Tuesday 24 April 2012

Whisky Discovery #75

SMWS 36.56 22 Year Old (53.6% abv, Single Cask)
Speyside Single Malt Whisky

Club bottling, not for general sale

SMWS 36.56
The first dram of the day at the recent Whisky Lounge Fest London enjoyed at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society Stand. I had a second dram of this when we visited the London Distillery stand too.

The label describes this as 'A magic carpet ride' and their website says it is a 'Tasting Panel High Scorer'. I checked their website when I got home from the show and saw that all bottles had been sold

Distilled on 9th March 1989 and aged for 22 years in a refill ex-bourbon hogshead cask, which was bottled at cask strength and yielded just 269 bottles.

Sam told me that this was a Speyside Malt and came from the Benrinnes Distillery. (The SMWS don't publicise the distillery, although it is easy to find out from a number of websites.Each distillery is given a number which is the first part of the bottle code, and the second part is the cask number, i.e this whisky was from the 56th cask they had bottled from the 36th distillery)

The label read:

On the nose, sappy, leafy, green fruit freshness gave way to toffee, malt, sweet tobacco and the aromatic essences of dried orange-peel, balsamic and honeysuckle. 
The palate was a mouth-watering explosion of oriental, exotic flavours – sherbet, blood orange, pineapple, sabayon, sugar-coated fennel seeds, tobacco and spice. The reduced nose took us on a magic carpet ride to a Bedouin tent on the desert’s edge – jasmine, sultanas, baklava, cumin, vellum and exotic fruits. The reduced palate, with spices, liquorice, elderflower and Turkish delight, did everything a twenty-two year old whisky should do. The original distillery was washed away in the 1829 floods. 

Drinking tip: The perfect dram for watching shooting stars - or whenever you need to escape from the world.

All very imaginative, but it was a cracking way to start the show and I really need to consider the benefits of becoming a member carefully.

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