Keepers of the Quaich

They are Port Charlotte and Kilchoman!

Port Charlotte seems to be an extension of Bruichladdich and is using the dismantled equipment from the Inverleven distilleries as well as Bruichladdich’s maltings so it already has released a 5, 6, and 7yo. You can find them as PC5, PC6, and PC7.

Kilchoman (pronounced kilhoman) is an artisan distillery operating on its own farmland and only using local ingredients. Its aim is to be a highly charactered single malt heavy in peat (40 ppm) and become the new classic taste of Islay. Its August 2009 release (a 3yo) won a cask strength award (the BIG award) last month.

I thought there might be some interest in the Whisky Explorer’s Club. Short story: it’s a membership club where they ship you a flight of 4 whiskies (”from around the world”) 6 times each year. You taste them blind and enter your tasting notes into their website to see what the whisky actually was. There are 3 membership levels and the one I just described costs $120/year.

You can read more about it here and/or join right away. I have to say I’m about 99% sure that I am going to do this.

This excerpt is from Whisky Mag’s on-line forum:

“Probably it’s nbs. (new bottle syndrome. ) Just give your dram plenty of time to breathe. Nasty sharp, bitter, sulpur and other off notes go away. Several bottles I hated in the beginning became better and better along the way. A fellow forum member whose name I forgot opens his 105 for a couple of months then closes it and waits a week or so before drinking it.”

Or just another attempt by the English to keep their “subjects” in line economically? You judge for yourself but England is now in the “whisky” business with an operating and distributing distillery for the first time in more than 100 years. The only spirit produced by the St. George’s distillery (by the River Thet, nestled among the farms of Norfolk, eastern England) is 3 years old, aged in old Jim Beam bourbon casks no less, and so is now technically “whisky”.

This sort of reminds me of the English’s sudden interest in manufacturing fine linen when they say their Irish “subjects” actually making money off of it in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, from a regional standpoint if you come across a bottle of St. George’s somewhere it may be interesting to sample it to see if it is an extreme lowland, an extreme eastern highland, or maybe something new altogether.

Here’s an excerpt from the article in the event, from an archiving point of view, that the link above goes dead:

“After three years maturing in charred white oak casks, the first English whiskey in more than a century is finally ready to flow out to excited and curious drinkers around the world. While Scotch is famous across the globe, there has not been a single whiskey distillery south of the border with England in more than 100 years. But at St. George’s Distillery by the River Thet, nestled among the farms of Norfolk, eastern England, the first casks have come of age.

The English Whisky Company’s first run of single malt spirit officially became whiskey on Nov. 27 as it passed the magical three-year mark, and will go on general sale from Dec. 16. Matured in casks used by Jim Beam bourbon whiskey in Kentucky, between 150,000 and 200,000 bottles will be produced per year, while some of the 1,040 barrels produced so far will be stored to mature for up to 20 years. They are currently being bottled by hand, with chairman James Nelstrop stapling the cardboard cases together as black Labrador Bert, the distillery dog, watches on. A bottle of English whiskey retails in Britain for about 35 pounds.”

This story caught my eye and is news-worthy for our KOTQ page.

Apparently a British explorer in the early 1900s, Sir Ernest Shackleton, had a crate of McKinlay & Co whisky on hand during his 1909 expedition in the Antarctica. The expedition was abandonded at some point, and the explorer left behind his stock.

Whyte & MacKay, who currently owns McKinlay & Co, has commissioned New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust to use special drills to retrieve these 100+ year-old bottles. The intent is not so much to drink the spirit, but rather to determine if reproduction of the storied whisky is worthwhile.

Here’s a link to the original story

Some photos from Brother Ville’s visit to the Auchentoshan distillery. Enjoy.

View from the Auchentoshan Grounds

Megan and John starting the Auchentoshan Distillery Tour

The 11 Ingredients comprising Auchentoshan

Close up of an Auchentoshan still

I needed to share these videos with the other Keepers. Isle of Jura has spun off an interesting little marketing theme. Whatever your view on mixing single malts, you might find these interesting.

First the challenge:

Then to the Ilse of Jura for the results:

Sorry for link, I think I crashed the site, and can’t find the direct link to the video but this should be the page)

Keep in mind that it is what it is (how’s that for a Tao statement) but they have some interesting ideas. I won’t repeat the content, go to the site and check it out.

Tao

PREMISE:

Numbered among Macallan’s large Special Release line is their Vintage Travel series. The whiskies bottled reflect the style of spirit produced during the eras of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. To re-create the style of The Macallan in each decade, their Master Distillers sampled bottles of The Macallan from that decade, refered to specification documentation and records from each era, and matched their aroma and flavor with more recent distillations taken from the casks maturing in the warehouses.

Unlike most other distilleries, Macallan had long held back significant quantities of its spirit, with some stores laid down as early as 1926, allowing it to quickly market special rare aged releases. In 2007, for instance, a 1926 vintage Macallan was sold at auction at Christie’s for $54,000, making it the most expensive whisky ever sold. These reflections of their eras happen to have some very old Macallan in it reportedly including 25 years and older in some cases.

The Macallan vintage travel range was initially launched in 1999 as an exclusive to World Duty Free. After the initial trial period the product was re-packaged into its current form and put on general sale in the Autumn 2000. This highly collectable range is now on sale again.

THE HISTORICAL IMPACTS:

Spanish Civil War 1936-1939; IMPACT: reduced availability of sherry (Oloroso) casks for export affected the aging methods of the Macallan. Second-fill and perhaps ex-bourbon barrels were used for some of the whisky in the 1930’s.

Second World War 1939-1945; IMPACT: sherry casks remained in short supply and coal was also in less supply due to the war and its increasing industrial activity so Macallan relied on peat-fueled fires. During the 1940s, The Macallan would refill their oak sherry casks more often than is the current practice. This, combined with the use of peat to dry the barley, resulted in a whisky that was less spicy and peatier than modern day Macallan.

20s - early modernization of the malt whisky industry hits its stride. The vintage series’ actual bottlings (1926 for example) provide a great benchmark of this halcyon age

30s - less spice and peatier than modern day Macallan

40s - lean. a war-time scotch. increased peat. less sherry flavor.

50s - most modern of this series. raw materials were more readily available. this expression should most reflect the modern Macallan.

PROS:

A fun diversion into the past with the opportunity to reflect on the realities each historical period placed on the day to day lives and of the people who made and drank these whiskies.

CONS:

Difficult to validate whether or not they were accurate. Of all Macallan’s bottlings, these expressions may be the most variable. Some feel that Macallan can put anything they like into these expressions since there is no standard for comparison purposes.

On Jun 14, 1825 John McMurray (b. 1765), his wife Jane, and three of their children: sons Henry and Hutchinson and daughter Esther landed in New York harbor having emigrated to the United States from county Armagh, Ulster, Ireland. From there begins the story of the McMurray family which begat KOTQers Bob, Jay, Chas (Mary), Mark, and John.

The names are known to 1765 with John to Henry to Peter to John Albert to John Kenneth but the story of the broad McMurray clan goes back much further…into their native land: Scotland.

The McMurrays are originally from Moray a village in the Speyside district meaning ‘seafarer‘. The McMurrays were the ’sons of the seafarer’ and our tasting lineup will follow their historical migration from the failed rebellion of 1160, and the impact its aftermath had on the McMurrays, to the plantation of Ulster in 1608 and the Scottish famine of 1695-1699. All of these events would combine to bring the McMurrays to Ulster, Ireland from where John and Jane would embark to their new world.

We’ll start our journey at the beginning in the village of Moray,

* Glen Moray 12 (Distillery bottling)

explore the general Morayshire area a bit,

* Glen Elgin 12 (Duncan Taylor Whisky Galore bottling)
* Longmorn 16 (Distillery bottling)
* Glen Grant 21 (Gordon MacPhail)

we’ll then move down to the remote district of Galloway deep in the Scottish Lowlands for,

* Bladnoch 12 (Signatory bottling)

whose owner, Raymond Armstong, fittingly comes to Galloway from Northern Ireland.

Given the relationship of the local peoples to their distillery histories and output it is not a stretch to say that Glen Moray (pronounced “Murray” in Gaelic), is the spirit distilled to relect the local peoples of Moray and clan Murray making this the “McMurray family single malt scotch”. Likewise Glen Grant and clan Grant which has a direct connection to our McMurray family tree as, in fact, Peter Kilpatrick McMurray’s (1850-1930) maternal grandmother was a Grant (Mary Grant). So, two single malts in this tasting have a direct, personal connection to the McMurrays.

As an additional tasting element bonus, two of the five single malts are un-chillfiltered (the Bladnoch and the Longmorn) giving the group an opportunity to explore the effect this technique may have on the finished product.

Further recommended ‘reading’ for those seeking to see this journey to its completion (to be completed on individual’s time):

- Northern Ireland’s single malt whiskey ‘Bushmills’
- Kentucky’s ‘Maker’s Mark’ (Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion, which was quite near where Henry eventuallys settles albeit 45 years later, led directly to the formation of the present-day bourbon industry in Kentucky)

I’m pleased to announce that I have successfully upgraded the underlying blog software beneath kotq.org, wordpress, to its latest version - 2.5.1. This represents an enormous leap from the prior version. You will mostly notice the differences when you go into the “admin” area to post your homework as a new posting in the blog. The dashboard and admin area look much different and work for the better imho.

However, the most important reasons that I even attempted this upgrade are:

a) I wanted to eliminate whatever security hole existed (in the prior version) for spammers to exploit in order to spam comments into our blog/database. I will be monitoring the comments to see if this upgrade was all that was needed to patch that security hole. If not, since we are on the latest version, I can utilize the developer forums to see what else may need to be done to patch the hole.

b) I wanted to demonstrate that we can run on the latest version so that when we move hostings to Chas’ provider there was no problem with wordpress version conflict between our site and the hosting’s version of wordpress. Additionally, in executing this upgrade it confirms my complete understanding as to what ALL of the files are that comprise our web site. I am now completely confident that I will be able to migrate the web site/application over to another hosting environment without any problems.