Follow Us:

Blog

KWM Advent 2018 Day 4: Old Malt Cask Mortlach 11 Year KWM Cask

Posted on November 30, 2022

by Andrew

We have a notable first here on Day 4 of the 2018 Kensington Wine Market Whisky Calendar. This is the first whisky we have ever had from Hunter Laing & Co., in any of our five editions of our KWM Whisky Advent Calendars produced in-house. And there is a good reason for this as the bottle might attest.

Prior to our request for Hunter Laing to bottle our exclusive Old Malt Cask Mortlach 11-Year KWM Cask for the Calendar, Hunter Laing had never before bottled a whisky in 50ml format. As you can see, today's whisky does not have a glamorous or beautiful label, but I hope you will agree all of the important details are there (save for mention of KWM) and the liquid is always the most important part!



Image courtesy of @frombarreltobottle

This label came as a bit of a surprise to us, though in fairness we may have been told it didn't have a proper label and forgot! But we are very proud of this malt nonetheless, and we are thrilled to include it in our Calendar this year. We launched full-sized bottles of this cask just over a month ago with a tasting hosted by Andrew Laing, one of Hunter Laing's owners, at the shop. There was a slight miscommunication with the importer, and in addition to the 700mls, we have more 50ml bottles of the whisky than expected. So we are excited to be able to offer our cask both in full size and miniature form. There is just one catch, the extra minis for sale have the same logo as the one in your Calendar so we have ordered a miniaturized version of the Old Malt Cask Label that will closely approximate the full-sized bottle. We should have these labels in-store early next week and the bottles will be on sale shortly thereafter. So if you want to order a few more, we won't say no.

Hunter Laing is a relatively new independent bottler, but as its Old Malt Cask brand will attest, it has much older roots. Hunter Laing was formed in 2013 when Fred and Stewart Laing decided to divide up their family business. Douglas Laing & Co. had operated since 1948 when it was founded by their father Fred Douglas Laing. Fred Douglas blended his own whiskies and began a filling program for casks, both malt and grain, that continues to this day. Fred and Stuart joined the firm in the 1970s and succeeded their father on his passing in 1982.



Fred Douglas Laing

Over the course of the 1980s, the firm shifted its focus away from blends and towards bottling single malts including their Old Malt Cask line. During this period they acquired an impressive inventory of whiskies, including considerable quantities from closed distilleries like Port Ellen and Rosebank, whose owners desperately needed the cash. Demand for these whiskies soared through the mid-2000s and into the 2010s. In 2013 when the brothers decided to take separate paths, they divvied up the brands and...

Continue Reading →




KWM Advent 2018 Day 3 - Compass Box The Peat Monster

Posted on November 12, 2023

by Andrew

 

Image courtesy of @frombarreltobottle


Compass Box Whisky is in our estimation the finest producer of Blended Whisky in Scotland and possibly the world today. Its founder and co-owner John Glaser is one of the most unlikely figures in the Scotch whisky industry. A native Minnesotan, he studied wine before falling into the whisky trade where he fell in love with Scotch whisky.






John Glaser is one of the most innovative, provocative and transformative figures in the Scotch and whisky industry today. He has pushed the bounds of innovation and challenged the status quo of the legacy interests. In short, he is one of the industry figures I admire most. For John whisky is a passion, it is a form of art. Yes, Compass Box is a business, but the art comes first. That is extremely refreshing in an industry dominated by large corporate interests, where the product is of secondary importance to the marketing plan. This is not to say that Compass Box isn’t good at marketing. Far from it, their marketing is superb, but rather that Compass Box’s branding and marketing are 2inspired by the product, as it should be, and not the other way around!

John Glaser got his start in whisky working for Diageo, the world’s largest whisky producer, specifically in the Johnny Walker arm, where he was eventually promoted to an executive marketing position. John loved the art of blending whiskies. In the 1990s Blended Scotch whisky accounted for close to 95% of all of the whisky produced in Scotland. Single Malts were starting to catch on globally, and John saw an opportunity for small batch, purposeful Blends. He approached Diageo about creating a boutique Blended Scotch Whisky business within the Johnnie Walker family, but they were not interested, the idea wasn’t big enough for them. So in the year 2000, John set out on his, with supply contracts from his former employer, and Compass Box Whisky was born.

Blends were born in the 1800s as a way of making the bold and smoky Highland whiskies more palatable to a broader audience. In the early days, the concept of blending could be summed up by Aristotle’s acronym of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. As the whisky industry grew and spread globally it became a commodity. The art of blending took a back seat to marketing plans and profit margins. John Glaser and Compass Box have wound the clock back and returned the focus to the product. In a whisky world obsessed with single malts, John has made Blended Scotch whisky interesting and relevant again!



The Compass Box Peat Monster was born in 2003, after the success of a forbearing whisky bottled for Park Avenue Liquors in New York City. At the time it was one of the peatiest whiski...

Continue Reading →




KWM Advent 2018 Day 2 - Cadenhead Linkwood 2006 KWM Cask

Posted on November 12, 2023

by Andrew

For Day 2 of KWM Whisky Advent we are featuring our 11 year old single cask of Linkwood, bottled exclusively for KWM by WM Cadenhead, Scotland’s oldest independent bottler. You are going to see more than a few WM Cadenhead bottlings in this year’s Calendar, in part because they were able to offer us an amazing selection of single cask, single malt, whiskies. Kensington Wine Market is proud to be the exclusive retailer of WM Cadenhead whiskies in Canada.



 

Picture courtesy of @frombarreltobottle


First, a little bit about WM Cadenhead. Let’s call this Part I. We’ll elaborate more about them in posts to follow, but today we will focus on the founder and the firm’s namesake, two different men. The firm we know today as Cadenhead’s was founded by George Duncan at 47 Netherkirkgate in Aberdeen in 1842. Not much was known about George Duncan, other than that business was good in the early years. The firm was established as a Vinter and distillery agent and was doing well enough for him to bring his brother-in-law William Cadenhead into the business in 1853. When Duncan died suddenly in 1858, Cadenhead assumed control of the business and promptly changed its name to WM Cadenhead, a practice not uncommon at the time. He also wedded Duncan’s widow, which may not have been so common a practice. (Stay tuned for the next installment on Cadenheads: Part II)

Linkwood itself is a relatively old distillery, founded in 1821, south of Elgin, by Peter Brown, in what we call the Speyside region. It, like many of the other early distilleries in the region, started as a farm. Production began officially in 1825 with two small pot stills and a capacity of just 4,500L a year. This is 1/10th of what Glenlivet and Glenfiddich each are now able to produce in a day. Linkwood passed on to Brown’s son William in 1868, who demolished it in 1872 and built a brand new, more efficient, distillery on site. The new distillery was capable of producing 225,000L of whisky a year - making it a big fish for the time - but a minnow compared to the modern Scotch Whisky industry. William Brown passed away in 1898 just as the distillery was expanding again to a production capacity of 454,000L. This was also the height of a new boom in whisky production which was soon going to turn to bust.

The Brown family established the Linkwood-Glenlivet company to manage the business in 1898. In 1902 they brought Innes Cameron on board to run things. He became the managing director and largest shareholder in short order. On his passing in 1932 the Linkwood Distillery Company was sold to Scottish Malt Distillers, who in turn were bought by United Distillers of Scotland (the forbearers of Diageo). The distillery has re...

Continue Reading →




AND SO IT BEGINS: Day 1 of the 2018 KWM Whisky Advent

Posted on December 20, 2024

by Andrew

Welcome to Kensington Wine Market 2018 Whisky Advent

For the 5th straight year, we have curated and assembled our own bespoke Whisky Advent Calendar. We hope you will follow our journey of whisky discovery over the next 25 days. Each and every day of Advent we will describe and publish our own tasting notes for the whisky in question. We will also give you a background on the distillery and producer. You can follow along with us each day on the Kensington Wine Market Blog, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We encourage comments and feedback.

We are very proud of not just the contents of the 2018 Whisky Advent Calendar, but also its artwork and design. For that, we would like to thank Kensington Wine Market Alumni Jean-Paul Berube, who has created the artwork on all five annual editions of the Kensington Wine Market Whisky Advent Calendar. We will also introduce the Kensington Wine Market 2018 Whisky Advent Tree, which you’ll be seeing a lot of over the next few weeks!

I hope you enjoy the Kensington Wine Market 2018 Whisky Advent Calendar and agree that it is 25 Days of Dram Fine Whisky. Let the Whisky Advent-ure begin!



Picture courtesy of @frombarreltobottle

Day 1 - Super NikkaFor the first time in 5 years of curating and producing our own Whisky Advent Calendar, we are thrilled to be able to offer a Japanese whisky in the selection. Before we jump palate-first into the Super Nikka (and a discussion of Japanese whisky in general), let me first address why the whisky is in position 1. Primarily this is because we wanted to kick things off with something we have never been able to offer before. But that is not the only reason. The more technical reason is the bottle’s shape: it is not a great fit with the insert sizes of our physical calendar. We didn’t want you to struggle too hard getting it out, so we tucked it next to the glass in the largest opening!

If you are not familiar with Japanese whisky, it may come as a surprise to you that it is far from a new phenomenon. The Japanese have been producing whisky in the Scottish style (single malts, single grains, blends and blended malts) for nearly a century. But their love affair with whisky goes back even further than the opening of their first whisky distillery, Yamazaki, in 1923. The second distillery was opened in 1933 by Masataka Taketsuru, who was instrumental in the opening of Yamazaki. Masataka travelled to Scotland in 1919, where he studied chemistry and fell in love with, and married, a Scot named Rita Cowan. But most importantly he spent seven months immersed in the Scotch whisky industry, absorbing every detail he could. He took Rita and this hard-earned knowledge back to Japan and gave birth to the Japanese whisky industry.



(Above: Masataka Taketsuru and his wife, Ri...

Continue Reading →




Autumn Beer Arrivals!

Posted on November 13, 2018

Hello, hop-heads, porter pounders and stout sippers!
I hope October and Halloween treated you well and filled you with sugary treats, pumpkin spiced whatever, and Marzen aplenty! It looks like we’re back into the lower portion of the temperature scale, again. Honestly, after that fantastic October, I’ll take it! Most of my associates laughed at me when I said (with confidence) that we will absolutely see an Indian Summer this year. I said it all through the snowy madness of September and continued saying it through the doubts and incredulity of the naysayers. I don’t normally say “I told you so”, and I won’t here (that one is in quotes). I’m really just happy that we got that warm spell! Indian summer is my favourite time of year, so the prospect of not getting one was not great for me.
Along with the snow, and every single damned store just throwing Christmas decorations everywhere at the stroke of midnight, October 31st, news of some of this year's special Christmas buys has reached my ear, and though I’ll give some more details soon, I will mention the arrival of Wild Rose Cherry Porter (this week!), Belgian Christmas gift sets, St Bernardus abt 12 magnums(in 3 past vintages!!), and as I’ve mentioned before, Advent calendars (which are already in store now!). Again, I’ll write up another post outlining all this year's goodies, but for now, I want to go through all the fun beers you may have missed in October (no pumpkin here, I promise).



Founders Curmudgeon’s Better Half ($8.39 for a 350mL bottle)
Founders Barrel Runner ($4.19 for 350mL bottle)
Yellow Dog Retriever Golden Ale ($3.479 for a 473mL tall can)
Parallel 49 Troll Juice Kviek IIPA ($3.89 for a 473mL tall can)
Big Spruce Tag! You’re it IPA ($6.09 for a 473mL tall can)
Blindman Anniversary ale ($8.29 for a 500mL bottle)
Blindman Barrel-Aged Saison: Light ($12.19 for a 500mL bottle)
Blindman Barrel-Aged Saison: Dark ($12.19 for a 500mL bottle)
Alley Kat Polar night Chocolate Porter ($2.99 for a 350mL bottle)
Coronado Island Vibes Passionfruit Sour ($3.89 for a 355mL can)
Troubadour Blond ($5.19 for a 330mL bottle)
Troubadour Westkust ($5.49 for a 330mL bottle)

Boulevard Dark Truth Imperial Stout ($15.99 for a 4-pack of bottles)
Outcast Best-ish IPA ($19.29 for a 4-pack of tall cans)

Annex Ales Force Majeure (18.79 for a 4-pack of tall cans)

Four Winds Saison ($17.49 for a 4-pack of bottles)

I know it’s an impressive selection, you don’t have to tell me! Some of these will be gone somewhat shortly! The Blindman releases and Outcast namely will likely be gone by Novembers end, so If those sound tasty to you (and believe me they are), then hop on down and grab them!

So that’s about all for...

Continue Reading →




Newer Posts →

← Older Posts

Recent Posts
Archives

Categories