Never head of Strathmore? Me neither. So this will be my first Strathmore. Apparantly it was a distillery known as North of Scotland, operational between 1957 and 1980. And while they experimented with…

Judging by the dark color of what is in my glass, the spirit of this Miltonduff slept on a rather active sherry cask. First fill, most likely. Anyway, it is young: distilled in 2004 and bottled after 11…

An Octave is a small cask – about an eight of a regular hogshead – and in this case, according to the label, it was a reconstructed ex-sherrywood octave cask. A mouthful. It was released especially for…

C&S Dram is a German independent bottler run by Andrea Cammineci (the name reveals his Italian roots), who started out as a wine merchant in 2005. Let us try his Miltonduff 1989 from a sherry hogshead…

The reason why Miltonduff is not very well known as a single malt has everything to do with the fact that owners Chivas use the lion’s share of production for blends like Ballantine’s, Teacher’s and Old…

I remember trying this malt for the first time at the whisky festival in Ghent in 2014, but I was unable to score a sample at the time. I rectified this at another festival last May. And now I can sit…

BYOB-C (say ‘biopsy’) is the acronym for Bring Your Own Bottle Club, a Belgian club of which the principle of their tastings is in their name. They have just released their very own bottling and aimed…

By now we know that 1997 was a great year for Clynelish. This one was distilled just a little earlier and bottled by Signatory in their beautiful decanters. It matured on a refill sherry butt that yie…

The Nectar, a Belgian bottler with a very strong reputation with regards to cask selection, bottled this Clynelish 1995 for the German market, albeit some 5 years ago. I sometimes get the question why…

My friend Peter visited the distillery last February and was kind enough to bring me a bottle of the current cask that is available in the ‘Bottle Your Own’ program. It is quite a young Auchentoshan,…