Founders Series: Your Land, My Land, Westland

Founders Series: Your Land, My Land, Westland

The Founders Series takes advantage of Scotchology’s founders meeting to celebrate our 10th Anniversary in August of 2023. Since we can’t meet in person as often as we were able to when the club first started, we decided to make the most of our time together and sampled a truly broad, exciting range of whiskies in some semblance of batching. The first batch features Westland, an American distillery we have gone to early and often. But a handful of reviews doesn’t quite convey how often we have been there individually or in groups, or how many expressions we have tried and bought for our private collections over the years. This series will expand whenever we gather continue focused explorations of brands or concepts. 

Craigellachie 13 Year Bas-Armagnac

Craigellachie 13 Year Bas-Armagnac

While Craigellachie exists in the Speyside region of Scotland, the distillery has long been proud of forging its own style that doesn’t always match up with its neighbors, whether that means using heritage equipment from a bygone era or adding a new twist to the production process. A new entrant into distillery’s core line of offerings, the Craigellachie Bas-Armagnac takes the distillery’s core 13 year single malt and finishes it for over a year in casks from Gascony that once held Bas-Armagnac. Translated as Lower Armagnac, it is a region in southwestern France along the border with Spain. Grapes grown in this region are blended into a specific style of brandy that uses column stills in the distillation rather than the pot stills often used in cognac production. The Bas-Armagnac region accounts for about 60% of all Armagnac production.

Laphroaig Cairdeas 2021 Pedro Ximénez

Laphroaig Cairdeas 2021 Pedro Ximénez

The Cairdeas line under Laphroaig was created to celebrate the Friends of Laphroaig, with the word being Gaelic for friendship. The Friends of Laphroaig is similar in some ways to other scotch loyalty clubs (e.g. the Ardbeg Committee) but is a little unique in that there are actually membership levels. Those levels are gained by inputting points gained by purchasing – what else? – bottles of Laphroaig and other distillery products. The three levels of membership are, perhaps unsurprisingly, Peat, Smoke and Oak. The Cairdeas 2021 is a cask strength scotch that began maturation in standard ex-bourbon barrels before being transferred to smaller quarter casks for more wood influence and then finished in ex-Pedro Ximénez sherry hogshead casks.