Three Ships is a single malt whisky from the James Sedgwick Distillery in Wellington, South Africa, made by master distiller and former Cricket star Andy Watts. James Sedgwick is a shockingly old distillery, in operation since 1886. It’s known for Three Ships as well as Bain’s Cape Mountain Whisky. This release (batch 1) from That Boutique-y Whisky Company – is the first ever independent bottling of Three Ships.
There is still independent whisky to be bottled, even if the pickings are slimmer, and some tempting things show up on shelves. Here, a Mortlach (one of my favorite distilleries, but hard to find) was distilled in September 1997 and spent some number of years in ex-bourbon before being transitioned to a Pedro Ximénez sherry butt to finish, for a total of 18 years in cask.
There is a wild raging debate on the Internet about the actual source of Alexander Murray & Co.’s big-age, low-price malts. Some rumors suggest that the majority of the company’s barrels come from Tullibardine (a whisky chameleon of sorts), while the company has definitely bottled Macallan before, and is reported to have contracts with both Diageo and Edrington.
This Old Malt Cask bottling spoke to me: younger Talisker (with an age statement!), purportedly aged in sherry, bottled at a potent 100 proof, and only $40. The malt was just one month shy of 7 years of age, and bottled in 2016 without added coloring or chill filtration. Only 361 bottles were filled out of this single sherry hogshead.
So apparently a brand called Kentucky Owl Bourbon was sold from 1879 through Prohibition and the business failed when its whisky was seized by the government for impounding. There’s a story about a warehouse fire, and Al Capone… the sort of thing that looks good on a whisky website and is impossible to corroborate. … The whiskey is from a batch of barrels of 11 year-old straight rye whiskey acquired from an unnamed distillery (or distilleries?) in Kentucky, and then bottled in Bardstown, Kentucky at a robust 55.3% ABV.
To its credit, this first US release of Port Askaig (named, you guessed it, after a port town on the Scottish island of Islay) is bottled at cask-strength (55% ABV) and without chill-filtration or added coloring from a small batch of “2 to 40” barrels per batch, which means whatever you’d like it to mean. The barrels in question are from an “unnamed” Islay distillery and are all ex-bourbon casks.
Bottled at a cask strength of 58% ABV, but without any age information, The Ileach Cask Strength is a single malt whisky from one of the distilleries on the island of Islay that makes fully-peated malt. “The Ileach” means “the man from Islay” and you could try pronouncing it as “ee-luck”, but you’d still sound like a tourist. Just don’t say “Eye Leech”. Ew.
The Lost Distillery Company, founded in 2012, uses archival records and the history of regional distillation of whisky in Scotland to create a “map” of the likely flavors and aromas present in long-closed distilleries, and then creates and bottles replicas of those whiskies using blends of modern malts. … The Lossit distillery was the largest producer of (then illicit) whisky on Islay. … To re-create this lost malt whisky, The Lost Distillery Company blended 5 to 10 single malts around a centerpiece of peated Ben Nevis, including a few malts finished in oloroso and PX sherry casks.
It seems that just about every distillery is frantically blending and selecting barrels for one-offs, while their interns are leafing through Gaelic almanacs in the local archive, looking for thus-far unused local landmark names. … Even if you find consistent reviews online, tasting is very subjective [and] “Worth my money” is an impossible metric to crowdsource.
This is a a proprietary blended scotch, exclusive to Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, FL, which was blended for them by Compass Box. Similar to Compass Box’s Hedonism, this is a blend of old (very old) grain whiskies: 5 casks of 40 year-old Strathclyde and Girvan were used.
