Ballechin SFTC Bourbon 12 year 53%

Tasting Notes

Andrew's Tasting Note

Nose: creamy, ashy, and piney, with honey and fruit; creamed honey, clotted cream, and marmite; ashy peat and green wood smoke; melons and apricots.

Palate: sweet, fruity, and ashy with more green-piney smoke; more creamed honey and clotted cream; salted licorice candies; tarry-muddy peat, creosote-soaked logs, and herbaceous vegetal notes; big, round, and malty; the fruits finally fight their way through with a burst of Five Alive Fruit Punch.

Finish: long, coating, and warming with fading honey, tar, and oak.

Comment: bright, tarry, and fruity, peatheads will love this one!

Distillery

Originally written by Evan for blog posts related to KWM's 2020 Whisky Calendar.

Edradour distillery is located in Perthshire and is one of the more picturesque distilleries around – not just because of the buildings and their history and the whisky they make, but also due to the landscape it all resides on. The Edradour Burn is a stream/river that flows through the distillery property, which itself resides on a gently sloping hill. This view is especially impressive in the morning, with the fog not yet having dissipated entirely.

When you take in the entire scene, it is incredibly picturesque, on par for me view-wise with visiting Maker’s Mark Distillery in Kentucky. One big difference between the two though, is that Maker’s Mark goes through pains to show you how authentic and quaint and different from the rest it is. This is nice, but it is kind of like a person bragging about how humble they are. It is fun if they get the irony of it all and are intentionally saying it as a joke, but not if they are being earnest to the point of hypocrisy.

The picturesque Edradour Distillery - with another group starting on the tour to eventually become evangelized like the rest.

Edradour doesn’t seem to brag or boast much. It just is what it is: a small distillery (well, technically two distilleries now I suppose..) owned by Signatory, which itself a small(ish) independent bottler. Both are located in the beautiful scenery of Perthshire in the Highlands. That is what makes nearly every visitor become an ambassador for the brand.

Edradour Distillery produces both unpeated and peated malt. Edradour 10 Year Old, which is arguably the flagship bottle for Edradour, is unpeated in style. When the distillery runs a peated batch, they call the resulting spirit Ballechin. It was given this name by Edradour’s owner Andrew Symington chose for its heavily peated runs of spirit. The Ballechin name was previously used for another distillery that used to reside nearby Edradour, though it closed down for the last time in 1927.

For Ballechin, Edradour Distillery uses malted barley peated to about 50PPM. The first runs of this heavily peated style happened back in 2003, and after a series of limited runs with the Ballechin name attached, the Ballechin 10 Year Old was officially introduced as a regular bottling in 2014.

Another interesting tidbit that I just hinted at in my post for the Edradour 10: The Edradour distillery currently has TWO stillhouses on site. Both are operational as well. The new stillhouse, which is classified as Edradour no2 when the spirit is put into cask, is in a building that also doubles as a warehouse.