Coldorak's whisky blog.
Time for a Ben Nevis session, beginning with the recent 2010 single cask bottled by Whiskybase to mark the 270,000th bottle recorded in its database. It is a 15-year-old release bottled at 54.2% ABV. It will be joined by a small selection of other Ben Nevis bottlings: an official 10-year-old from 2000; two further official 10-year-olds bottled in 2018, including the cask-strength Batch 1; and a 27-year-old release from Le Gus’t, also bottled in 2018.
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Reaching 100 Glen Moray tasted feels less like crossing a finish line and more like coming home after a very long, very enjoyable detour. This new line‑up of five independent bottlings – from The Whisky Cask, High Spirits, Archives/Whiskybase, Asta Morris and Celtic Whisky Distillerie – is both another step on that journey and a small personal milestone. These aren’t ‘official story’ bottlings, but rather five external, sometimes quirky lenses through which to look at Glen Moray’s spirit: different casks, different philosophies, different markets, all converging on the same Elgin DNA. Taken together, they say a lot about how adaptable Glen Moray is, and why it lends itself so well to being interpreted by bottlers beyond the distillery gates.
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Balcones is a Texas based whisky distillery, doing all sorts of whiskies: Bourbon, Single Malt, Rye, Corn… They don’t take themselves seriously and don’t bother with regularity about ABV, taste or whatever. They do what they want, how they want, whenever they want. Let’s hope that now that Diageo bought Balcones, they won’t castrate the spirit (pun intended) and let them continue going free. In the mean time, Archives, the indy bottler branch of the famous whisky database and online shop Whiskybase, bought a few casks from 2017 and bottled them in their Venomous Snakes series, so let’s try one of those three Balcones 2017 from Archives.
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