Ahh some nice Highland scotch, not a peat monster or too light and fruity – sounds great, and there’s the sherry cask to rain our parade. The problem is however how hard it is to tell if such casking is actually the best parts of this whisky. Overall it’s not great, but at it’s best it’s the fruity aspects that make it work in at least a few categories, while doing awful to mediocre in the rest.
So it’s pronounced Bu-na-ha-venn. Just felt the need to get that out of the way, because the name (and dear god their literature) can be summed up best by the word verbose. If we’re honest the contents of the glass can also fall under the category of verbose as well. The whiskey here is quite a complex thing – but the problem with complexity in a scotch is whether it fits the expectations and the desires of the drinker.
The first glass of this made itself VERY well known – it was as it said – hello – my name is Aberlour. The wood and smoke hit you in a way that makes you take notice, but thankfully – this is actually a good whisky so taking notice is a good thing.
It’s bold – we’ll give them that. The whisky itself is actually a fine combo of smoke, sweet, citrus, and wood – although failing to properly bring them together. No, we say it’s bold because it looks very nice and well defined, but then you read what is being said. In short, we’re a site that’s built on honesty, and often we find what people say about their product to be a load of spunk – but we sort of revel in the sheer audacity of Aberfeldy.
Imperial isn’t exactly the best word to use in this situation being such a common term for high proof beer. Add that to the vague branding and Sazerac being explicit and this is essentially just some off-brand scotch. This is the moment we’d love dearly to tell you it’s akin to an Ezra Brooks story, but it’s not. This isn’t good.
This does have one of the dreaded ‘kickstart’ pour spouts that have accumulated only ire on this fair website. We got around that with some clippers, but even the results are not terribly pretty. In all, fuck you. Now let’s get to the whiskey itself.
There is a rule of design where you put the most valuable information closer to the top-left as most people look there first (obviously our Arabic or Japanese readers would disagree among others). As such we too could not ignore the elephant that is is apparently the official spirit for golf, the King’s Game, or as we call it – a good walk spoiled. (One of our reviewers does occasionally golf, but we’re not sorry)
When one thinks of Dewar’s one often thinks of the more popular and widespread White Label. Instead of this one which has a label that’s wait. The White Label is a budget scotch, that frankly fails to compete with the likes of Johnnie Walker Red or Famous Grouse, but what if you actually give every whiskey the time to do its work.
So we have recently had the Bulleit 95, but thanks to our Father’s Day gift of whiskies to recommend we have the 12 year and figured we’d put this one on the usual Wednesday. This too unlike Cascade was also just a sample size, but unlike that French Oak Crown Royale – we wish we had a full bottle of this.
At this point, we’re fairly familiar with Bowmore. However we’ve sort of been going about it in reverse having started with the 17 year, and then near 6 years later (yikes), we did the 15 year. We’ve opted this time to go with the 12 year. We can therefore finally form a verdict on which Bowmore you should buy, and what (if anything) does time do?
