The KOTQ

Laphroaig Cask Strength (10 yo) recently won a blind taste-off hosted by Whisky Magazine. 100 so-called writers, tasters and experts participated in the bi-annual event. If you haven’t had it, it’s quite nice (even for those of you less inclined for the straight stuff). I picked up a bottle a few years ago when it was not available state side. Sam’s now has it in stock. I think this would be a good one for an official offline tasting!

There’s a sea change taking place in Scotland about how to appropriately name what we know as vatted and blends. The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) is doing this in response to Diageo trying to shift Cardhu from a single malt to vatted. Read these for starters:

Whisky Magazine Editorial March 05
Daily Herald 3/11 This link is now dead, Bop 2/26/06

I’m all for it. It should make it clearer to the consumer what he/she is buying and it will elevate single malts. Pure Malt was always a little confusing too–unless you were in the know. Also the SWA proposal will protect the region naming (Speyside, Lowland, etc).

What do you guys think?

In my continual search for a bottle of Ben Nevis 10, I decided to contact the distillery directly. A few weeks ago, I wrote to Colin Ross, the managing director at Ben Nevis, and told him of the difficulty I’ve had in finding the 10 year expression here. I just heard back from him today, and here’s an excerpt of the reply:

“Since our U.S.importer went into liquidation/receivership a few years ago we have, sadly, not been able to find another so currently we are without a presence in your country. I have been suggesting to other enquirers from the U.S that they may be able to obtain stocks of our whisky through www.thewhiskyexchange.com or Loch Fyne Whiskies, Inveraray, Argyll, both of whom have the necessary agreements in place to be able to supply whisky directly into your country. You may find that Loch Fyne Whiskies are the less expensive option and I know that they do provide a good service.
We would love to supply you directly from the distillery or through an agent in the U.S. but for the moment this is just not possible.”

I found this information worth mentioning in case you, too, are also unable to find a special bottling unavailable stateside. I visited the Whisky Exchange site and it looks like a great collection. Loch Fyne will ship to the US, but they have a lot of caveats as a result of the trials and tribulations of shipping liquors overseas through customs. For Ben Nevis 10, Loch Fyne is about $10 less than Whisky Exchange. Loch Fyne is at www.lfw.co.uk.

Does anyone have experience with buying direct from the UK? I plan to take my chances with Loch Fyne and will let you know how it goes.

If you haven’t already please consider RSS to be a basic element of your KOTQ.ORG implementation.

RSS, “Real Simple Syndication”, is the mechanism by which the blog content is syndicated from kotq.org directly to you. With RSS you will be able to see whenever there is a new posting or comment directly from your main Internet portal environment/home page. You can stay on top of all of the action at KOTQ.ORG without making special surfing trips to the site.

Irving and I use the My Yahoo! home page to consolidate our RSS feeds – and KOTQ.ORG posts and comments are at the top of my feed list (ahead of my White Sox feed, Boardgamegeek.com feed, news feed, all of them). Whatever you use as your Internet portal environment take a look at how RSS feeds are added and use the following URLs to include KOTQ.ORG into your world.

For posts:
https://www.keepersofthequaich.org/index.php?feed=rss2.”

For comments:
https://www.keepersofthequaich.org/index.php?feed=rss2&withcomments=1