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.
Copperworks Distilling has eschewed the normal distillery commercial standard by having a limited product offering but achieving uniformity between batches. Rather, the distillery has leaned purposefully into crafting each release as a limited, distinct expression that allows them to explore the subtle nuances that differences of grains, yeasts and cask aging can provide, while still holding onto some house styles. The Copperworks Peated is their 34th release, and is made from eight casks of whiskey that were aged for a little over four years, with Washington barley smoked using Washington peat, a first for the distillery. Copperworks has since signaled it will distill peated whiskies on an annual basis.