Here is another of my purchases from my brief Chicago trip last month. I’ve had very little Glen Keith before. It’s a relatively young distillery that no one’s ever gotten very excited about, albeit one that’s packed a fair bit of change into its brief history. It was built in the late 1950s and originally triple-distilled its spirit (unusual on the Speyside). In the 1970s it produced peated variants under the Craigduff and Glenisla labels. In 1999 it was mothballed and seemingly closed for good…until it reopened in 2013 with a doubled production capacity. Now, as then, it is producing a somewhat generic spirit for Chivas Bros./Pernod-Ricard’s blends and it’s mostly known to whisky geeks through a number of independent releases in the 2000s—and, of course, individual casks can hit far above the average. Unremarkable as its reputation is, I’d have been willing to bet that it would eventually have turned around if the owners had only been far-sighted enough to keep it closed. Anyway, let’s see what this one is like.  Continue reading →