to have matured at all, calling me an “arsole”, which is accurate but not good spelling.

Continue reading →