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Day 18 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Still Austin Cask Strength Bourbon

Posted on December 18, 2024

Day 18 - Still Austin Cask Strength Bourbon – 58%

By Evan

Well, it took going through 2/3 of our KWM 2024 Not Advent Calendar tasting series, but I finally managed to sneak in a Bourbon!

To all of you Bourbon lovers out there: You’re welcome. I know — I am pretty amazing. And incredibly humble. I mean handsome.

To all of you Bourbon haters out there, and Andrew: I am sorry — but not that sorry.

When it comes to Bourbon, there is a still-common misconception that all Bourbon has to be made in the state of Kentucky. This is wrong. It just often seems like all Bourbon comes from Kentucky when all you see on liquor store shelves are the likes of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Buffalo Trace, and other Kentucky Straight Bourbons. For quite a while Kentucky has been the de facto Bourbon Whiskey Producer in the USA, producing about 95% of all Bourbon made. This is simply because Kentucky is where most of the distilleries that survived Prohibition are located. Outside of Kentucky, there is only one massive distillery in Indiana that has operated for most of that time as well.

More people are becoming aware of the truth – that Bourbon can be made anywhere in the USA. Much of this awareness coincides with the tremendous increase we have seen in Bourbon Whiskey released from distilleries in other states. A lot of what we have seen comes from smaller and younger craft distilleries, but there are some big players making Bourbon in the likes of Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, and other areas as well. States such as Colorado, California, Texas, Virginia, Washington and more have become hotbeds of craft Bourbon and Whiskey production over the past decade.

Still Austin Whiskey Co. and Distillery resides in Austin, Texas. It opened it doors in 2017, having been co-founded by six fellow Austinites three years earlier. It was the first distillery to open and operate within the city since Prohibition.

The distillery prides itself on being grain to glass – a concept we touched on a bit with Kilchoman’s 100% Islay KWM Cask we tasted on Day 5, Lochlea’s Cask Strength Batch 2 from Day 7, and the Daftmill 15 Year Old we tasted in the 2023 KWM Whisky Calendar. There are local distilleries that have focused on this as well, as we discovered in prior whisky calendars with Shelter Point Distillery and Eau Claire Distillery. For Still Austin, being grain to glass means sticking as local as possible for sourcing grain all the way through maturation and bottling.

Kind of like Kensington Wine Market, Still Austin wouldn't exist without Nancy. For us, Nancy refers to Nancy Carten, the founder and owner of KWM until 2015, when she sold the company to Andrew Ferguson.

Still Austin Distillery’s Nancy is not a person, though. It is their continuous still tha...

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Day 17 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Scotch Malt Whisky Society 18.60

Posted on December 17, 2024

Day 17 — Scotch Malt Whisky Society 18.60 — SUPPING SHERRY FROM POLISHED WOODEN CUPS – 55.5%

by Evan

It is tradition for us to include a whisky bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in each year’s KWM Whisky Calendar. This year, we are featuring one that was bottled exclusively for Canada – to celebrate Canada Day, even. This is SMWS 18.60 — SUPPING SHERRY FROM POLISHED WOODEN CUPS.

Here is your Scotch Malt Whisky Society information, or refresher, depending on what you already know. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society – or SMWS as it will now be referred to keep my verbosity from hitting Dickensian levels – was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by a group of whisky lovers headed by a gentleman named Pip Hills. Over the years, it went from a small whisky club to something that could nearly be classified as a movement (if not a religion, which some members might argue it is), with 26 chapters and 40,000 members now found around the world. Canada’s own SMWS Chapter came into being in 2011, with Kensington Wine Market being it’s first exclusive retail partner. KWM and other shops host monthly Outturn tastings, featuring 6 to 7 new sample bottles, twelve times a year.

To purchase SMWS bottles, you do have to be an SMWS Member. Do not worry, though, this is not like joining Fight Club. Rules number one and two for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society are that EVERY member talks about the SMWS. Members of the SMWS both in Canada and world-wide tend to enjoy talking about whisky — specifically single cask and cask strength whisky — quite a lot. There are two ways to become an SMWS member.

The first is by purchasing an annual membership from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
The second is to purchase an SMWS bottle that costs more than $180. That first year of membership is included in that purchase.

But what do we taste? We single casks bottled at cask strength like this for the most part, which are codified numerically and given fanciful names to entice you without overtly revealing which distillery the dram came from.

Let's break this SMWS 18.60 down to give an example. If you look at the actual bottle or the web page full of this bottle’s information, you will find that the name of the distillery is not listed anywhere. The information you are looking for is codified in that series of numbers.

The SMWS has an ongoing numerical list of distilleries it has bottled over its 40+ year history. The first distillery it ever bottled was Glenfarclas, which is classified as distillery 1. Glenlivet was the 2nd distillery to be bottled, so it is distillery 2. Bowmore is 3, Highland Park is 4, Auchentoshan is 5, and so on. The SMWS is up ...

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Day 16 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Boutique-y 18 Year Highland Single Malt (Peated)

Posted on January 30, 2025

Day 16 — Boutique-y 18 Year Highland Single Malt (Peated) — 45.8%

By Evan

Today we will be exploring a release from That Boutique-Y Whisky Company for the third time in this year’s KWM Not An Advent Calendar Tasting set. Like the 30-Year-Old Blended Grain Whisky we tasted back on day three in this series, this bottling is part of Boutique-Y’s current core range. Say hello to the Boutique-Y Highland 18-Year-Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky!

As often happens with That Boutique-Y Whisky Company releases, we once again have a bit of a mystery on our hands. The label shows a stag against a green background, with an ear tag that reads “Highland Peated”.

There is no information on exactly which distillery this single malt comes from, and it could possibly change from small batch to small batch. The current iteration is rumoured to be peated Knockdhu though, which would be great since we have never had a Knockdhu in our whisky calendars before from what I can recall! So let’s take that notion as fact and talk a little bit about the Knockdhu distillery.

Knockdhu was founded back in 1893, and more or less operated steadily for the next 100 years – except for short closures during the great depression and World War II — until the great Scottish distillery cull of 1983 nearly killed it for good. Knockdhu was mothballed at that time by then-owners DCL, but in 1988 a buyer by the name of Inver House was found. Inver House Distillers itself was founded in 1964 and lead the newly built Glen Flagler malt Distillery and Garnheath grain distillery on the same site in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire in the Scottish Lowlands. Glen Flagler and Garnheath were closed never to reopen in 1985 and 1986 respectively, a few years before the Knockdhu Distillery purchase.

After its purchase of Knockdhu in 1988, Inver House went on to add a few more distilleries to its portfolio over the following decade. Speyburn (purchased in 1991), Pulteney (acquired in 1995), Balblair (purchased in 1996) Balmenach (purchased in 1997), are all still part of the Inver House lineup, along with Knockdhu. Inver House Distillers itself changed hands a few times during its lifespan, but has been owned by the big-in-Asia company Thai Beverage since 2006.

Ever had an official bottling of Knockdhu? It might be hard to know. Official bottlings are not actually given the distillery name for release. Instead, they are given the name anCnoc, possibly to avoid confusion with another Scottish distillery named Knockando. Funny how attempting to avoid confusion often makes things even more confusing instead, isn’t it?

At least they didn’t go with Chamuis Dhu, I suppose.

The Knockdhu Distillery resides in the village of Knock within Aberdeenshire. This puts the distillery in the East Highlands o...

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Day 15 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Rest & Be Thankful Port Charlotte 14 Year

Posted on December 15, 2024

Day 15 — Rest & Be Thankful Port Charlotte 14 Year – 57.4%

By Evan

I believe today’s bottle represents two firsts for us. This is both the first time we have featured a bottling of Port Charlotte in any of our KWM Whisky Calendars, and also the first time we have featured a whisky from indie bottler Rest & Be Thankful. Today’s dram is a 14-Year-Old single barrel bottling of Port Charlotte from Rest & Be.

That gives me a lot to talk about, and nearly nothing that I can crib or copy from prior years of writing our Whisky Calendar blogs. Brace yourself for some new content!

Port Charlotte is not a distillery – at least it hasn’t been for nearly a century. There was a Port Charlotte Distillery on Islay between 1829 and 1929. It was known alternatively as the Lochindaal Distillery or Lochindaal Distillery Port Charlotte or Rhinns, or Rhins. The name Port Charlotte refers to a heavily peated style of whisky made at Bruichladdich Distillery, which resides only a few kilometres away from the Port Charlotte Distillery site. Some of the original Port Charlotte/Lochindaal warehouses are currently used for aging Bruichladdich whisky stock, as the Bruichladdich purchased the site back in 2007.

Bruichladdich even had plans to rebuild and revive the Port Charlotte distillery, which they announced the same year they purchased the land the former distillery sat on. Unfortunately, an economic downturn and then Bruichladdich’s purchase by Rémy Cointreau in 2012 has not only killed this idea but also buried deep down in peat. It was a quaint notion, though!

So, where is Port Charlotte whisky made? At Bruichladdich, of course. Since Bruichladdich Distillery’s own revival happened, and it reopened in under feisty new management in 2001 after being mothballed in 1995, it has been used two distill a few different types of Single Malt:

Bruichladdich – the main spirit which the distillery is known for. It is unpeated in style.
Port Charlotte – heavily peated single malt – around 40PPM
Lochindaal – slightly more peated than Port Charlotte at around 50 PPM. It was only made for a few years before production of this style was ceased in favour of Port Charlotte single malt.
X4 – A no longer made four times distilled single malt that was experimented with for a very brief period. Very little has made its way to bottle, or into the fuel tanks of race cars.

Octomore – The most peated whisky, bar none. Ranging from 80 to 300+ PPM, depending on which release we are talking about. This monstrous abomination that is surprisingly drinkable if you like Islay Single Malt has been distilled in small quantities since 2002.

Bruichla...

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Day 14 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - G&M Distillery Label Mortlach 25 Year

Posted on December 14, 2024

Day 14 — G&M Distillery Label Mortlach 25 Year – 46%

“What’s with all of this young whisky?”- You might be thinking after the past two days of our 2024 Not An Advent Calendar. How fickle our memories are this time of year — it is easy to forget we had a 21-Year-Old Irish Whiskey recently, back on Day Eleven. Maybe this is just me projecting my own memory issues on you, though? Regardless, today we are jumping into something older. Say hello to this 25-Year-Old Gordon & MacPhail bottling of Mortlach!

Mortlach Distillery was founded back in 1823 and is located in Speyside, within Dufftown. It is the oldest distillery in Duftown and its nearest distillery neighbours include Glendullan, heavy hitters Glenfiddich and Balvenie, as well as the aptly named Dufftown Distillery itself.

Mortlach is known as “The Beast of Dufftown” thanks to its heavy and often meaty distillate profile that often shows up in its whisky as well. This rich, characterful profile makes it highly sought after by blenders. The distillery is owned by (stop me if you have heard this before) alcohol giant Diageo. The whisky Mortlach produces is showcased throughout the Johnnie Walker range, including the bold and peated Black Label.

The distillation process at Mortlach is curious and unique, thanks to both utilizing worm tubs and being distilled 2.81 times. Not double-distilled or triple-distilled, but some strange and confusing mathematical equation between them. The copper at Mortlach is made of three wash stills and three spirit stills, all with different sizes and shapes. Somehow, these stills create three different types of spirit that are then merged into what we know as Mortlach’s style. This process was first adopted in 1896 and has not been changed since.

Here is a YouTube Video that delves into the 2.81 Distillation Process from The Scotch Malt Whisky Society.

The bottler of this whisky is Gordon & MacPhail. G&M has featured prominently over our past decade-plus of making KWM Whisky Calendars, as well as on our store shelves, and in our hearts for that matter.

Gordon & MacPhail started as a grocery store in Elgin, back in 1895, founded by James Gordon and John Alexander MacPhail. The first generation of the Urquhart Family – which owns G&M – John Urquhart started as an apprentice to the two founding partners.

(Gordon & MacPhail in the beginning: a single grocery store. Photo from gordonandmacphail.com)

Over John’s lifetime, he helped push G&M firmly into the Scotch Whisky scene by sourcing whisky from many Speyside and Scottish distilleries, which was then matured and bottled by G&M. His legacy with G&M is still seen to this day, with some of the whisky laid down during ...

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