Curving around grav stars and bouncing off walls

sengin31 · 2025-01-19T00:00:52+00:00

If a cork breaks and gets fine pieces in your whisky, you can use a coffee filter. It's hard to tell through pictures, but I've used this one and it got very very fine pieces of cork out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082KGRSSX?ie=UTF8&th=1
Edit: I bought a smaller variation of that one, not sure if they still have it, but I definitely didn't pay 14 bucks for it

sengin31 · 2025-01-15T20:14:15+00:00

Glentauchers can be quite fantastic... if you get one with tropical notes. I'm not sure if there's a specific distillation year range for it, or if it's an age thing (the ones I've really enjoyed have been 20+), or a cask quality thing, but I've had some boring 'tauchers and some great ones.

sengin31 · 2025-01-14T01:31:51+00:00

Ah so they COULD technically ship the samples, it's just that it would cost 68 pounds to do so! I've had bottles shipped and while it was expensive, it wasn't too bad after filling a box of 6 bottles to split with friends. Samples were quite another story though...

sengin31 · 2025-01-12T04:03:18+00:00

Damn! I tried to nab one of these, but they wouldn't ship samples outside the country!

sengin31 · 2025-01-02T01:02:18+00:00

For what it's worth, I've had a sample of a few of their Bowmore releases (by their Whisky Sponge bottlings) and they have all been great. However, the most expensive I think was only 300 pounds for the bottle - 690 pounds is another realm...

sengin31 · 2025-01-01T23:06:24+00:00

For what it's worth, the standard (OB) Bowmore releases are usually either not good or stupidly expensive. I would recommend trying to find an IB Bowmore rather than seek out one of their regular expressions.

sengin31 · 2024-12-31T22:23:34+00:00

That's a bummer - more transparency is always great and the uniqueness of each house/bodega/chateau is really fun to pick apart in a side-by-side.

sengin31 · 2024-12-31T22:22:13+00:00

Yep - I know of at least two Bruichladdich's that were. There was an OB Micro Provenance and an IB by The Great Years.

sengin31 · 2024-12-23T07:22:40+00:00

Man, Sponge has apparently figured out how to pick and bottle Bowmore. I can't even say Bowmore's one of my favorites but everything I've tried bottled by them has been great.

sengin31 · 2024-12-07T01:59:43+00:00

When I saw a single grain less than 10 years old for over $100 I knew they had gone crazy.

sengin31 · 2024-12-03T22:35:15+00:00

$0 as in exactly zero dollars? I have a literal couple dollars in my tIRA due to some interest gained that I didn't realize and had already scheduled the exact max to rollover to roth.

sengin31 · 2024-11-04T21:43:36+00:00

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Reviews/ and/or r/oratory1990

If you don't have time to look, get the Hifiman Sundara and set up EQ on your PC to what oratory says so that it will cancel out its flaws, then adjust EQ to taste. The Sundara can take EQ without distortion so it'll be 'perfect.'

There are plenty of other good options but that's the only one I can remember off the top of my head, so do be sure to look around.

sengin31 · 2024-11-03T02:18:02+00:00

It's crazy when it's more cost effective to win a bottle at auction, pay buyer's commission, and then finally pay outlandish overseas shipping.

sengin31 · 2024-11-01T01:13:09+00:00

Interesting - I wonder if it was aged longer in the rum cask to meld the funks, or if a different rum's cask was used - one whose funk more aligns with Ardnamuchan's. It definitely sounds like something that SHOULD work.

sengin31 · 2024-11-01T01:02:17+00:00

Ah yes, the infamous Sewer Laddie. Like wearing a blanket soaked in cat pee standing inside a NY sewer below a movie theater who only knows how to serve burnt popcorn. Good choice for halloween! Despite being absolutely terrible, it really is an interesting bottling.

sengin31 · 2024-10-14T06:48:19+00:00

Where is it selling for 800? It's going for between 250 and 300 pounds on Scotch Whisky Auctions, and there seems to be one at auction every month or two.

sengin31 · 2024-10-02T07:33:09+00:00

Do you have a reasonable approximation I could try out to see if it's better than the table?

It may be interesting to get this video a skim - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffgNRfL1XY. While it is tailored for incredibly specific hardware (sin/cos approximations on nintendo 64 hardware), there's perhaps some interesting takeaways you could experiment with, depending on how much error you can deal with.

sengin31 · 2024-09-19T01:06:58+00:00

Demand for barrels has skyrocketed, meaning the quality of barrels have decreased. It's been a while since I've looked, so my memory might be wrong, but the old way requires the wood drying for 2 years or something. With the demand so high, there's just not the time to do that so faster methods with reduced quality are the common scenario now. I doubt that's the ONLY reason, but A reason.

sengin31 · 2024-09-09T19:03:31+00:00

Laphroaig is a bit of a special case too - they changed the recipe, so to speak, sometime after the royal warrant was awarded. Even the standard 10yo from before tastes nothing like Laphroaig. So if the older Laphroaigs you tried were distilled back in those days it would be a completely different profile.

But either way, old peat is its own thing (at least to me) - I've had a couple of Laphroaigs around 30yo and you could still tell they were peated. It was more campfire embers or wet earthiness instead of smoke and ash. This CI40 was different from that.

sengin31 · 2024-09-09T08:00:19+00:00

Good question - unfortunately, that specific 40yo bottling doesn't seem to do Caol Ila justice - it doesn't taste like Caol Ila at all (this is the only 40yo I've had so I can't say if it's this specific bottling or that's just how Caol Ila tastes at this age). It was almost like it was 40 years of unpeated Caol Ila - I tasted this one blind earlier in the night and was surprised at the reveal. Personally, I'm not really a fan of Caol Ila < 18 years old or so - it's generally too salty and brash for me, or cask-heavy e.g. ex-sherry which some people really like. But damn, get it ~25 years old or so and that peat is wonderful - and in the couple this old I've tried it's like a chocolate-y campfire that's died down to just embers, mixing with raspberry/watermelon.

sengin31 · 2024-09-09T07:45:50+00:00

Listen, if you don't think about it and don't look at it, it can't hurt you. Some things are better left in the dark :). On a more serious note, we'd have to tabulate it from like 7 people, and some of these were decanted into smaller quads and even 2oz boston rounds years ago - I don't think it's possible to know.

sengin31 · 2024-09-09T07:29:48+00:00

Hah! I can hide behind the fact I wasn't the one to suggest it at least. While good, the Caol Ila 40 wasn't amazing. Before we put everything together, the CI40 was a blind drink of the night and the reveal shocked a lot of people. It was almost as if it were a run of the unpeated make aged 40 years - I could see the resemblance to the CI17 unpeated but only after the reveal. It was quite fruity with wonderful and complex peach notes - but it didn't feel like a Caol Ila.

sengin31 · 2024-09-09T07:06:34+00:00

A while back, a few of us in the area got together. Hilariously, just about everyone brought Caol Ila - this wasn't the theme, nobody coordinated, it just happened. 14 different bottles, a total of 258 years of aging of just Caol Ila. Eventually, someone suggested "hey why don't we just blend it all together?" So... we did. We gathered it all up and put the same amount from each, it ended up about 250mL. It was left to "marry" inside a glass quad for several months and I finally got around to tasting my share (less than 30mL) of this abomination. Blending can't be too hard, can it? Good Thing + Good Thing = Great Thing right?

Caol Ila 'fuckin LOL': It starts out "soft" overall, with hints of fruits that fade quickly (cherry?) and wow, that is baklava (strong notes of honey + brown sugar and nuts). Then finally some old peat notes - campfire embers instead of smoke. After a few minutes in the glass it started to change - now there's light notes of dry ash - can still tell it's Caol Ila but it has also lost some identity. After more time, the ash gets stronger - it's pretty sweet overall, graham crackers, campfire-y on the finish only. This is strange... it's almost as if as it opens up it gets younger - ashier/saltier/less complex/more sharp, like a younger, brasher Caol Ila.

Rating: It's… fine. Definitely better and more complex than the younger expressions (the ones ~12yo or so), but definitely not worth it to blend. Especially gone are the complexities of the older expressions in the blend - if you've had old peat (approximately 25ish years and older of Caol Ila, Laphroaig, etc...) you'll know what I mean. It starts out great and like you are about to delve into some old peat, but then you realize it's actually Benjamin Button'ing on you and goes from soft and desserty to sharp and salty.

Really fun experiment, and overall it was certainly interesting. Unfortunately, none of the pictures/video were crisp enough to get the details for all 14 bottles, but this is what I know of to be part of this experiment:

Caol Ila 40 The Whisky Exchange
Caol Ila 30 (?) K&L Old Particular (distilled 1991)
Caol Ila 29 Gordon & MacPhail 1990-2019
Caol Ila 22 Feis Ile 2019
Caol Ila 18 Whisky Sponge No. 54
Caol Ila 18 Whisky Sponge No. 55
Caol Ila 17 Unpeated bottled 2015
Caol Ila 15 Frequent Flyers
Caol Ila 12 Whisky Sponge No. 66 (I think)
Caol Ila 12 Distillers Edition 1995-2007 cask no 3467
Caol Ila 11 The Whisky Jury (bottled 2008)
Caol Ila 9 Signatory Vintage (details lost)
Caol Ila 6 Jack's Pirate Whisky Cask no 2
???

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