Compass Box is doing something very cool. After the incredible success (due in no small part to its very high quality) of Great King Street: Artist’s Blend, the company is expanding its blended scotch selection under the Great King Street label.
Compass Box releases the “Last Vatted Malt” before UK law changes the name of the category to “Blended Malt Scotch Whisky”. Also, Connosr releases a new online magazine which focuses on whisky production worldwide, edited by Dominic Roskrow.
The Exceptional is a line of sourced scotches blended and bottled by Sutcliffe & Son. They began with The Exceptional Grain in 2013, and then expanded to an Exceptional Malt and Exceptional Blend. Putting aside the hubris involved in referring to your own work as “Exceptional”, Sutcliffe has garnered renown for his blends and continues to release new editions each year. Each edition of…
I get the problem: You’re a DJ or whatever and you want to start a whisky brand. It worked for David Beckham, right? But what can you do that’s new? You get an idea: A YOUNG whisky, for YOUNG people. You’ll sell it with dance music and a story about how using young blended grain whisky makes the drink refreshing, not heavy like those old-fashioned malts. You pepper the marketing materials with euphemisms like “sublte”, “light”, “smooth” and suggest emphatically that…
Anyone who was around the whisky blogosphere back in 2011 can’t have avoided the media fervor surrounding the discovery of several crates of antique scotch whisky preserved beneath the Antarctic heritage site of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ‘Nimrod’ expedition base camp. … This version, bottled at the bare minimum 40% ABV, is comprised of Highland single malts aged in a combination of ex-bourbon and ex-sherry (Spanish oak). Unlike the more-expensive prior re-creation, we know little to nothing about the composition of…
Well, it’s not every day that you get to try a whiskey that represents and entirely new category of spirits. Lost Lantern claims to be (and may very well be) the first company to blend (or “vat”) together American single malt whiskies, making the first American Vatted Malt Whiskey. … a self-styled independent bottler out of Vermont, got its start by bottling American whiskies under its independent bottling label. This is a very familiar story to anyone who drinks single malt scotch. The company then released their first vatted malt (Edition 1) in 2020. It’s a vatting of 6 American single malts (2 barrels of each), and…
Stellum Spirits Rye is a cask-strength blend of straight rye whiskies distilled in Indiana (so that’s MGP), Kentucky, and Tennessee. The vast majority of the blend is MGP rye, and even the marketing materials references how the heart of the blend is a 95% rye mashbill, a familiar mashbill to fans of MGP-sourced ryes. This blend is bottled at a rousing 58.12% ABV. The stated goal of the brand is to create…
Bruichladdich continues to push the boundaries of both transparency and innovation. Despite the “Sponsored” flag on this article, I really do personally think the company is a positive force for the industry and I’m excited about the future of scotch whisky if things like bottle code lookups, 100% Scottish barley, organic and biodynamic farms, and a dedication to transparency are trends that the whole whisky market will follow.
The idea behind the 10 year-old editions of Octomore is for Bruichladdich to examine the effects of longer aging on the somewhat-well-understood young (typically 5 year-old) Octomore. As Head Distiller Adam Hannett said in our interview session for the Octomore 11 campaign, “we just don’t know everything,” and “there are so many infinite variables in the creation of single malt whisky, so we try to isolate one variable at a time to see how it improves the whisky, or doesn’t.”
So here we are, a day late and about ninety dollars short to talk about a bottle you can’t buy anymore. Batch 017 was released in early 2019 and is intended to be an homage to “classic” bourbon — the kind that is suddenly hard to find on shelves. It’s a blend of straight bourbon whiskies from Tennessee, Indiana, and Kentucky. The three component whiskies were all rye-flavored bourbons (mash bill corn, rye, and malted barley) aged 10 years and 4 months, 14 years, and 15 years so this bottle is “officially” 10 years and 4 months old. It’s up to you if you want to mentally count the extra age…