Coldorak and Ainulindalë's blog about whisky.
Despite being a very small and young distillery, founded in 2009 by Pär Caldenby, a lawyer also whisky fan and author of the book Enjoying Malt Whisky, Smögen starts to be quite known in the whisky enthusiast world. My 7th dram from my whisky calendar is a Smögen 2011 Single Cask Edition No. 5, so let’s quickly introduce Smögen, that I must admit I don’t know a lot about, before reviewing my first Smögen ever.
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After a couple days in Tasmania and a quick trip to Japan (yesterday’s dram was a Nikka Taketsuru 21, already reviewed by your servitor last year), we’re back to Islay but this time from the eastern shores of Loch Indaal, above the hands of the witch. I’ll just do a brief introduction about Bowmore since with (almost) a review a day, I cannot take the time to cover the story of the distillery with its two and a half centuries of existence. And after that, I’ll review the Bowmore 2011 Artist #7 part 2 LMDW.
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We’re still in Tasmania this evening for our fourth dram from the advent calendar, and still at Hellyers Road. But we go a bit older and unpeated this time, so it will be interesting to see what’s different (to the one in the back saying “This one is not peated”, thank you, I’ve already said it, please listen next time) compared to the 2004 Peated from yesterday. As I said yesterday, Hellyers Road sits near Burning, in Tasmania, and was founded in 1999. Australian whisky, including Tasmanian, has really exploded since the beginning of the 21st century. Before the year 2000, there were only four distilleries in Australia, of which three of them were in Tasmania. Lark, founded in 1992, Sullivans Cove, founded in 1994 and Hellyers Road saw the light of day and the spirit flow in Tasmania. The fourth one is Bakery Hill, founded in 1998 in Victoria. And what about now? Well, now there are more than 70 distilleries running or about to, including the very well-known Starward founded in 2004. The exponential rate at which distilleries pop of the ground with whisky flowing soon after is mind-boggling. However, many of those distilleries are not widely distributed yet and I may not have the chance to try what they do. But today I’m back at Hellyers Road, and I’m very happy about that.
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Hellyers Road is one of the largest whisky distilleries in Australia, with a capacity of 120.000 litres of pure alcohol per annum. Located near the town of Burnie, in Tasmania, it was founded by dairy farmers in 1999, and is named after Henry Hellyer, an explorer and cartographer who carved a bushy trail into a road in 1827. The distillery features a 60.000 litres wash still and a 20.000 litres capacity spirit still, and I must admit their capacity compared to the global capacity of production of the distillery eludes me. But I couldn’t find a lot of information on this distillery. Anyway. Dram 3 of my whisky calendar is a Hellyers Road 2004 that is 16 years old and peated, so let’s try that!
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Today we open the second sample from my advent calendar. After a new riddle that didn’t help my hair grow back, my friends and I finally guessed it was a Port Charlotte 2003 bottled by Hidden Spirits. You probably know that already, dear reader, but Port Charlotte was an Islay distillery. It was founded in 1829 by Colin Campbell on the north-west bank of Loch Indaal and was also known as Rhins Distillery and Lochindaal Distillery. It ran for a hundred years between 1829 and 1929, changing hands several times during that period. In the mid-1880s, Alfred Barnard reported Lochindaal was producing 128.000 gallons of spirit per annum, to compare with Lagavulin’s 75.000 gallons and Ardbeg’s 250.000 gallons at the time. Back in 1920, JF Sherriff & Co, then the owner of Lochindaal, was bought by Benmore Distilleries. Nine years later in 1929, Distillers Company Limited (DCL) purchased Benmore and closed down immediately Lochindaal. Then, in 2000, the nearby distillery Bruichladdich was acquired by the independent bottlers Murray McDavid, who wanted to revive the Lochindaal distillery by creating a new distillery in which to produce heavily-peated whisky, but the plans never saw the light of day, and since Bruichladdich’s acquisition by French company Rémy Cointreau in 2012, it seems highly unlikely that distilling will return to the Port Charlotte village.
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We’re the first of December! While December means cold, wet or snowy weather depending on where you live, it also has more festive connotations with Christmas or other end-of-year festive events, and for many people from the 1st to the 24th of December: advent calendars! As the few years before, I’m doing a whisky advent calendar. This year again I couldn’t get a Boutique-y Whisky Advent Calendar (I reviewed one with Ainulindale in 2019) or another one from Drinks by the Dram, but Benjamin, a member of a French Whisky Discord server I’m a member of, and who spends probably way more than me on whisky, offered to do for a few of us our very own ultra limited whisky advent calendar. Five of us members ordered him one, gladly paid 300€ for 25 samples (yep, we have an extra one for Christmas!), and all we know is that the bottles used for the samples go from 150€ to 800€ a bottle… All the samples are just labelled with a number, and each day Benjamin gives us a hint or two in order for us to guess what it is. But first, where do advent calendars come from?
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Our friend and guest writer Mac from Kanpai Planet is back today with the review of another Japanese whisky, this time the Fuji Gotemba Single Grain.
Most drinks fans are familiar with Kirin, whether through their Kirin Ichiban Shibori beer (Kirin Ichiban outside Japan) or through Four Roses Bourbon, which they own.
But outside Japan, not many know that Kirin is the number 3 whisky producer in Japan, behind Suntory and Nikka.
In November 1973, the Fuji Gotemba distillery began production. It was built by Kirin-Seagram, a joint venture established in August 1972 between Kirin Brewery Co., Ltd. (Japan) [50%], JE Seagram and Sons [45%] and Chivas Brothers [5%].
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The legend says Sir Ernest Shackleton, preparing his Antarctic expedition to the South Pole in 1907, ordered 25 cases of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky to heighten the expedition team spirit. By the way, I love how whisky is always rare and old, especially blends. Do you think they mean rare as a wink to a good steak cooking, just a bit but not too much? Thus the whiskies that make the blend spent just a bit of time in casks but definitely not too much? Unfortunately, Shackleton and his team didn’t reach the South Pole, but at the time they still went by far to the farthest south latitude ever attained, 88° 23′ S, missing the South Pole by just 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km or 112.2 mi.). I said the legend, but it seems it’s a fact, as a century after the expedition, in 2007, three cases of the original Mackinlay’s blend were discovered, frozen into the ice beneath Shackleton’s base camp at Cape Royds. As Mackinlay’s website says, the whisky was excavated and flown to New Zealand where it is exposed by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. Let’s talk a wee bit about blends market share, then it’ll be time for Mackinlay’s Shackleton review.
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Fun fact: we’ve not written anything about Scotch whisky on this humble blog this year. We didn’t write much at all to be fair. And if you were expecting a Scotch whisky review here, well you’re going to have to wait a little more, as we go back to Ireland today. And even almost as far from Scotland as we could without leaving the UK and Ireland, as we’re going to the Dingle Peninsula. Put down that map and that ruler, it was a figure of speech, I know it’s not the furthest point on the map by quite a few miles. Dingle Distillery released a few weeks ago their first permanent expression, a single malt Irish whiskey, after releasing their previous single malts (and single pot still) as batches. But today, they’re becoming big girls and boys, and we’re going to see how well they did. Oh, and we have a guest that will bring his Scottishness with him, so that’s almost as if we reviewed a Scotch whisky today, right? No, that doesn’t count you say? Anyway, let’s have a chat with Graham Coull, Dingle’s master distiller, then we’ll review Dingle’s Single Malt. And I won’t go into a presentation of Dingle Distillery, my good friend Brian @MaltMusings did one that I invite you to go read. Cue the intro! (Ahem, I mean scroll down, I know we’re not on TV.)
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Bimber distillery released a new series to celebrate the London Underground, a great engineering project of the 19th Century, and together with Steve Rush they offered to try them during a new Tweet Tasting. Bimber was one of my first ever Tweet Tastings almost two years ago (already!) and since then I’ve been really following what they do and bought a few bottles they released. So you can imagine I was quite excited at the prospect of trying these four whiskies, especially since thanks to Brexit and wouldn’t try my luck grabbing one by fear of having hide and seek with customs and annoying shipping companies.
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