The Malt Cask

It's been a while since I had some peat back on the blog so let's change that today with one of the last bottles I have opened: Ardbeg 10 years old. I actually bought this bottle one if not two years ago and never really got round to opening it. I must say with about 30 bottles opened in the cabinet, I had to establish a bit of rule: kill a bottle to be able to open another one. However, I am reaching the stage where a few of my bottles are running very low which means I can open some of those which have been on the shelves for a while. So why Ardbeg 10? The first reason is that I am running a little low on peat. I finished Caol Ila 12, Lagavulin 8 and when I pour the last dram of Kilchoman Machir Bay, I thought I needed to replenish some of the peat stock. Ardbeg 10 is also one I tried a couple of times in the past but it didn't leave a particularly strong impression on -me unlike the Uigeadail. It was therefore time to give it a proper chance, and boy did it not disa...

Being on holidays allows me to attend a few more tasting sessions at the Whisky Shop Manchester. I was there last Saturday for their "new release" session, and on Wednesday again for their Japanese session, which I will present in a future post.  Today is about the 5 new releases that we got to try last Saturday, and here was the line-up: 1. The Loch Fyne Living Cask Batch 4 (43.6%) 2. Inchmurrin 12 years old (46%) 3. Glen Ord 11 years old Hepburn's choice single cask  (46%) 4. Glen Scotia Double Cask (46%) 5. Ardbeg Dark Cove (46.5%) Out of these 5, Dark Cove is the one I was most looking forward to as I got to try the Committee release at the distillery and really enjoyed it. We started with the Living Cask from Loch Fyne. The idea for the Living Cask is that the company started with a vat of single malts, took 1/2 to release as batch 1 and topped up the vat with fresh single malt, and repeated the process for batch 2, 3 and now 4. In case you ...

Last day on Islay today with quite a line-up: Ardbeg at 10:00, Lagavulin at 12:30 and Laphroaig at 15:15, and all that on foot! So after a good breakfast of smoked haddock and poached eggs, we set off from Port Ellen, heading towards Ardbeg, the furthest distillery on the southern coast from Port Ellen. We soon found a brand new tarmac path which runs all the way from Port Ellen to Ardbeg so it’s great for walking and perfect if you’ve got a bike on Islay. And to top it all off, the sun was out. Timing-wise, it took us 30 minutes from the B&B to Laphroaig, then 20 more minutes to Lagavulin and 20 minutes again to Ardbeg, walking at a decent pace but stopping here and there for photographs. Good breakfast at Askernish! On the path between Port Ellen and Laphroaig We reached Ardbeg distillery on time for our 10:00 visit. We started from the shop/café (which has really good reviews but we couldn’t verified them as we ran out of time at the end of the visit!) and headed ...

Last November, we decided with a few friends to organise a whisky trip to Islay during the Easter weekend. Even if I will have the two weeks following that weekend off, some of the people I am going with will be back at work on the Tuesday, so we decided to head North on the Thursday afternoon, hop on the ferry Friday morning and head back to Manchester on the Monday. This means our trip will be rather short, and it left me the tricky task of organising our time as best as possible. Looking on several websites and forums, I have found some information about people who have already been, but often, it tended to be answers to specific questions, that is why I thought I would share my experience. Today is therefore going to be about the organisation of the trip and I will update you on the actual visit probably when I am back after Easter. So as I mentioned before, our starting point was as follow: -5 people going to Islay  -leaving Manchester on the Thursday afternoon  ...