From the Cawdor Estate (as in, “Thane of Cawdor,” if you remember Shakespeare’s MacBeth), the Royal Brackla distillery’s fame as the “King’s own whiskey” (circa 1833) brings a new entry to the Scotchology crew: the Royal Brackla 16. Finished in first-fill ex-oloroso sherry casks and bottled at 40% abv (80 proof), this 16-yr old barley malt is one of Dewar’s (Bacardi) series of releases entitled “The Last Great Malts of Scotland.”
Boasting “…big dreams, bigger goals, and the biggest pot still in the state” Boulder Spirits Distillery brings us their Peated American Single Malt. The recipe is simple: distillers malted barley, a Scottish pot still, #3 char American white oak barrels, aged in an arid high elevation climate, and cut with the celebrated Eldorado Springs water. Their outlook is that peat can be a piece of the whiskey, and not the defining attribute. Aged for a minimum of three years, the Boulder Spirits Peated Malt uses is a lightly peated single malt made in the tradition of Scotland, with American ingenuity.
The Method and Madness brand was launched a number of years ago as the experimental lab at Midleton distillery. Mildeton is the starting point for a number of familiar Irish whiskey brands, and this lab is a place where the different masters and apprentices can come together and share knowledge and ideas. The result is an exploration of many variants in Irish whiskey, from single grain to single malt to pot still, but using elements that are rarely seen. It’s a place to push the envelope and take risks to discover something new. Most of these elements, at least so far, are featured as different cask finishes. The Method and Madness Virgin Hungarian Oak is a single pot still whiskey finished for an undisclosed amount of time in virgin Hungarian oak casks.