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.
If you’ve noticed a distinct trend on this site it’s that overall we’re not big fans of sherry casking. It’s often just the result of a tax avoidance, and usually is used improperly and to ill effect. However we have been known from time to time to enjoy that bit of sherry, and it seems that while a nice 12 year scotch may not be helped with it – it seems Rye and Sherry might just be the combo we needed. That or maybe these Limestone Branch Distillery folks know what they are doing.
So this has in 3 years gone through 3 casks, Bourbon/Port/Sherry – but the thing about casking is you kinda need time and while you do get some of the sherry finish here – it’s not ideal in any way. Add some massive burn and sugary nonsense and you begin to think maybe this shouldn’t be blonde and maybe – it just needs more time to age. As it stands though this is basically worthless.
Once again the duty-free shops of the world’s airports have made the choice of getting another Auchentoshan breed an inevitability. This time instead of Blood Oak we get another blood-related wood thing – Heartwood. It genuinely does live up to that name of being a warm and woody drink, but it’s sadly not that simple.
Grand Macnish has still been one of the favourites of the Buffalo Lounge, the reason being like all of our well spirits – it’s cheap, but not shite. We’ve formally reviewed the 12 year and informally have had the 150-anniversary version, and suffice to say – this is the worst of the lot.
Alright well time to start going through our backlog of scotches (I’ll try to pepper them in among the other spirits). This scotch has a special place in my heart though. I was recently at the crux of a project release, and my nerves were understandably frayed. Even though my hand was shaking just to get the scotch in the glass, the warmth of the highlands saved me from getting too stressed.
Now those of us who’ve read this column know that we love scotch. We love scotch so much we’d actually marry it – despite thinking marrying anything not human is beyond weird. So while Justice was journeying through many places one of his highlights was Glenmorangie. A solid scotch that we all enjoy from time to time. So when we saw that there was a tasting pack of Glenmorangie’s starters (aka nothing over the age of 12) we gladly picked it up.
