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Kingsbarns Doocot

Kingsbarns Doocot

Kingsbarns was founded in 2014 by Douglas Clement and is currently owned by independent bottler Weymss Malts, which purchased it in 2022. The placement of the distillery in the Lowland region, where there have been remarkably few active distilleries in the 21st century, was purportedly done to help provide comfort to golfers at the nearby famous courses around St. Andrew’s. The first whisky launched in 2018 and after a number of limited in development expressions, a limited core range emerged. The Kingsbarns Doocot is their flagship release and is the Scottish word for the dovecot that sits at the center of the distillery. It is a blend of whiskies matured in (90%) ex-bourbon and (10%) ex-Portuguese red wine barriques that have been shaved, toasted and re-charred (STR), both first-fill.

Teeling Brabazon Series 2

Teeling Brabazon Series 2

While Teeling Distillery was founded in 2015, a quick look at their offerings will show releases carrying much older age statements. This is because when John Teeling sold the Cooley Distillery to  what is now Beam Suntory, one of the stipulations of the sale was the family taking 16,000 casks of whiskey with them. It is from these casks that many of their older bottlings are derived, whiskey essentially sourced from themselves. The Brabazon series from Teeling kicked off in 2017 and was named after William Brabazon, the 3rd Earl of Meath, who oversaw the development of the New Market area in Dublin that would eventually become the Liberties district where the current distillery resides. There have been four entries in this series as of this writing. The Brabazon 2 was bottled in September 2017 and matured in a various sizes of ex-port casks.

Longrow Red 15 Year Pinot Noir

Longrow Red 15 Year Pinot Noir

Springbank is one of the most storied distilleries in Scotland, a land rife with history and legends centered around whisky. The history of scotch in general has seen a number of boom and bust cycles and Springbank is one of the few survivors in Campbeltown of a particularly strong bust cycle of when there were upwards of 30 distilleries in this town of a few thousand on the eastern side of the Kintyre peninsula that faces the Isle of Arran and is only separated from Northern Ireland by a little over ten miles of open water. One of the three current major brands of Springbank is Longrow, named after another lost Campbeltown distillery, and is their peated single malt that is twice distilled. The Longrow Red series is a yearly release bottled at cask strength. No two years are the same, as a different type of red wine cask is used to mature the whisky, whether or not any kind of finish is used. This Longrow Red 15 Year was finished in fresh Pinot Noir casks from New Zealand for four years after 11 years in ex-bourbon barrels.