Category: Whisky Reviews
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Five years is enough ff you know what you’re doing
There’s a certain snobbery in whisky circles around age. Anything under ten years gets the raised eyebrow. Anything under eight gets quietly ignored. Five years? You’ll hear mumbling about immaturity, about spirit that hasn’t found itself yet. Sukhinder Singh doesn’t have time for that. At his recent masterclass, Singh the founder of Elixir Distillers and…
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Port Askaig sherry cask: When peat meets sherry, and neither one wins
Most Islay whiskies pick a side. Either you are in the camp of raw, maritime peat smoke, salt, iodine and ash-grey sea, or you are drawn to the soft, fruit-heavy sherry style that smells more of Jerez than the Sound of Jura. Port Askaig Sherry Cask refuses to choose. This is not a compromise whisky.…
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Glen Scotia Victoriana: A whisky named after a golden age that nearly never came back
Campbeltown had over thirty distilleries in the Victorian era. By 1933, it had three. That collapse driven by the First World War, the Great Depression, American Prohibition killing exports, and decades of overproduction gutted what had been Scotland’s whisky capital. Glen Scotia survived it. The Victoriana is, in part, a tribute to the era before…
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The whisky that beat 3,800 others and nobody outside Campbeltown saw it coming
In May 2021, the San Francisco World Spirits Competition one of the most rigorous blind-tasting competitions in the world worked through 3,800 entries across 31 categories and handed its Best in Show to a small distillery most people couldn’t place on a map. Glen Scotia. Campbeltown. Population: just over 5,000. Number of active distilleries in…
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Glen Scotia’s 2026 Festival Bottle Is Pink, Peaty, and Worth Every Penny
Look at that colour. That blush, almost salmon-pink hue sitting in the glass isn’t an accident or a gimmick. It’s what six months inside a ruby Port cask does to a whisky and Glen Scotia’s Campbeltown Malts Festival 2026 release is the proof. We got to taste this one presented by Alan Reid, and it’s…
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We tracked down the Laphroaig Willem Dafoe bottle. Here’s what it’s actually like to drink.
Some bottles you seek out because of the liquid inside. Some because of the design. The Laphroaig x Willem Dafoe release managed to make both arguments at the same time. We had it on our list before we even walked through the doors at the whisky event. It had just been released, the bottle was…
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The best whisky highball outside of Japan is being poured in London right now
The Japanese whisky highball is one of those drinks that sounds simple until you have a bad one. Then you realise how badly wrong it can go: flat, warm, over-diluted, poured from a bottle sitting under harsh bar lights for six months too long. Mitsu London gets it right. What Mitsu is actually doing Mitsu…
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Liquid orange marmalade in a glass: Deanston’s 17 year old orange wine cask finish
It smells like sunshine and tastes like the best orange marmalade you’ve ever had. That’s the short version. The longer version involves a Highland distillery, a 34-year-old master blender with family roots in southern Spain, 7,000 bottles, and a type of fortified wine most whisky drinkers have probably never heard of. But if you love…
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Tamnavulin did that: why Whiskyland chapter thirty one deserves your attention
Tamnavulin doesn’t usually stop anyone in their tracks. Built in 1966 on the southern edge of Speyside, it was a blender’s workhorse big stills, short fermentation, light and grainy spirit that quietly propped up an enormous share of blended Scotch for decades. It wasn’t a name that whisky writers typed in excitement. It was a…
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19 Years in the cask one eeek at Royal Birkdale: Loch Lomond’s open course collection 2026
Royal Birkdale is back. So is Loch Lomond. The 154th Open Championship returns to the Southport links this summer, and Loch Lomond has marked the occasion with something worth paying attention to: a 19-year-old single malt distilled in 2006, finished in hand-selected Tawny Port casks, and limited to just 3,000 bottles worldwide. This is the…
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