Thursday 30 January 2020

Koval Millet Review

Hi everyone,

Did I know anything about Koval or Millet before trying this? No—no I did not.
But having now done some cursory internet Googling, it seems that the distillery itself is in Chicago, releases single barrel whiskies from 113 litre barrels and has a German made still that looks suspiciously similar to other Holstein set-up’s I’ve seen at other distilleries.
These types of stills seem to always produce a exceptionally rubbish tasting spirit, to the point that I really don’t understand why people use them (they must be cheap).
Millet then is a grain that hasn’t much been used for whiskey production. Wait, hold on, maybe it’s a grass, not a grain. Anyway, let’s get to the taste:

Koval Millet 40%
Colour: Bronze
Body: Medium
Nose: There's some cardboard-y-ness here, toffee apple, plenty of oak, pretty wooden and 'craft.'
Taste: Nice arrival, then soft, some fresh red apple, toffee, some caramel, a little cardboard, more into the finish, some spices.
Finish: Short/Medium length. Apple and cardboard.
Interesting use of the Millet grain and parts of this are fine. I found this one feels quite flat and overall very stiff. Another cardboardy American craft whisky IMO.
58/100

Thanks for reading!

American Review #67
Whisky Network Review #1005

Network Average: 75.2
Best Score: 94
Worst Score: 12
0-49 Terrible
50-59 Bad
60-64 Just About OK
65-69 Ok to Good
70-74 Good
75-79 Very Good
80-84 Excellent
85-89 Superb
90+ Magnificent

Full Disclosure Disclaimer: I currently work as the Global Brand Ambassador for Penderyn Distillery. The views expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect the views of Penderyn Distillery or The Welsh Whisky Company. I try to maintain as much objectivity as I can but feel free to take my reviews with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Furthermore, my rating scale is NOT based on a Parker type wine scoring scale or a school/college/university % or A-F grade score. You can find more on my scoring here. I apologise for any seemly low or 'bad' scores given with my system and I am sorry I can't say only nice things. Please keep in mind that I am ethically compromised and I am unable to produce 100% unbiased reviews.

Wednesday 29 January 2020

Robert Burns Single Malt Review

Hi everyone,

With Burns’ Night having just passed us, I thought I should get round to reviewing this sample I got given at Christmas… last year or maybe the year before. Yeah, I don’t get round to reviewing stuff I have at home.
Anyway, I hope everyone had great Burns’ Night celebrations and Haggis galore!
This one is a single malt from Arran distillery, NAS and done specially with a special Robert Burns society .

Robert Burns Single Malt 43%
Colour: Light Gold
Body: Medium
Nose: Nice and malty, green apple, apple pie, a little pear, creamy. Seems like a nice young Arran, if a little boring.
Taste: A bit astringent on the taste, quite bitter with lemon pith, damp wool, a bit of plastic or something burnt, some malt, none of fresh fruit I was expecting.
Finish: Short length. Some lemon and malt.
The nose on this is fine but the taste and finish are not so good. The astringency and bitterness on the taste kill it for me.
57/100

Thanks for reading!

Scotch Review #838
Whisky Network Review #1004

Network Average: 75.2
Best Score: 94
Worst Score: 12
0-49 Terrible
50-59 Bad
60-64 Just About OK
65-69 Ok to Good
70-74 Good
75-79 Very Good
80-84 Excellent
85-89 Superb
90+ Magnificent

Full Disclosure Disclaimer: I currently work as the Global Brand Ambassador for Penderyn Distillery. The views expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect the views of Penderyn Distillery or The Welsh Whisky Company. I try to maintain as much objectivity as I can but feel free to take my reviews with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Furthermore, my rating scale is NOT based on a Parker type wine scoring scale or a school/college/university % or A-F grade score. You can find more on my scoring here. I apologise for any seemly low or 'bad' scores given with my system and I am sorry I can't say only nice things. Please keep in mind that I am ethically compromised and I am unable to produce 100% unbiased reviews.

Monday 27 January 2020

The Sexton Irish Whiskey Review

Hi everyone,

We continue the theme of low scores today with an Irish whiskey.
This one is made at Bushmills, though is not their own branding. It is instead the creation of Alex Thomas, an ex-employee of Bushmills, that is allowed to do her own distillations on their equipment and has a warehouse on their site (If I’m reading this article right).

Sexton Irish Single Malt 40%
Colour: E150a
Body: Light/Medium
Nose: Blended Scotch at first, then some Irish-style fresh green fruit coming out, pear drops, green apple bubblegum, a little malt, standard vanilla.
Taste: Soft but not watery, green apple bubblegum, sour green apple sweets, a little astringent, dry new oak, a bit sappy perhaps.
Finish: Short/Medium length. Some malt and more green apple, a bit of rubber.
Tastes like a cheap blended Scotch blended with some Irish whiskey. The result is not fantastic but isn’t quite terrible either. Apparently this is matured in second and third fill Oloroso Sherry casks, which I got absolutely none of.
59/100

Thanks for reading!

Irish Review #30
Whisky Network Review #1003

Network Average: 75.2
Best Score: 94
Worst Score: 12
0-49 Terrible
50-59 Bad
60-64 Just About OK
65-69 Ok to Good
70-74 Good
75-79 Very Good
80-84 Excellent
85-89 Superb
90+ Magnificent

Full Disclosure Disclaimer: I currently work as the Global Brand Ambassador for Penderyn Distillery. The views expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect the views of Penderyn Distillery or The Welsh Whisky Company. I try to maintain as much objectivity as I can but feel free to take my reviews with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Furthermore, my rating scale is NOT based on a Parker type wine scoring scale or a school/college/university % or A-F grade score. You can find more on my scoring here. I apologise for any seemly low or 'bad' scores given with my system and I am sorry I can't say only nice things. Please keep in mind that I am ethically compromised and I am unable to produce 100% unbiased reviews.

Thursday 23 January 2020

Auchentoshan Classic Review

Hi everyone,

I have only reviewed four Auchentoshan’s in the past. The triple distilled, impossible to pronounce first time distillery is likely the most well known of the few lowland distilleries.
Once again, I am trying to complete my 101 Whiskies to Try before You Die and this Classic was one of the more difficult ones to find as Auchentoshan discontinued this is favour of the ‘American Oak.’
This makes 85/101, so I’m well on my way!
 
Auchentoshan Classic 40%
Colour: Light Gold (Though probably coloured)
Body: Light
Nose: Ah, an interesting mix of yeasty rising bread and rubbery garbage... Rotting banana, some green apple, lemon that's been left out too long, cardboard.
Taste: Soft arrival, fresh fruit with green apple and a little lemon, then the Jura-esque yeast comes in and ruins everything, rubbery, feinty and gross.
Finish: Short/Medium length. Cardboard.
From Bourbon barrels apparently. I don't seem to like Auchentoshan very much. One of the worst whiskies I have ever had the pleasure to taste.
44/100

Thanks for reading!

Scotch Review #837
Whisky Network Review #1002

Network Average: 75.2
Best Score: 94
Worst Score: 12
0-49 Terrible
50-59 Bad
60-64 Just About OK
65-69 Ok to Good
70-74 Good
75-79 Very Good
80-84 Excellent
85-89 Superb
90+ Magnificent

Full Disclosure Disclaimer: I currently work as the Global Brand Ambassador for Penderyn Distillery. The views expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect the views of Penderyn Distillery or The Welsh Whisky Company. I try to maintain as much objectivity as I can but feel free to take my reviews with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Furthermore, my rating scale is NOT based on a Parker type wine scoring scale or a school/college/university % or A-F grade score. You can find more on my scoring here. I apologise for any seemly low or 'bad' scores given with my system and I am sorry I can't say only nice things. Please keep in mind that I am ethically compromised and I am unable to produce 100% unbiased reviews.

Sunday 12 January 2020

Let's Talk Recharring: STR Casks

Hi everyone,

We are back! New year with plenty of exciting and innovative stuff going on.
I haven’t done any of these Let’s Talk pieces for a while (the last was 2 years ago now!) and I’m really interested to see what you guys and gals think.
Once again, I am not a chemist or biologist and could very well be full of crap.

Anyway, the topic I’d like to discuss today is the phenomenon known as STR.
Now, you may be thinking; ‘what kind of hideous new sexual transmitted disease is that?!’

In fact STR stands for ‘scraped, toasted & recharred’ and has started being used at certain connected distilleries; Kilchoman, Kingsbarns, Nc’nean, Cotswolds, Penderyn, Kavalan and Gouden Carolus as well as plenty of others that don’t use them for specific releases.
The connection? Dr Jim Swan.
 
The rejuvenation of casks is not a new thing. People have been recharring casks for a long time now. These have been Bourbon barrels, hogsheads and some Sherry casks. This was essentially to get a few more uses out of the wood.
Though, there was (a now banned practice) of recharring the wood and then quickly dousing it with Paxarette Sherry, which would of course seal quickly into the pores of the wood.

What changed?
Jim Swan (or at least he is usually credited) came up with the brilliant idea of using old red wine barrels, that, when recharred, gave a new flavour that had not really been seen before. It wasn’t too intense or restrained, and, very importantly, it gave young, immature whisky a more mature flavour at a young age.
This was exactly what he needed, as the distilleries that he was involved with were generally newer distilleries and new builds that didn’t have a lot of time on their hands before needing to get product out on the market.
In addition to this, Sherry casks and other fortified wine barrels were becoming much more expensive, while Bourbon barrels don’t necessarily give you the punchy, fast maturation that they were looking for.
Their question to Jim was; ‘is it possible to create a mature, smooth, nice whisky at 3 years old?’
He could pretty much smile and say; ‘yes… I invented it.’
(Though I feel I should point out that Glenmorangie also used recharred wine casks for their Milsean release, though these weren’t referred to as STR casks.)

So, let’s talk a bit about STR casks and what they mean for the flavour of the whiskies using them.
I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more and more of them…

First, let’s have a lot at what people were doing before; recharring casks, but not wine barrels.
I have been lucky enough to visit Loch Lomond distillery and actually see a cask being recharred and it was a great education.
This is usually a process reserved for older barrels that have been used a few times and lost a lot of their flavour. When this happens, the recharring can be used to rejuvenate the cask and bring a lot (though not all) of the flavour back to the barrel.
The barrel has the cask ends taken off and a machine will go around the inside of the cask with a wire brush or mechanical shaver. It is then transferred to a charring machine with a large gas flame and the charring is pretty much the same as any other charring that you can read any number of other articles about online.
I was surprised how long this charring went on for at Loch Lomond though. My expectation was maybe 30 or 40 seconds of charring but this went on for minutes. About 2 minutes, 45 seconds.
My understanding is that this process cannot be repeated over and over though, because the wood is thinned by each scraping and the barrels would then leak.
 
Anyway, as I said, this has been done for a long time. Talisker Dark Storm being a good example.
The recharring should caramelise the sugars in the untouched wood underneath the penetrated layer, giving more classic oaky flavours like caramel, toffee and vanilla. However, these will not be quite as intense as a virgin oak cask because there are some flavour chemicals that do not rejuvenate.
In particular, it looks like the Oak Lactones do not rejuvenate in the recharring of a cask, leaving you with less spicy and coconut flavours (Thanks again Whisky Science). In addition, I’ve found that there can be lower levels of tannin in recharred casks.

Some recharred Sherry casks have also been popping up, particularly from Springbank and Kilkerran.
Weirdly though, these whiskies are usually dark in colour and look very similar to whiskies that have spent time in 1st fill Sherry casks. Having tasted the new Kilkerran 8yo Cask Strength, I would say that this also fits with the flavour profile created. Blind, I am not sure I would be able to tell the difference between something matured in a recharred Sherry cask and a 1st fill Sherry cask.
This could be to do with wood thickness. A Sherry cask’s staves are much thicker than a normal barrel and Springbank could be recharring these casks only lightly. A combination that would encourage the Sherry that has penetrated deeper into the wood to be more assessable to the whisky that then goes into these casks.
I asked a friend of mine who works for them and he said that the casks are lightly recharred, which seems to agree with what I suspected.
&nsbp;
Okay, cool. So that’s what has already been going on. But what about this new thing? Why use ex-red wine barrels to rechar?

Well, people disagree on this next bit.
Some say that the recharring penetrates only so far into the wood, leaving some of the wine in a layer that is still accessible to the whisky.
Others disagree and say that the recharring destroys the wine in its entirety, but the caramelisation of that wine does give a different flavour.

Unfortunately, I do not have exact measurements of where the wine can penetrate into the wood compared to whisky but we know that wine is more viscous and dense than whisky and therefore not penetrate quite as far into wood that is originally toasted rather than charred.
However, the main evidence for myself is flavour and colour.
If there truly was wine untouched in these STR casks, then the whiskies matured in these casks should taste (even slightly) winey with red fruit notes. This is not something that I have found in whiskies matured in STR casks. Though I would be interested to know if anyone else has? The colour of the wine would also be expected to come out into the whisky, giving it a slightly redish hue. Again, I have not seen this in the whiskies that have used these casks.
Instead, what I have seen and tasted, is whiskies with more oaky flavours and a dark bronze-y colour similar to Bourbon.
As you can tell, I firmly believe that the wine caramelises and is destroyed inside the wood during the recharring and THAT is the difference in flavour from traditionally recharred casks.

Though this does depend on what the distillery that is buying the casks has asked for. These STR casks are being made by cooperages and they can make them to order. If you want something more or less heavily recharred or toasted or scraped, they can do that.
This gives the option for huge variation in these casks and is exactly what these distilleries want.

So there are two good reasons that new distilleries are using these casks;
Firstly, for the good amount of ADDITIVE flavour coming from the oak and the caramelising of the wood sugars and red wine, giving caramel, toffee, vanilla with fresh fruity hints like peaches and apricot.
Second, the excellent SUBTRACTIVE maturation of these casks from the new and active layer of charcoal in the barrel. This helps the cask to take away harsher flavours and off notes from the new make that is put into them. Of course, for whisky that you want to taste good in only a few years, this is a big bonus.

The red wine being used here is mostly Portuguese and Spanish red wine with some French in the mix. However, because the wine is caramelised in the recharring, it matters very little what type of red wine that this would be in my opinion.
The oak type tends to be exclusively American Oak, though I am sure some have experimented with European. The use of American Oak may be just because it is cheaper and easier to hold of, or also because European Oak is generally more porous and would leak after being scraped to the same level.
These barrels are Barriques, which means that they should be about 225-230L.

Well, that’s how they are made and what flavours you might get with STR casks but the other thing I would like to talk about is whether using these casks is a good thing or not.

Different cask types are being looked at all the time and the SWA’s decision to allow a bunch of new types I think was very positive and forward thinking. Bourbon, Sherry and Hogsheads are very much the old guard and consumers are looking for whiskies that are different, new and interesting.
STR casks fit into this modern whisky scene very well. They give a different take on the classic flavours of a distillery you might know well.
What worries me is this… If all of these new distilleries are using these STR casks, won’t they all taste a bit the same? Is this starting to be a case of lazy whisky maturation?
With Bourbon whiskey, they have to use virgin oak casks. It’s the law. But it does make things a bit dull in my opinion and Bourbon has had to adapt to give consumers new things (long ageing, weird finishes, sending the whiskey out to sea, etc). These STR barrels have the same kind of flavours, just not quite as harsh or spicy. By using these, yes, you get a 3 year old whisky that tastes fully matured but you also aren’t truly engaging with the character of the spirit that you are trying to make. Instead, you’re just covering it up.
But then, when you don’t use them, your whisky can taste harsh and unmatured.
Really, there’s no right answer.
Apart from, I guess, leaving your whisky to mature for a decent amount of time before releasing it… but then, you’d likely be bankrupt by then!
Remember that we live in an age where distilleries are struggling to keep up with demand and are discontinuing traditional age statements in favour of younger whiskies. STR casks are a tempting option for distilleries that are looking to make their younger malts taste more mature, essentially tricking us all into thinking that they are older than they are.
Again, not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is done carefully, and with quality in mind.

Anyway, I hope that this has been useful to you!!
What do you think? Have you tasted an STR matured whisky and been disappointed or surprised? Have you had your mind blown by a recharred Sherry Springbank? Or are you worried that STR casks will take over the maturation of young whisky? Let me know!

Wednesday 8 January 2020

The Epicurean Glasgow Ed. Review

Hi everyone,

Happy new year! Hope everyone has had a great time over the holidays.
Today I’ve got a whisky that I was given 2/3 of a bottle of at the end of a festival. But immediately gave to a friend because I thought they might enjoy it more than me.
This is one of Douglas Laing’s blended malts that they have done focussing on different regions, this one on the Lowlands. Which puts it in the interesting position of not having that many distilleries to source whisky from. Glenkinchie, Bladnoch and Auchentoshan seem like the only likely options.

The Epicurean Glasgow Edition 58.6%
Colour: Straw
Body: Medium
Nose: Umm, milky at first nosing. Like sour milk, which is weird. Some lemon, green apple and also, well, cheese. Malt is there, very light touch of oak but remains pretty lactic. Really not a fan of the nose.
Water: Green apple and milk in a blender, throw in a pack of bubblegum too. And some yeast. You know, because why not?
Taste: Soft with a nice mouthfeel to start, fresh and zesty with green apple and zingy lemon citrus, then a little darker with the malt and a bit of white pepper spice making an appearance. There is more of a lactic thing coming out nearer the end into the finish.
Water: Again, nice arrival but the development goes astray with spiced cardboard and a bit of plastic.
Finish: Medium length. Malt and some milk chocolate, doesn't quite go into the lactic territory again but there's something harsher going on with the spice.
The lactic and milky notes on this were totally unexpected to me and I don’t think I’ve had anything like this in a whisky before, even from Bruichladdich. It isn’t even that unpleasant, but it’s kind of unsettling and weird.
61/100

Thanks for reading!

Scotch Review #836
Whisky Network Review #1001

Network Average: 75.2
Best Score: 94
Worst Score: 12
0-49 Terrible
50-59 Bad
60-64 Just About OK
65-69 Ok to Good
70-74 Good
75-79 Very Good
80-84 Excellent
85-89 Superb
90+ Magnificent

Full Disclosure Disclaimer: I currently work as the Global Brand Ambassador for Penderyn Distillery. The views expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect the views of Penderyn Distillery or The Welsh Whisky Company. I try to maintain as much objectivity as I can but feel free to take my reviews with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Furthermore, my rating scale is NOT based on a Parker type wine scoring scale or a school/college/university % or A-F grade score. You can find more on my scoring here. I apologise for any seemly low or 'bad' scores given with my system and I am sorry I can't say only nice things. Please keep in mind that I am ethically compromised and I am unable to produce 100% unbiased reviews.

VLOG