It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed an old Scotch blend, by which I mean, a blend released a long time ago. The last one I reviewed was a White Horse released in the 1950s. Today I have for you another White Horse, albeit one released in the 1970s. Unlike the 1950s release, this review is not of a pour from my own bottle but of a sample I’ve had sitting in my stash for a few years now. I have an unexpected feeling of nostalgia about this whisky, however. This because in the late 1970s, when my family lived in Iraq, White Horse was one of a few Scotch whiskies that my father had in his bar. A bottle of White Horse or Black and White from this era was probably my first encounter with the aroma of Scotch whisky—and, of course, we repurposed the empty bottles to store drinking water in the fridge! I certainly didn’t taste any of it then but it feels a bit like a time machine trip to be drinking it now. Let’s hope the actual whisky doesn’t now disappoint! On that note, let’s get right to it. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Blended
Compass Box, Delilah’s XXV
Compass Box week ends with another commemorative whisky. I say “another” because both of this week’s other Compass Box reviews were also of commemorative whiskies. Stranger & Stranger (which I thought was nothing very special) was released to celebrate their relationship with the eponymous design company, and Spice Tree Extravaganza (which I liked a lot more) was released to mark an event in company history. Well, this one was released to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chicago whisky bar, Delilah’s. This was released five years after Compass Box’s first release for Delilah’s in 2013 (on the bar’s 20th anniversary). A chunk of the 25th anniversay vatting incorporates a parcel of that earlier release (29%), which had been aged further in a refill hogshead. The rest of the vatting comprises grain whisky from Cameronbridge (10.5%), and malt whisky from Miltonduff (10.5%), Teaninich (20%), an unnamed distillery near Aberlour (15%) and Linkwood (15%). The Cameronbridge and Miltonduff came out of first-fill American oak barrels and the rest from first-fill sherry butts. I’m not sure what it cost on release but I’d be surprised if it was cheap. Well, let’s see what it all added up to flavour-wise. Continue reading
Compass Box, Stranger & Stranger
Alright, after a week of reviews of agave spirits (two mezcals and a raicilla) that no one reading the blog seemed to be interested in, let’s go back to Scotch whisky. Here’s another week of reviews of releases from Compass Box. First up, is one from 2018 that they called Stranger & Stranger. The name is apparently that of the design company they work(ed) with and the whisky was composed to commemorate the relationship. This is a blend of malt whisky with a tiny bit of 1 yo spirit from Girvan (apparently 1% of the whole). The explanation for the odd choice to blend a tiny bit of 1 yo spirit with a lot of malt whisky in a very expensive release (close to $200 in the US) is that Stranger & Stranger’s work is also category-defying. Of course, it also makes for a story of sorts and what is a Compass Box whisky without a story? The malt components are from Glenlossie (recharred hogshead, 80% of the whole), Glen Elgin (recharred barrel, 14% of the whole), and Linkwood (sherry butt, 5% of the whole). Okay, let’s see what it’s like). Continue reading
Writers’ Tears, Cask Strength
My week of Writers’ Tears reviews comes to an end with what is, I think, the third in their trio of core releases: the Cask Strength. (See here for my review of the Copper Pot and here for my review of the Double Oak.) Like the other Writers’ Tears releases, the Cask Strength is a blend of Single Pot Still and Single Malt Irish whiskey. There’s no grain whiskey component: only barley. Of course the presence of the pot still component, not to mention the triple distillation, makes it different from your average Scottish single malt whisky. Like the Copper Pot, this is matured in bourbon barrels, but I’m not sure if there is any other relationship between them. By which I mean that I do not know if the Cask Strength is the cask strength version of the Copper Pot or even if the whiskeys that go into the two comes from the same sources. I do know that the Cask Strength costs far more than the Copper Pot. The current release was at 150 euros at Celtic Whiskey Shop in Dublin. This review is not of the current release, however. That one is at 54.8% abv. This one is at 53%. A number of prior releases have been at 53%, most recently in 2019. All three of the miniatures I reviewed this week came out of the attractive book packaging—I don’t know if that helps narrow things down. At any rate, here are my notes. Continue reading
Writers’ Tears, Double Oak
This week I am reviewing three different releases from Walsh Whiskey’s Writers’ Tears label. The week got off to a decent start yesterday with the Copper Pot, their entry-level blend. Today I have for you a review of the Double Oak, which joined their core range a few years ago. It is so-called because it is a blend of spirit matured in American oak and French oak casks. What the proportion of the two in the blend is, I don’t know (I am assuming that it’s not all double-matured in the two cask types). Like in the Copper Pot, the spirit that goes into this is triple-distilled and is a blend of single pot still and single malt Irish whiskey. It gets a step-up in abv from the Copper Pot, being bottled at 46%. As with the Copper Pot, there is no indication of age. It’s probably safe to assume we’re not dealing with an abundance of age here. Okay, let’s see what it’s like.
Writers’ Tears, Double Oak (46%; from a miniature)
Nose: Orange peel, vanilla, polished oak. On the second sniff there’s some apricot and the vanilla moves in the direction of butterscotch. Not much change with time. A drop or two of water and there’s more citrus at first and then a metallic note. Continue reading
Writers’ Tears, Copper Pot
After exactly six weeks in Ireland—five of those in Dublin—we are headed back to Minnesota tomorrow. Regardless, I am going close the month out with an extended run of reviews of Irish whiskeys. Last week I reviewed a threesome from three different producers. Two were entry-level blends (The Irishman: The Harvest and the West Cork distillery’s Black Cask); and one was a peated single malt (W.D. O’Connell’s Bill Phil). This week’s whiskeys are all from the same producer. Walsh Whisky are the ones who put out the Irishman series. That series has quite a few releases in it at this point and the same is true of their better-known line, Writers’ Tears. I’ll be reviewing three from that line this week: the Copper Pot, which is their entry-level blend, bottled at 40%; the Double Oak, which steps up a bit in price and abv at 46%; and finally the Cask Strength, which is priced as a premium whiskey. First up, the Copper Pot. This is a blend of single pot still and single malt Irish whiskey, all of it distilled from barley. It’s all triple-distilled and unpeated and the maturation is in “flame charred” bourbon casks. No word on the likely age of the pot still and single malt constituents. Draw your own conclusions. Continue reading
West Cork, Black Cask
Irish Whiskey Week 2 has gone pretty well so far. On Monday I reviewed W.D. O’Connell’s Bill Phil, a peated whiskey that I quite liked. On Tuesday I reviewed a blend from Walsh Whiskey: The Irishman: The Harvest. While I didn’t give that one a very high score in the abstract, I thought it was very good for what it is: an entry-level blend. Here now is another entry-level blend. This one is from West Cork Distillers and unlike the other two, which are both sourced whiskeys, it is actually made by West Cork. Or so I assume anyway: they do have their own distillery and it produces a fairly large volume of spirit. As per their website, they have eight pot stills and two column stills and have the capacity to produce 4 million liters of spirit per year—though it’s less clear how much they actually produce. (They also bill themselves as the largest fully Irish-owned distillery in Ireland but that’s neither here nor there.) The Black Cask is comprised of 66% grain and 34% malt whiskey. It’s called the Black Cask because after three years of maturation in first-fill bourbon casks it spends another year in heavily charred bourbon casks. Quite a bit more grain in the blend than I would prefer and I’m always given pause by heavily charred bourbon casks and the potential for the contents to turn into vanilla bombs. Has that happened here or does the char tame the grain and youth? Let’s see. Continue reading
The Irishman – The Harvest
I quite enjoyed the first of this week’s trio of Irish whiskeys. That was yesterday’s Bill Phil from W.D. O’Connell. That was a heavily peated, single malt from an undisclosed distillery (probably Great Northern). Today I have a blended whiskey from Walsh Whiskey. Walsh Whiskey are blenders who produce two lines/brands: The Irishman and the more famous Writers’ Tears. I confess that I am not really sure what the distinction between the two lines is supposed to be. At any rate, there are a number of labels in each line. Currently, there seem to be six different iterations of The Irishman. Today I am reviewing what I think is the entry-level whiskey in the line: the Harvest. This is a blend of triple distilled whiskeys: 70% single malt and 30% single pot still, all matured in bourbon barrels. What the sources of the single malt and single pot still spirit that goes into the blend are, I don’t know. I don’t expect an entry-level blend to be anything very out of the ordinary but I am hoping that it won’t be extraordinarily bad. Let’s see. Continue reading
Teeling Small Batch
Living very close to the Teeling distillery, as we currently are, I decided to do a week of reviews of Teeling’s core lineup. Things got off to a very shaky start on Monday with the Single Grain, which I really did not like. Here now is a review of the Small Batch, which is a blend of grain and malt whiskey. As to whether the grain whiskey that goes into this blend is the same as the grain in the Single Grain, I do not know. Nor am I sure of whether the malt whiskey in it is that distilled by Teeling themselves. I assume the odds are decent that it is as the Teeling distillery has now been open for about eight years. The whiskey itself is NAS and if there’s been any indication made about its purported age, I am unaware of it—I haven’t followed whisky marketing for many years now, and even when I did I was not very up on the Irish whiskey scene. As with the miniature of the Single Grain I reviewed, there’s some variance between this miniature and the Small Batch as currently described on the distillery’s website. There it is said to be finished for up to 12 months in rum casks; this label definitively notes a 6-month rum finish (after initial aging in bourbon casks). As to whether the duration of the finish varies from batch to batch, I do not know. I’m also beginning to wonder if there are any Teeling releases that don’t involve maturation or finishes in non-traditional casks. Continue reading
Old Blends: White Horse, 1950s Release
Here is a review of the only bottle of very old whisky I have ever owned and very likely will ever own. By “very old” I don’t mean length of maturation but era of distillation. As per people who know far more than me about this sort of thing, this bottle of White Horse was released sometime between the mid-1950s and very early 1960s and probably in the late 1950s. I don’t know how this provenance is established and am only very slightly interested. In the EU bottles like this one circulate regularly–or did anyhow—at auction. How did I come into possession of this bottle, living in the US? Well, about five years ago a friend visiting in Israel emailed me saying he’d come across this bottle at his in-laws’ home and asking if it might be worth anything at auction. I made some inquiries and told him what the likely range of prices might be. It then transpired that in transporting the bottle from Israel to Berlin—his next stop—there had been some leakage resulting in the label coming a bit loose. All of this, I advised him, would probably drive the auction price down. His own interest in pursuing the auction market had dimmed at this point and he ended up offering it to me at the low end of the auction prices I’d initially given him—with a further discount once even more of the whisky leaked on its way to the US in his suitcase. I then wrapped the the spring cap up tightly and, as is my wont, forgot about it for a few years. I think the initial plan had been to save it for an unspecified special occasion. As I’ve noted before, during the pandemic I revised my definition of “special occasions” to now include almost any given day. And so about two months ago I decided to open it to mark the end of term. Here now are my notes. Continue reading
Ambassador 25 yo, Blend
This week’s reviews are all of blends of one kind of the other. Monday featured the Campbeltown cask from the Edinburgh Cadenhead store from April 2014. That one was almost certainly all malt whisky, almost certainly all Springbank. But in the absence of specific information we will consider it a blended malt whisky. Today’s whisky is the the type of blend we think of more usually when we think of blended whisky: a blend of malt and grain. But it’s no easier to locate now than that one-off Campbeltown cask. This is a 25 yo from a defunct brand named Ambassador and I know very little about it. The person I acquired the sample from pointed me to this entry on Whiskybase. There is no bottling year listed there but another entry for an identical label indicates it was probably a 1970s bottling—so the whisky in it was distilled in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Apparently Ambassador once contained malt from Scapa and Glen Scotia though I’m not sure if this was still the case for 1970s releases. For more information on the brand I will direct you to Michael K’s review of an Ambassador 25. His review is not of this release though but of a much older bottle from either the 1940s or 1950. Okay, let’s see what this is like. Continue reading
Jameson Irish Whiskey, Bottled Early-Mid 1980s
On Monday I had a review of a malt whisky from a relatively unknown Taiwanese distillery. Here now is a review of a whiskey from the most famous brand name in Ireland: Jameson, made at the Midleton distillery. What do they have in common? Nothing other than the fact that neither is Scottish.
I know very little about Irish whiskey and have reviewed very few Irish whiskies. And I’ve not had very good luck with the few Jamesons I’ve reviewed. Those were all contemporary releases, however, whereas this one was bottled sometime in the early-mid 1980s. I assume it was still made in the same way then, as a blend of grain and pot still whiskey. You are doubtless sick of hearing Scotch whisky geeks go on about how much better single malts and blends were in the 1970s and 1980s. Was the same true of Irish whiskey? Let’s see what this one indicates. Continue reading
Old Blends: Black & White, Late 1940s/Early 1950s
There are a lot of things I post on the blog that most of my old whisky readership has no interest in: recipes, restaurant reviews, pictures of markets, reviews of old blended whiskies. Accordingly, here is a review of a Black & White released sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I expect it will be enjoyed by the tens of visitors who also read my review of a late 1940s/early 1950s Ballantine’s back in December. As for myself, I will be happy if I like this one as much as I liked that one. This is not actually my first review of a Black & White from the days of yore. Back in 2013, just a few months into the blog’s existence, I’d reviewed one from the 1960s. That was an unscored review but my notes indicate that I quite liked it. Let’s see how this one fares.
Black & White (43.4%; Late 1940s/Early 1950s release; from a bottle split)
Nose: Mild sweet notes (orange) mixed with putty and a decent whack of peat (though not medicinal). The peat gets more organic as it sits (dead rat). Some brine in there too with time. Gets maltier with a few drops of water and some mildly honeyed notes emerge as well. Continue reading
Old Blends: Old Rarity 12
A few summers ago I posted a number of recipes for home-made jams. These were not popular with my whisky readership. Do you know what is even less popular with said whisky readership, or whatever remains of it? You guessed it: my reviews of blended whiskies released many decades ago. And interest in them goes down with each one I post, rather than the other way around. Accordingly, I am pleased to present this review of a rather obscure blend. Well, obscure to me. I believe this bottle was from the US market—though I doubt Old Rarity was only released in the US. The source of the sample estimates that the bottle might date from the 1960s. That is the extent of my non-knowledge about Old Rarity. I’ll add only that the name of this whisky suggests that the practices of adding the word “old” to things that aren’t very old and of suggesting things are rare by calling them things like “rarity” are obviously not innovations of our time. Continue reading
Old Blends: Haig & Haig 8, Five Star
Following last week’s old Haig & Haig 12, here is a Haig & Haig 8 yo that is four years younger but may have been released half a decade earlier. Again, I know very little about these old blends and can therefore tell you very little about their antecedents or history. My interest is only in seeing, in the aggregate, what the qualities of whiskies from earlier eras were like. I’m not likely to have much chance to taste single malts released in the 1940s and 1950s, so samples of these old blends are pretty much my only window to the era. It’s true that with many decades spent sitting in bottles—plus the uncertainties of storage—there’s no guarantee that what we are tasting now is very close to what these whiskies were like when consumed upon release, but there’s no solving that conundrum. My limited sample size does suggest, however, that whisky drinkers of the mid-century (synonymous then with blend drinkers) drank much better than current blend drinkers, and that there was much more peat, and likely much more malt whisky in blends of that era. That said, I didn’t like the Haig & Haig 12 quite as much as some of the other old blends I’ve reviewed but I did like it. Let’s see what this 8 year old is like. Continue reading
Old Blends: Haig & Haig 12, 1940s Release
After a week off, here is the latest installment in my slow-motion series of reviews of old blends (blends released a long time ago, that is). (I have previously reviewed a Dewar’s White Label from the 1940s/1950s, a Hudson’s Bay “Best Procurable” from the 1950s, and a King George IV from the 1940s/1950s.) This is a Haig & Haig 12 yo that was released sometime in the 1940s. It is a 12 yo, and I think it may have been an US release. I assume its marketing back in the day included David Beckham’s old timey equivalent. I know very little about these old blends so can’t really shed any light on the subject of the importers of these whiskies back in that era or what the market as a whole was like. Frankly, I’m not even sure how people date these old blends to particular decades, but I do trust the source of this bottle split (who is also the source of all the other old blends I have reviewed, and will be reviewing in this series). Continue reading
Old Blends: Hudson’s Bay “Best Procurable”, 1950s
Here is the third in my slow motion series of reviews of blended whiskies from earlier eras. (See here for my review of an old Dewar’s White Label, and here for a review of a King George IV bottled in the 1940s or 1950s.). I don’t know much about this Hudson’s Bay brand, except that I think it was made for the US market and that while this particular bottle was released in the 1950s, the brand is still around. And if it ever had a strong reputation, it’s not exactly high-end whisky now: you can get a 1.75 liter bottle of the current Hudson’s Bay for not much more than $20. (I am, of course, assuming it’s the same brand.) Then again, I really liked the older Dewar’s White Label despite finding the current version to be bordering on undrinkable; and so I’m not assuming anything about this one. Well, let’s see what it’s like.
Continue reading