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Tired of reading dozens of tasting notes? Do you want to have simply the best whisky right now? Suffer no more! Read about the best whiskies I have had during February and discover where you can buy them before they are sold out, because they will!

1. And the winner is… Macduff 11 years old 2000 bottled for The Whisky Barrel

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  Macduff 11 year 2000 The Whisky Barrel
  

It is a very nice sherry monster with powerful notes of tobacco, spices and toffee. And the best of all for a really nice price, just £39.99 at The Whisky Barrel

2. Caol Ila Old Malt Cask 27 years old 1984 bottled by Douglas Laing for The Whisky Barrel

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  Caol Ila Old Malt Cask 27 year 1984 The Whisky Barrel
  

3. Bunnahabhain 30 years old 1978 bottled by Murray McDavid

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  Bunnahabhain 30 year 1978 Murray McDavid
  

4. Bunnahabhain 9 years old 2000 bottled by Adelphi

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  Bunnahabhain 9 year 2000 Adelphi
  

5. Caol Ila Feis Ile 2010

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  Caol Ila Feis Ile 2010
  

Honorable mention: El Dorado Demerara Rum 25 years old 1984

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  El Dorado 25 year
  

What have you been drinking this past month? Tell me in the comments below.
If you like this post, why not share this site with your friends?

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Oliver Klimek, the Malt Maniac behind Dramming.com is proposing a great idea: a blind tasting competition.

Oliver explains the idea at his blog:

You can check the rules at http://www.dramming.com/2012/02/27/blind-tasting-anyone/

About the payment it is like this: you pay now 25€ for the samples that amount 15€ for delivery ( worldwide ) and 10€ for samples. After the tasting happens, Oliver disclose the bottles and the prices and you will have to pay up to 10€ more, as the total price of the samples won’t go beyond 25€, so in worst case scenario we are talking about 40€ for five expensive whiskies. Seems like a great idea. I am in!.

Hurry up as there are only 21 seats and more than 50% is now occupied.

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In this rather funny video Whyte and Mackay master blender Richard Paterson shows David Hayman how to drink whisky. Right after that he crafts a blended whisky for David and show how to drink it.

It is a must see even if you consider yourself an expert. You never get disappointed or bored with Mr. Paterson.
WARNING: video contains slaps and scenes of whisky being thrown on the floor.

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Maybe you weren’t aware that this last Friday Jan, 19th took place the Canadian Whisky Awards.

The Canadian Whisky Awards reward the very best tasting Canadian whiskies, and recognize outstanding contributions made by highly successful individual whiskies and producers in generating favourable attention for Canadian whisky. Winners are chosen by a panel of seven judges following extensive blind tastings. Among the judges are some of Canada’s top whisky writers and bloggers, as Davin de Kergommeaux and Mark Gillespie between them.

Whisky makers nominate their very best whiskies creating a strong competitive field. Among these, gold medals were awarded to five entries, and silver medals to another twelve. Eight whiskies were recognized with bronze.

If for any reason you haven’t yet tried Canadian whisky you are missing a great sweet mellow experience. I don’t see in the list Crown Royal or Gooderham & Worts but I love both of them. I will taste them as soon as I see them at this side of the pond.

You can read more at http://www.canadianwhisky.org/news-views/canadian-whisky-awards-2011.html

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This December, 1st, the Malt Maniacs group have published the report about their 9th annual Malt Maniacs Awards. This year they have choosen between 171 samples after last year hell of 262 samples.

The Malt Maniacs Awards has three categories for their awards:

• Daily Drams are bottles with a price of up to €50
• Premium Whiskies are bottles with a price of up to €150
• Ultra Premium Whiskies are bottles with a price of more than €150

Then on each category, they have six awards categories:

• Non-plus-ultra award
• Best Natural Cask award
• Best Sherry Cask award
• Best Cask Innovation award
• Best Peated Malt award
• Thumbs Up award, that is the best release of this year.

So let’s roll the drums!

Ultra Premium Category

Tachan! Here they are. Don’t worry about buying one as all of them are single casks released and most of them surely dearly departed already. Anyway, it is nice to know that exists stuff like this.

Non-plus-ultra Award

GlenDronach 39 years old 1972 Cask #712

Best Natural Cask Award

Glen Grant 59 years old bottled by Gordon & Macphail Cask #1134

Best Sherry Cask Award

Karuizawa 1981/2011 Sherry Cask #2634

Best Cask Innovation Award

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  Lochside 46 years old 1965 Adelphi
  

Best Peated Malt Award

Port Ellen 28 years old Wilson & Morgan Cask #2033

Thumbs Up Award

Strathisla 1970/2011 G&M Licensed Bottling

Premium Category

Well there is the stuff you and me can buy on stores. Most of them are large batches so you maybe even lucky to grab one before everyone else start adding vinyls of MMA to them. Hurry up!

Non-plus-ultra Award

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  Suntory Yamazaki Sherry Cask
  

Best Natural Cask Award

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  Lagavulin 12 years old Natural Cask Strength
  

Best Sherry Cask Award

Glendronach 17 years old 1994/2011 Original bottle for Taiwan Cask #107

Best Cask Innovation Award

Amrut Portonova

Best Peated Malt Award

Breath of Islay 12 years old Adelphi

Thumbs Up Award

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  Hakushu Heavily Peated
  

Daily Drams Category

Here are the whiskies that are affordable and easy to find. I am happy to see that I have already tried many of them in my own.
Here you can get excellent ideas for that Christmas present you wanted to buy.

Non-plus-ultra Award

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  Lagavulin 16 year
  £43.99

Best Natural Cask Award

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  Talisker 10 year
  £34.19

Best Sherry Cask Award

Glenfarclas 2002/2011 Cask 1575

Best Cask Innovation Award

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  Aberlour 16 years old Double Cask Matured
  

Best Peated Malt Award

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  Big Peat Small Batch Cask Strength
  

Thumbs Up Award

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  Kilchoman Spring Release 2011
  

The Medals

Aditionally there is a really extensive list with the gold, silver and bronze medals at http://www.maltmaniacs.org/2011-score-card.pdf Designed by Tim Sainburg from Brambling Design

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Master of Malt has been doing really cool things during the last week.
Two of them has been really cool, first they have at last released the Blogger’s blended whisky.

St. Isidore, the bloggers blended scotch whisky

Master of Malt is proud to finally announce the release of the blended whisky, St Isidore, created entirely by whisky bloggers. To make this blend, the spirits retailer called upon the great and the good of the whisky industry including names such as Whisky Magazine, Edinburgh Whisky Blog, CaskStrength.net and Whisky Cast.

Master of Malt started by sending blending kits to 10 prominent whisky bloggers, and asked them to create the best blended whisky they could using the ingredients provided, whilst maximising its value for money. The bloggers’ recipes were made up and sold in sample sets, and Master of Malt asked the public to vote for which recipe should be made into the brand’s next whisky.

The votes were counted (using the AV system) and a rather smoky, Islay-inspired blend was chosen as the winner, before the bloggers agreed on a name for the blend, calling it St Isidore after the patron saint of the internet. For the final stage, Master of Malt called on graphic designers to submit label designs for the bottle, which summed up St Isidore, the blend, and the whisky blogging community, making them as creative as possible.

Master of Malt 55 years old Whisky Liqueur

The second event of the last week is the release by Master of Malt of the world oldest scotch whisky liqueur, made with a stunning sherry matured 55 years old Speyside Scotch Whisky!. This rare, limited edition liqueur was created with single malt drinkers in mind, and rather than masking the core whisky with sweetness, just a little natural sugar and spices were added to accentuate the rich, sherried flavours and malt notes.

The whisky was sourced from one of Scotland’s most legendary distilleries, and it was aged for 55 years in sherry casks, resulting in a rich palate redolent of calves leather, sultanas and mahogany. It was then bottled non-chill-filtered, and not diluted in any way save for the addition of natural sugar and spices.

You can have a look here… just don’t ask about the price :D Designed by Tim Sainburg from Brambling Design

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The chaps from Master of Malt, the superb online whisky shop, have come with another great crazy idea!.

“Blend your own whisky.”

Yeah, exactly like that. Sounds crazy?! You will love this.

You can order, for £49.95, this blending kit that include ten diferent styles of whiskies:

• Single grain base whisky
• Malt base whisky
• Speyside sherry matured whisky
• Highland single malt
• Islay single malt
• Lowland single malt
• Old Highland single malt sherry finished
• Old Speyside single malt
• Very old grain whisky
• Very old Islay single malt

You will get one sample of 3cl of each of the whiskies plus one extra sample of both the malt base and the single brain base. Additionally you will get two pipette, one of 3ml and another of 1ml, two measuring cylinders of 10ml and 25ml and a conical flask of 100ml.
Obviously you will find also in this pack a Master of Malt tasting glass and a detailed letter introducing you in the arcane art of blending whisky.

Now you can be the Nose yourself! “Hi! How are you!? Ummm, honey!”

The really cool part is that once you are done you can order a case of six bottles of your own blended whisky by introducing the composition of your whisky at Blend Your own whisky page at Master of Malt.

Keep in mind that each whisky has a different price tag, so blend it keeping in mind taste/aromas and the price tag, just like a real master blender.

Once you are done introducing your very secret recipe, you can name your whisky and order a case of it. I think this is the coolest chritsmas present I have ever seen.

I just see two negative points:
1) You have to order a full case of six bottles that can be a big investment.
2) You can’t change the default label nor bottle it at cask strength or a higher alcohol volume than 40%.

Fix the two points chaps and you have here a great tool.

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For the second time in 3 years The Whisky Exchange have won the International Spirits Competition award for Best Independent Retailer, as voted for by the drinks industry.
So to celebrate the joy with all of us they are doing a really interesting offer: -25% off from Laphroaig 18 years old and -25% off Clynelish 14 years. This great offer will last only one week so hurry up.

Here you have the links: Laphroaig 18yo and Clynelish 14yo

Enjoy.

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“Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough.”

What the hell! No way. But it has been a quite interesting and fun year. It looks as it was yesterday but this blog has turned one year today.

Only a year but it has been a great travel of personal discovery: whisky, history, facts, geography and friends.

Before I started blogging I was already collecting malt whiskies but I wasn’t really interested in how they tasted. One day I decided to open one miniature of Compass Box Spice Tree and I was impressed about how good it was. Then another, and another, and another. And just one day I decided to write tasting notes about what I was drinking. I could have do it the way other great whisky blogs does, but being myself engineer (Dilbert! You are not alone!) I preferred the hard way: write tasting notes so a computer can process them and do interesting things with it. Just a few months later I created whisky-o-matic, which is really fun if you haven’t tried yet!.

I have learnt lots of things about how whisky is made, how barley is grown, how water is chosen based in its characteristics. I have learnt a lot about ageing of whisky and how the wood influence the final result, with two bottles of a great Laphroaig 10 years old Cask Strength sacrificed in the altar of knowledge.

I still have to improve my world geography but now I know where Islay, Orkney, Kentucky and Hokkaido are situated.

And I have known great people related to whisky: from bloggers like Galg of WhiskyIsral, Steve of The Whisky Wire, Ruben of Whisky Notes, John Hansell of MaltWhisky Advocate, Billy Abbott of Billy’s Booze Blog, John Campbell of Laphroaig for their invitation to Laphroaig Live 2010, Richard Barr who shared with me a whole Whiskylive show. Special thanks for the chaps at Master of Malt for their support during this year.

Crying already? Feeling emotional?
Ok, so let’s get back to the crude bare numbers! :)

Naked Statistics

This year can be resumed in a few numbers and two or three great posts.

• 1 year
• 365 days
• 1 whisky show ( hey! I have had to fight for that single one a lot! )
• 619 bottles of whisky bought ( don’t panic! Most of them are samples! )
• 372 tasting notes written.
• 356 posts published.
• 150K visits. ( and growing! )
• Tasted Macallan 30 years old Fine Oak.
• Bought a bottle of Highland Park Earl Haakon.
• Drink Kilchoman Inagural Release.
• A new son ordered.
• Built a whisky library for reference.

Sensual promises for the future

Those are my promises for the future.

• 2 whisky shows ( I must be at The Whisky Show 2012 and Maltstock 2012. At least! )
• Less whisky bought. ( My wife is going to kill me. And the worst thing is that she may be right about it )
• More tasting notes.
• More and better articles about distilleries.
• Better whisky-o-matic suggestions.
• More friends, more social. ( Did you know you can submit your own tasting notes for whisky-o-matic now? )

Thank you all for this great year.

Yours sincerely,
Miguel

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After several weeks of hard work here it is a last! The new blog in all its splendour.
Browse, visit, try whisky-o-matic, enjoy the ratings and the recommended whiskies.

If you think something is missing, something is not working or something is not right please comment it. I do love to listen to other friends ideas.

Regards,
Miguel

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