As Saint Clynelish's Day has since passed us by (it was last Sunday), and our somewhat belated 3rd Annual celebration - which will also be our belated International Whisk(e)y Day Celebration - is coming up next Friday (March 28th), I thought I should do a write up of last year's celebration; I tried to do this last week, but there were some ( Read more... )

On Saturday, November 30th, 2013, which also happened to be Saint Andrew's Day (you know, that Saint Andrew, the Patron Saint of Scotland), I attended, along with several other members of our informal whisky club, the Diefenbunker Museum's 2nd Annual 'Whiskey Business' Fundraiser.  I had wanted to go to this event last year, but scheduling ( Read more... )

Five months, seventeen bottles of inexpensive blended whisky (several of them being truly terrible, awful whiskies), and more than twenty hours of (blind) nosing, tasting, and heated discussion culminated on Saturday, October 5th, 2013...the final round of our Battle Royale of the (Budget) Blended Scotch Whiskies...and from the preliminary rounds, ( Read more... )

Friday, August 30, 2013.  Group D, the final of the four preliminary rounds, and the one where all bets were off; we were sure of only two things: 1) the winner wasn't likely to the Johnnie Walker Red, and 2) the only other whisky in the line-up that any of us had experience with was The Black Grouse, and it hadn't faired so well at the 2nd Annual ( Read more... )

About a month ago, I wrote about our group's decision to conduct a Battle of the (Budget) Blended Scotch Whiskies.  Things have moved forward since then.  In fact, we've had two sessions, the first of which, Group A, took place on May 31st, 2013, although we had to make some last minute change-ups to the fight card (and this will become a ( Read more... )

Our 2nd Annual Scotchtoberfest, held in June of 2012, used Blended Scotch Whiskies as a theme (you can read about it here), but the whiskies the we tasted had significant variation in price and quality: The Black Grouse, Te Bheag, and Ballantine's 17 year-old, and then two entries from Compass Box - Peat Monster and Spice Tree - both of which were ( Read more... )

To celebrate my upcoming birthday (a day that will live in infamy), I'm having a small group of friends over to help me consume my Talisker Gift Collection, which is three 200ml bottles, one each of: Talisker 10 year-old, Talisker Distiller's Edition (the standard 10 finished for two additional years in sherry casks), and Talisker 57' North, a No- ( Read more... )

This time around I left the organizational issues to Jeff.  Yes, we had some discussions about the theme - a specific region of Scotland, World Single Malts, a vertical tasting (and if so, which distillery), etc., etc. - but I let him make the decisions (although I offered my place as the location since his condo is quite small).  In late September ( Read more... )

Planning is well under way...and after much debate we've decided to do a vertical tasting of Highland Park expressions.  We're pretty sure that we'll get at least the 12, 15, and 18 year-old malts, and we'll see what we can do to get bottles of the 21 year-old and "Thor" (a 16 year-old special release), but that is totally dependent on who can make ( Read more... )

Last night Jeff and I co-hosted our 2nd Semi-Annual 'Scotchtoberfest' Scotch Tasting Evening.  The first event, held in December 2011, was fun.  This one was better.  More people, fewer whiskies, which is a good thing, believe me; last time we had seven people and seven whiskies, and by the end of the evening I was feeling more than a little buzzed ( Read more... )