Scapa 16 Review

Hi everyone,

Today I’ve got a whisky that I’d been trying to track down for a while. Scapa with an age statement, something that hasn’t been seen in quite a while. This version was discontinued a good few years ago.

Scapa, if you didn’t know, is the other distillery on Orkney. It used to have one of the longest fermentation times of any distillery, always being above 120 hours. This has since been cut to 48 hours, along with the release of a bunch of uninteresting NAS whiskies. People speak quite highly of this one though.

This was another one I wanted to taste to complete 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die.

 

Scapa 16 40%

Colour: E150a

Body: Medium

Nose: Fruity and heathery, loads of fresh apple, light honey and vanilla, pleasant nose.

Taste: Soft then quite watery before the spice arrives but then it goes very dry and spicy, harsh ginger, finally the honey and heather come to the rescue at the end.

Finish: Medium/Long length. Oily and heathery, honey, HP-like. A tiny bit of plastic right at the end.

Can’t help but think that this would have been pretty good at 46% or even 43%. As it stands, Scapa has bored my twice, though I can imagine it being great as a single cask, cask strength thing. Sadly, we don’t see it independently bottled very often.

67/100

 

Thanks for reading!

Updated Distillery Rankings

Scotch Review #853

Whisky Network Review #1026

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.

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