Vanilla

Balvenie 14 Year Peat Week

The Balvenie are large and successful enough to not only keep their full stock of standard offerings in full swing, they’re also keen on playing with all the elements available in whisky production to create more limited offerings. The Balvenie 14 Year “Peat Week” is so named because the distillery has apparently been distilling peated whisky since 2002 for one week a year. Hitching their cart to the transparency train, Balvenie does a brilliant job of listing exactly what week in any given year this scotch was distilled during, along with some particulars about how peat characteristics are imparted to whisky in general. While not part of their standard lineup, it appears that Balvenie is poised to make this scotch a regular or semi-regular offering, even if only ever in limited quantities.

By Adam | January 16, 2018 | Speyside | No Comments |

The Irish whiskey tradition is every bit as proud – and sometimes convoluted – as their Scottish neighbors to the east. Distilled at the New Middleton Distillery for Irish Distillers, an arm of the Pernod Recard, and distributed by Mitchell & Son of Dublin, keeping track of the Green Spot from barley to bottle can be an adventure in and of itself. Regardless, Green Spot is a bonded whisky and one of the few remaining pot still whiskies left in Ireland, deriving its name from the practice of marking casks of different ages with a spot of colored paint to tell them apart. At one time a 10 year old whiskey, the current iteration is made up of whiskies aged 7-10 years. The whiskey has been steadily popular over the past century and more. An older sibling, the Yellow Spot, is aged in Malaga wine casks.

By Adam | December 5, 2017 | Foreign | No Comments |

OOLA was founded in 2010 by owner and master distiller Kirby Kallas-Lewis in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. They remain small but have won several awards for their various gins and vodkas. They also produce whiskey and their Whiskey Discourse series is designed to combine different whiskies to see how they interact under different influences. Other entries experiment with smoke and cask finishes. OOLA Three Shores is included in our All-Canada World Whisky Day by reason that it is made up of one part OOLA Waitsburg Bourbon, one part unknown scotch from the Highland region, and one part Canadian rye. So part of it’s still Canadian! They are sourced separately but aged together for at least a year in American Oak.

By Adam | November 15, 2017 | Foreign | No Comments |