Balvenie 14 Year Week of Peat

Balvenie 14 Year Week of Peat

The Balvenie have been pioneering creative endeavors with scotch for a long time. Taking advantage of a gap in production schedule, the distillery began making peated whisky exactly one week out of the year starting in 2002, which resulted in their first release of Peat Week in 2017 and was a limited release. This Week of Peat, also aged 14 years, is the second part in Balvenie’s Stories range, which was launched in 2019. Balvenie, besides having the legendary David Stewart as malt master, is one of only seven distilleries in Scotland with its own malting floor that is used in at least some of its whisky.

Wanderback Batch 2

Wanderback Batch 2

This whiskey has a story particular to Scotchology. This had been slotted for World Whisky Day 2020 but a last minute mixup in shipping meant that we had to substitute the Batch 3 instead, to the complaint of absolutely no one. But Batch 2 deserves its due. Wanderback exists somewhere between an independent bottler and a distillery, in that they procure the barrels of single malt from different distilleries – Batches 1-4 from Westland Distillery and Batches 5-6 from Balcones Distilling – and then choose how they age or finish them. The Wanderback Batch 2 is aged a minimum of 3 years and finished in a mix of ex-bourbon and ex-rum casks.

Glenmorangie A Tale of the Forest

Glenmorangie A Tale of the Forest

The Tale of the Forest is the third in an annual series by Glenmorangie that centers around an idea, whether that is concepts as divergent as Cake or Winter. This single malt takes another creative approach by Dr. Bill Lumsden, where instead of finishing the scotch like the previous two, the barley used was dried – or kilned, to use an industry term – with juniper, birch bark and heather flowers. This mix of woodland botanicals was apparently an ancient way of kilning barley for beer, and is used to infuse elements of the botanicals with the barley, much like how drying barley with peat smoke imparts other characteristics. The art on the box and bottle was illustrated by famed artist Pomme Chan.