Five glasses on the table. One, two, three, four, five. There's only four of us. You didn't bring your vast collection of Glencairn glasses? Yeah. Or a sampling, a smattering of from, selections from. Actually, every single one of these scotches was tasted in my basement with some people last Saturday night. I'm still washing all the Glencairn glasses. Hey, welcome back to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Pat from the Specialty Spirits sales and Marketing Department. Got a few people here with me today. I'm Jenna, I'm with the Communications Department. I'm Chris, I do wine related things, among other things at Binny's. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. Pat, you only brought 10 bottles this time. I'm waiting on a couple more to ship in that we're going back and forth on Price On. How many handpicked scotches do you anticipate that we buy this year? What we buy this year and what ships this year are two different numbers but what we should have in stores by the end of the year is at least a dozen. respectable. It's been a really long time since we've done just handpicked scotches. Maybe a quick refresher on the process here. Brett goes there. Did he go there? Yeah, we go there. We'll go to Scotland, usually just once a year, sometimes maybe twice. We're generally there for a week. We visit as many distilleries as we can. That pace is, we attempt three a day. And then on some of those visits, if we go to an independent bottler, that usually means we only get one distiller and then the bottler a day. Because when we go to an independent bottler, we usually spend a day literally crawling around casks in the warehouse and just pointing at them and saying, can we try this? Can we try this? Can we try this? For a solid decade now, Signatory has not allowed us to try their 1991 Lagervulin in a saw turn cask. We keep asking though, but they won't let us try it. It's just over there evaporating. Well, what is the reasoning? That's one of the owner's retirement casks is what we're told. Well, the owner's retirement cask. They call that little thing a thief for a reason. Yeah. That's a good point. But we don't want to spoil the relationship we have with these guys. So we've carefully cultivated these relationships with some of these independent Scotch bottlers for many years now, Brett specifically going back over 20 years. So we get access to some pretty cool things. And they know us, we know them. They'll give us a list of, you know, we have certain lots from these certain distilleries, anything you'd be curious to taste. And then we'll, sure, we'd love to taste one of those Bunahovans and, okay, it's pretty good. Do you have more from that? And then we might taste three or four from that same lot and trying to narrow down one we have. So when we go over there, we'll taste many, many, many casks, narrow it down to a field of usually around 30 candidates. And then once we're in a clear head with clean pallets, stateside will taste through those 30 samples and narrow it down to what we'll pick from that visit. I mean, I really think that these personal relationships are what make this so unique. I mean, you guys are going out there, you've known them for years and they know you and they know you're serious. And they know like what kind of like gets us excited about some of these things. And they know we're not just looking for just like, what's gonna be, you know, the darkest colored cherry caps that you have. Not that those can't be good, but oftentimes they tend to be, I think, a bit one dimensional and boring. But I don't think that kind of mutual respect between retailer and producer or aging signatory model exists widely in the world. I think you guys have really created something amazing here. And I do believe that the Brophy family crest does say mutual respect on it. All right. And Chris gets the buzzer for qualifying the word unique. What did I say? More unique. That's Greg's ultimate pet peeve. It's my own and I know better. I will say, these picks- I am the most unique person in this room. Chris, I very much said a whole mother earlier today. these picks specifically are actually from last fall's visit. And they got stuck on a ship in the ship global shipping crisis for many months. So they got bottled up, they got put on a ship, they got sent to New Jersey. They hung out waiting for a dock in New Jersey. Eventually the ship just turned around and went to Savannah, Georgia to drop off some other crap. And then it hung around in the southeastern United states for a while at a couple of ports. And eventually it got back up to New Jersey. And finally our container was unloaded. So now in October, one year, almost one year later, we're actually have them on the shelves. Got stuck in a Middle Eastern canal for a while. So I'm going to take you through these guys generally in order of just lightness to heaviness. And that could be by both smokiness or just general flavor profile. Do you think that a description of the signatory model is in order? Do we go over that? I mean, do people understand? Well, OK, so they're an independent bottler. So in Scotland, it's a little weird in that all these distilleries that make whisky also trade and sell their whisky between each other. Signatory is also the company itself also owns the Eddardower Distillery in the Highlands of Scotland in a town called Pitlock Creek. I don't believe they're selling any Eddardower to anybody else right now. But because they're a distillery, they do get some access to some some of these casts out on the open market like that. And they've been doing it for a long time too. Like you couldn't just go there and start an independent bottler now and expect to get access to these kind of things. Right. I mean, the stock they have is mind boggling. Oh, it's crazy. And so anyway, so Signatory Vintage Whiskey Company is their independent bottling arm of the Eddardower Distillery. Right. I just wanted to fine point on that because I feel like people think, you know, the distillery, you know, distills the whiskey ages it sells it. Yeah, no, no, this is, this is. So some of these casts, they buy as new makes, some age at the Distillery of Origin, many age at the warehouse at Eddardower. Some they buy when they have a much advanced age on them. You know, it really depends what's out there on the market. I'm going to say one thing before we lose all of the bourbon nerds who downloaded it because it's a spirits episode, but may not stick around because it's about Scotch. If you're not drinking these, you're missing out. these are some of the most interesting and complex whiskeys I've ever tasted consistently from you guys. It's a real grown up thing to do. Yeah. Not to mention the strong, strong bond between the bourbon and Scotch industries. If you're drinking bourbon, you might want to check out Scotch because it has such a strong influence on the flavor profile of Scotch whisky. Something you'll probably hear me say more than once a day is some of these things when they're in a bourbon cask. It's for the benefit of the Scotch too. It lets the distillate do the talking. So much flavor in Scotch comes from the casks, but when you let it just sit in a once or twice used bourbon cask, you really more so taste and understand what that distillery is all about. Also, just grow up and stop drinking only one thing. Yeah, right. High five, Jenna. You gotta get those weird, acidic white wines we were drinking the other week. Right? All right, let's use that to segue into this first one, because there's an interesting barrel treatment here. It's D-Char Re-Char. Yeah, so the first one we're going to taste, bottled by Signatory, it's an 11-year-old Mannochmore, and it was aged in a D-Char Re-Char hogshead. So a hogshead, of course, is about 10% bigger than a bourbon barrel. They take the heads off, they add staves to it, make it a little bigger. It's 250 liters, it's the standard barrel size in Scotland. It doesn't specify bourbon. Judging by the color, I would almost certainly guarantee this is a bourbon hogshead. It's a pale straw. Yeah. This is 11 years old. All of these are cast-strength, by the way. This is 57.8%. Mannochmore is one of the classic types of distillers we look for in this in that it's a distillery otherwise unavailable in the United states. Well, Mannochmore was always my nickname whenever I went off my Lithium. I know. I was going to go with, I'm going to pop some dirt. But yours was better. I mean, yeah, Macklemore was a thing for a year, 10 years ago, so thanks, Craig. Mannochmore, big malt factory owned by Diageo. It was built in 1971. It actually shares a campus with Glenn Lossi, I think. They make two slightly different styles of malt, though Glenn Lossi is going to be a little grassier and a little more citrus, as I would usually describe it. Mannochmore still has a ton of fruit, so it has a very long fermentation, which produces a lot of fruit. This is the primary malt that gets used for a blend called Hague, which we don't even have in the United states, really. There was like a Hague Club thing that David Beckham was involved with at some point. In that stupid hexagonal bottle. Yeah, no, it was like a big square blue bottle. Either way, it was super dumb. So what do you think of this Mannochmore? This is also exceptionally reasonably priced. I think we're selling this for $60. Yeah, $69.99. How many bucks? Oh, it's so good. Really kind of sweet and honeyed up front. Yeah. That's the first thing that really pops out and certainly plenty of fruit. It's like honey drizzled apples. Pears. Right. Pears. The little green pears, the crispy ones. Palm fruit. Somebody painted an orchard with honey. Yeah. It's so fresh and lively. It's beautiful. It's very bright. Yeah. But it still has, you can tell it's got some of that barrel character there. There's still like this twang of sweet, fresh vanilla in there. It's great whiskey, man. I really love this. This has been a showstopper when I've been tasting these out with staff for the last couple of weeks. They're not a ton of this. Because the hoghead's a little bigger, but there's only 302 bottles of this and then it's gone forever. That's crazy because this is delicious. Yeah. It's very good. Probably a good point to talk about how these are bottled at cask strength, which means this is screamingly alcoholic too. I don't think so. I mean, it's hot, but it's not over the top. Yeah. 57.8. That's pretty standard for a Scotch of this age. Scotch normally gets filled at around 62 percent alcohol. It loses alcohol as it ages in Scotland typically. It would be very rare for a Scotch to gain proof. Versus in bourbon where things tend to get- They gain proof, yeah. Yeah, hotter over time as the water evaporates away. So, molecularly, alcohol is lighter than water. Alcohol should evaporate out first, but it's cooler and it's very damp in Scotland. So, because a lot of times the air is so saturated with moisture as is, even if it was warmer, the alcohol would still evaporate out first. Man, this is so good. It's so fresh. Very good, right? Yeah. And I mean, there's no denying that there's a lot of alcohol in here, but I don't feel it as hot per se, but it's very present. sometimes you swallow and the alcohol is like a burn. It feels like you could breathe fire. Yeah, this one did not have that effect. This carries it well, but you're under no illusion that it's not really high in alcohol. So the next one we're going to talk about here is another signatory. I have a bunch of signatories and then only one Gordon and McPhail right now. So this is signatory Mortlach. This is a 14-year-old, and Mortlach, of course, has long been a favorite of the whiskey hotline. It's been a whiskey nerds kind of hidden gem forever. Was not sold in the US as a single malt for a long time. It is now though, they have a 12-year and a 16-year and a 20-year that you can find somewhat. They've been struggling to keep those in stock though. All right, 12 is pretty great. 12 is great. Yeah, we've had the 12 on the podcast before. Yeah, I love that. So this 14-year, what do we got for cask treatment on this? This is just as matured in a hogshead. It's got a little more color on it. It could be a sherry hogshead. It could be mixed staves. I don't know. So this 14-year Mortlach, single hogshead, 227 bottle outturn, 57.2% alcohol. So again, pretty much on the nose for a whiskey of this age. Mortlach, known for a couple quirks of distillation. It's generally known to be a big meaty whiskey because it's got big fat squat stills. It's distilled 2.81 times. That's because their stills are different sizes and they also include part of the distillate, sees a third distillation in a very tiny still called the Wee Witchie. It is also condensed through a worm tub instead of a modern shell and tube copper condenser. So when you condense something in a worm tub, picture the fake logo on the Tito's vodka where you see a pot still and then that squiggly thing coming. That squiggly thing is the worm. It sits in a bath of cold water and so when the vapor hits that, it condenses through the worm and then you collect your liquid. The thing with a worm tub is it condenses the vapor incredibly fast. So fast that it is kind of minimizing the copper contact of the liquid itself. So it tends to leave some more sulfuric notes in the whiskey and that adds to like the meatiness of the character of the whiskey. In low levels, it's like savory, right? yes. I would not describe Mortlach is generally sulfuric unlike the next whiskey or two whiskies from here we'll try. But this Mortlach is kind of out of character, I think. I love the lower dump by the way. It's like the first four minutes of Skyrim right there. That's the best part of Skyrim. When you're sitting on the cart. Yeah. Hey, you're awake. Okay. Let's nerdy. Signatory Scotch. Let's nerdy. Anyway, the reason I say this Mortlach is kind of out of spec, this is an incredibly bright and ripe and fruity Mortlach, and I don't find it to be particularly meaty and chewy. I think it's grainy. You can get some Mortlachs to be. I think it's grainy. I think it's toasty like graham crackers. I feel like it has kind of a weight on the palate, like a lush, viscous mouthfeel. For sure. I mean, known for that as a distillery. This is gorgeous. We always do a lot of Mortlach casks. Those who know, know and tend to snap them up often by the case. It does help that signatory now is in six bottle cases instead of 12, so we've spread these out to a lot more stores than we have been able to in the past. So almost all Binny's has some representation of these. This is $99.99, 100 bones. It's interesting because I was a huge fan of that 12, and I can see the family resemblance, but this is a very different whisky, very different. The 12 has more Sherry influence for sure. Isn't distillery bottled Mortlach getting really expensive? So when they first launched it, it was way overpriced and then they came back and it was less expensive. But they did recently take a price increase this year. So the 12 year on the shelf went from 45 to $60, I believe. Which 60 is in the middle for 12 year olds, but on the lower end of the middle for 12 year old single malt price now. At 45, it was stupid, I mean, that was so important. 45 is great. There's not many 12 year single malts available for $45 or less anymore. And the quality was just was impeccable. Yeah, I guess my Scotch price brain is calibrated to pre-pandemic, pre-tariff world. All right, whisky number three. First Fill Bourbon Cask. Yeah, this is a 13-year-old old Pulteney. Pulteney is a distillery on the far northeast coast of Scotland in a town called Wick. One of their logos, trademarks, I'm not sure what it is, is the maritime malt. Most of these were distilled when I was still in high school. You know, f**k you, Jenna. So, there is Pulteney here. First Fill, Bourbon Barrel, which again, about the smallest barrel, smaller than a hog's head. So, 200 liters, 220, yeah, 200 liters. And this is only 198 bottles of this, 57.7% alcohol. So, back to Pulteney being the maritime malt, it sees some seaside character. That is in here, but I think this is a bit toned down versus some of the Pulteneys you might find on the shelf. One of the things I really love about the Pulteney Distillery, one of my favorite distilleries, is that sailing tang to it. That's here, but it's restrained. Having no experience really with this distillery, that was one of the first things that jumped out at me, was kind of this like sea breeze note in the nose. Yeah, it's fresh. And I like it because it's got a lot of that kind of butter toffee caramel character. yes, exactly. With that bit of salinity, I always describe to customers as a saltwater taffy type character. Salt and caramel. It's a flavor that, yeah, salt and caramel. It's a flavor a lot of people can relate to. There's some vanilla too. And a lot of people enjoy. Vanilla underneath it. Well, First Fill bourbon barrel, it's going to have typical bourbon barrel notes. Yeah, I think the wood is prominent. Yeah, it's lovely. It's approachable. I think this is a good introduction to some of the wilder flavors of Scotch for a bourbon drinker, because it's got the familiar wood notes, but there's certainly unfamiliar character in it, especially when you talk about that maritime influence. Yeah, I think that's really cool. I like the way it floats above the fruit and the weightier notes of the oak. It not only smells like a sea breeze, but it behaves like one too. It's just kind of, yeah. If I had been given this the first time I tried Scotch, I probably wouldn't have spent a few years hating Scotch so much. Well, somebody probably dumped you into a Isla Scotch. Oh, yeah. Right off the bat. What was our price on that Pulteney? I believe it was $89.99. $89, okay. By the way, you keep saying Maritime, but oftentimes when you think of Maritime Scotch, you think of Isla, you think of Pete, this does not have any of that. No, no Pete at all. Different character. Maritime. Brine, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, salinity. The character of the ocean, which I think is the reason you don't maybe associate that with Isla is because of all the Pete, it's harder to pick something like that. In my admittedly limited experience with a lot of scotches, that peediness can just on my palate overpowers like anything else. It takes a long time to get used to that. Well, that's why we're tasting those last ones. All right. You know it would be good. Tonight, Jenna is going to try to enjoy a nice frozen pizza. But all she's going to be tasting is moss. Is it burnt vegetables? Vegetation? I don't know, I would pair that with a nice 100 year old bog butter. Oh my God, how is this not the first time that bog butter has come up on the show? Moving on to whiskey number four here. This is a 12-year-old malt, also a signatory from Craigellachie. Craigellachie, another long-time hotline favorite. Now available in the states, they have a really nice 13-year on the shelves, and then a 13-year Arminac finish that we recently tasted on the podcast, also on the shelf. This 12-year-old is a First Fill bourbon cask, 210 bottle outturn, 58.7% alcohol. I've been saying Craigellachie like an a** this whole time. Well, because you were confusing it with Glenellachie. Yeah, you're right, I was. One year we did a cask of Craigellachie and a cask of Glenellachie, and it really confused the s**t I was saying. Scotland's kind of stupid. Yeah, Scotland's. Hey, you take that back. All your locks and... So we've been over the Craigellachie thing before, where I talked about how they paid that maltster to keep the malt kiln open with the fuel. Fired kiln and all that stuff. So quick refresher. It tends to be pretty sulfuric in character, both because of the malt and because of the giant fat stills and very fast worm tub condensing. I think I get more sulfur on this one. You pick up sulfur, Chris? Yeah. But I also think that smelled from an altitude, there's really nice kind of delicate floral notes too. And there's a lot of fruit in this too. This is definitely on the milder side as far as sulfur and a Craigellachie goes, like very mild. I'm very sensitive to it and I think this is mild. I don't really notice any sulfur. I mean, maybe that's part of what gives you a banana because like a little bit of banana is a little bit of sulfur. And this is like baby food banana, like smushed up super ripe banana. I really like the texture. It's kind of viscous and unctuous. That's pretty delicious actually. It's a really great whiskey. Splash in my eye. yikes. The old eye cleanse. You're right though, the viscosity there is really cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's nice. And adds to the body and the richness of the whole thing. And I believe this one's on the shelf for $90 as well. Let me double check. Well, that definitely looks markedly darker. I'm sorry, this Craigellachie, $79.99. Solid deal for that. Not bad. All right, this next one's a real treat. There has to be some barrel story here, because it's dark. This is a First Fill Sherry Butt. So we actually have a fair bit of this. This was a 612 barrel, I think, 612 bottle outturn. This is a 15 year Glenn Livet First Fill Sherry Butt. This is on the shelf for $150, a little more expensive here. What's our proof there, Jenna? 63.8%. 63.8%. So this could have been filled at a higher strength than normal. Occasionally, malt distilleries will fill barrels at a higher strength than they normally do. That's pretty high. With the intent to sell the stock off to blenders or other people. So whatever, their loss, our gain, because nothing wrong with having a little stronger proof for you, because by the time you add some water, you're getting a little more whiskey for your buck. Jim's gonna have to do another mashup of all the times butt is said on this episode. Butt. I already laughed when I saw butt on the label. Well, we got more butts to taste here too. First fill butt. Yeah. Okay. So this one has a distinct note that I picked up immediately that as a wine drinker, I associate with corked wine, but it's not, I think it's from the wood, but it's a particularly weird high grainy kind of wood. Yeah, I know. Jenny, you go. Right? So the first thing I was thinking was spice notes. So I get like cinnamon, things like that. Yeah. I would describe it as more of that kind of sweet brown spice spectrum, oiled leather, pretty classic Sherry age Scotch notes in this. This is like your grandfather's single malt. Like this is old school classic old Scotch flavors. Like there's leather and there's butter toffee and there's baking spice and there is some fruit, but it's like the dark dried fruit. It's the fig and the raisin, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I like that. I love the leathery note. Yeah, it's this is a lot of the flavors that I'm looking for in an really old mature Scotch whiskey. The characteristics that Greg's talking about, I notice like right away on my palate, but then that like just fades into exactly what you guys are talking about into those. There's so much dark fruit. Spicy notes. Yeah, and then fruit and. A lot of wood on the finish though. There's some serious tan in here. And a bit of sulfur too, a little bit. Fruitcake, heavy weighty, the candied fruit of a fruitcake. Christmas pudding. Christmas cake, I was going to say. Christmas cake isn't something that people in America can really relate to, but it's that like heavily spiced, heavily fruited weighty cake. Yeah, it invokes the holidays for me. Yeah, for sure. A booze soaked holiday as a good Christmas cake. Isn't it? A rich mahogany filled library with many leather bound books. This is exactly where you want to be drinking it. It would be maybe a fire going. Somebody else cooking you a wild grouse. It really is like cooking you a wild grouse. Should I bring some smoked pheasant in one day to pair with something on a podcast? Reem sells it seasonally in the fall usually. What a segue. He just loves to plug this meat store that he goes to. So if you thought that was a heavily sherry delight. So next we have our Gordon and MacPhail bottle. The one Gordon and MacPhail on the table. Yep. And this is one of the fancier Gordon and MacPhail bottles that I've seen. It's a very heavy bottle. Medallion and all. Oh yeah, big gold medallion, wooden tops of the cork. It is expensive. This is a $300 bottle. This is a 1996 vintage 25-year-old Tamdhu. This was matured in a refill sherry hog's head. So they took a sherry, but they recuperated down to a 250-liter hoggy. This outturned 206 bottles at 53.7% alcohol. What a sentence. Right? That was pretty good. A hoggy. Yeah. Jenna, what grade were you in? 1996. Oh baby. Let's see. I was like in kindergarten. I was five years old. That is putting so much into perspective for me. In such a horrible way, I can't even stand it. I still had nap time. I was definitely watching Fox's outstanding X-Men cartoon on Saturday mornings just in a pair of underwear on the floor of the living room. Yeah. This smells like an old Sherry'd whiskey. It is because it's an old Sherry'd whiskey. I think this whiskey was done a lot of favors by being in a refill Sherry, but if this was a First Fill Sherry after 25 years, it would be one-dimensional and just dried fruit leather. There's more pop to this though because the wood didn't completely overtake the malt. Yeah. I think that's really an important point. The longer you're going to keep something in wood like this, it's perhaps wiser to have a barrel that's been used more prior. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I love that this has like the clove spiked orange kind of thing. Yeah. There's citrus in this that you don't expect. You look at the color and it looks like iced tea or soda pop or something. It is dark fruit. It is very dark. And so there's a ton of dark fruit in it. But then there's this bright, vibrant citric note that really cuts through it. Greg would say it gives it some lift. And it makes for a really balanced, interesting drinking experience. And there's a lot to unpack here. Like I was going back to this over and over and over when I was writing the tasting notes for the website. And it's just like every time I went back, I was smelling and tasting something different. Yeah, it's buttery. It's spicy. It's there's so much going on here. Wow. It's a it's just it's a real gem of a Scotch. And of note, this is actually in a 750 mL when pretty much all the other ones we're tasting today are 700 mLs. I feel like you owe everybody a little little little airplane. I don't know you. So it's so new as of this year, 700 milliliter size is legal in the United states forever. The United states and Canada have 750 mLs. The rest of the world, the 700s. So as soon as we allow the 700, you're going to see a lot of Scotch switch to 700 mLs. If any liquor doesn't have to run two different sizes in a bottling line, they're going to choose not to. Of course. Let the chaos ensue. Yeah. We're not trying to stretch things far. This is purely an efficiency standpoint from small producers. Again, Johnson & Johnson just made the hole on the shampoo bottle bigger. Would that be the shampoo aroma hole? Aroma hole. So not even doing this justice by not gushing about it because this, I wish I could take this and set it to the side and have it be dessert and come back to it. Because we still have four more spirits, but this is probably the tops for complexity and elegance. And it's not precious, you know? It's weighty and it has a body and it has lift. It's a 25-year-old, perfectly shared, ultra-mature Scotch whiskey at Cast Strength for $300. Do you know what a bottle of 25-year-old, very lovely, shared 46% alcohol or maybe if only 43% alcohol, 25-year-old McAllen costs now? 10 times less. Yeah, about. Yeah, you're out the door with tax, slightly over $3,000. jesus. Yeah, this is steel. I mean, it's expensive, no doubt. But for what you're getting, that's a steel. I was tasting this with the staff at Oakbrook yesterday and I made the McAllen comparison. The guy said, I just sold one this morning and it was $3,010 and whatever sense with the tax. And that's with Lolo DuPage County Tax. Yeah. And this is what I would call a whiskey of meditation. This is something you sit with. You don't have to have a lot of it. So you can have a $300 bottle that lasts you quite a long time. And you can spend a lot of time with one ounce of this, in my opinion. Oh, absolutely. Is there like a kind of potpourri that incorporates dried orange peels? Because this would be that. This would be that. I don't want to dump it. Yeah, there's some bergamot in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there. Yeah. Okay, we're moving on to the Petey stuff. We got four whiskeys left. I'm starting with the youngest and what I think is gonna be the most gentle for everyone here. Can I say I've never had this distillery before? What the hell is a Whitlaw? You can, but you'd be wrong! Really? Yeah, okay, so we are tasting an eight-year signatory from Whitlaw. This is a eight-year-old Second Fill Sherry Butt, an outturn of 650-something bottles, I believe. It's big. Yeah, it's big. It's a big butt. 500 liters. I like big butts. 652 bottles. Greg Cant and I. Oh, look, June 2013. Jenna was old enough to drink. I was. I was graduating college. So Whitlaw is Highland Park. Oh. So that is from the Orkney Islands, the northernmost distillery in all of single malt Scotch whiskey. So when Highland Park sells casks now, they bury you in NDAs. Yeah. And so different independent bottlers get cute with what they call them. Are we going to get sued for this? No, because it doesn't say Highland Park. It says Whitlaw, come on. Yeah, but you just said Highland Park. Oh, I said it too. Oh, the secret's out. So these guys used to just call it unnamed Orkney. I think Whitlaw has something to do with the name of the family that owned the distillery a hundred years ago or something like that. Like if you see a Williamson, an independently bottled Williamson is LeFrogue because Ms. Williamson was the woman who owned the distillery for many decades. Okay. So it's secret code. It is secret code. For you nerds. yes. Did they adulterate it with a single teaspoon of something else? This is still a single malt. So it would have to be labeled blended malt whiskey if they teaspooned it like that. So what is the one that they did that with? We've had that done with some independently bottled Balvini before. Balvini. William Grant does not sell any single cat. They do sell Balvini and Glen Fittick on the open market, but they teaspoon every single cat first. So they only get used in blends or blended malt. That's like they rubbed the bald guy's head on the way out. Yeah. But it's literally a teaspoon. So we've had that before. We've had a couple of cats of Balvini that were teaspooned. I remember Brett explaining it and he went like this. I just. This gesture. Okay. Whitlaw. 60.5% alcohol. So this is actually was filled at regular strength, considering it's eight years old and it's dropped two points or something. Jenna, do you detect peat on this? Like just a very subtle amount. I don't mind it at all. This is and it has a very nice finish. I'm really enjoying this one. I don't know if I'd even pick it up. This is great. There's some lemon in here. Highland Park does peat their whisky, but what they do is they malt about 30 percent of their annual malt needs in-house. They have five different malting floors. The malt they make in-house is peated with Orkney peat, and it is peated to about 30 to 40 ppm. That's not very much. Not very much. When that's only 30 percent of it and it gets blended in with malt, they bring in from a traditional maltings called Simpsons. Chris is very familiar, classic brewing malt supplier. You end up usually with Highland Parks that are in the 8 to 12 ppm range for peated whiskey. So that's very low. To put that in perspective, Ardbeg and LaFroy are considered the peatiest at about 50. Something like a B'more is in the high 20s, a Lagervulin might be 40. So this isn't very peaty. And so when the peat is that low, it comes through more as a spice and really not as a smoke. Yeah, it's like a crisp snap that makes it even more lively. It's ginger and pepper. Yeah. I still pick up a little of that classic peaty smokiness, but I think if I were, I mean, I haven't had the next three we're about to have, but I would guess if I had this particular one after these three, I wouldn't notice the peat at all. I would dare to tell you, I think it's more of an earthiness and less of a smokiness. Yeah, I don't perceive it as smoky, but I think I'm picking the peat up. There is a certain phenolic sense to it. And sometimes it ranges into bandaid, but this is like just a suggestion. And I find it like incredibly compelling. It keeps drawing me back to the nose. I think this is another whiskey that has been done immense favors by the choice of cask. Second Fill Sherry. So we get some of those dried fruit notes, but they're on the juicier stone fruit side, like dried apricot, dried peach, less of the dried plum and raisin and fig. Those are still in there, but it's like more of a golden raisin here. If you recall, one of the casks we tasted at some episode earlier this year was a Binny's Handpicked Highland Park from Highland Park, an 11-year-old in a Second Fill Sherry, but that was also north of 60% alcohol by volume. I have not even put this in my mouth yet. The nose is so compelling to me because the peat is at such a level that it allows all the other aspects to shine through. There is fruit and there is all kinds of spice, but there is this, I don't even know how to describe it, the savory veil over it. Maybe just subtly porky or bacony. I picked that up on the finish of the palate, a tiny bit. It's really, but it's so deftly balanced. It's fantastic. Yeah. It is such a gorgeous whiskey. I want to point out that we're not describing its brightness well enough because it's very fresh. Yeah, very fresh. I think that the color in my brain comes to mind. It's yellow. This is like the yellow smiley face of Scotch whiskey. No doubt. I just tasted it and it's a burst of citrusy lemon. Yeah. I told you lemon. Fantastic. It's unbelievable. Now, some people are going to dismiss it because of a single digit age statement. Those that have been following our program know that we have been doing peated from lightly to heavy styles of whiskey from Scottish islands now for 15 years in the single-digit age range. And every single one of them just absolutely slaps. That's what the kids say, right, Jenna? Yeah. They say it about foreigner. I know that. So, this is fantastic. You do pay a bit of the premium tax as a peated island whiskey. This is on the shelf at $89.99. But honestly, that's close enough to my personal threshold of $10 per year of aging. I think is an exceptionally fair price to pay for cast-strength whiskey of any kind, especially Scottish single malt in an environment where you're dealing with shipping delays and shortages and high fuel prices and all that. So to have this on the shelf at $89.99, I think is really, really a deal. I agree. Don't pass this one by. It's fantastically balanced, fantastically subtle for a whiskey of this provenance. It's just, and everything is so well integrated. It just all works nicely together. Now, the first of two OB bottlings. yes, we have two OB, that's original bottler, that means that it's bottled at the distillery itself, by the distillery itself. So we have two Benromics here. Benromic is a space-side single malt distillery. It is owned by the Gordon and MacPhail company. When they bought it, it had been mothballed for many years, meaning it had been kind of put in stasis, but the equipment was still there. They brought it back to life with the goal of creating space-side single malt Scotch whisky as it would have been made in the 1950s and 1960s. Lightly peated, a little heavier and richer in style. Why doesn't anybody ever want to make space-side single malt whisky like from the future? I don't know how to answer that. I don't want to be an Einsteinian asshole, but every whisky you distill in Scotland is the whisky of the future. Look at the age statement. Technically speaking, yes. Settle down. So this is Ben Roemic, single cask, First Fill Sherry Hogshead, 60.6% alcohol. This was a nine-year-old. So a 2011 vintage, nine-year, First Fill Sherry Hoggy, Ben Roemic, 60.6% ABV. This one's also 89.99. Both these Ben Roemicks are 89.99. So the fun thing we haven't even gotten to whisky number two is we have a First Fill Sherry Hog's head here and a First Fill Bourbon Barrel in the next one. Oh, neat. From the same display. Now, you are not the same age. The Bourbon Barrel is actually 11 years old. Let's focus on the nine-year Sherry cask. So Ben Roemic, again, lightly peated, First Fill Sherry though, you can look, you can tell by the color of this thing and you can tell by the nose. There's just gobs of fruit here. So you think it's PX. We haven't talked about the fact that Sherry is really a broad swath of different styles of production. And that can impart all kinds of different flavors. Well, when you're talking to hogshead, it's a Sherry cask that's been coopered down to a hogshead. The vast majority of the time in Scotland, it was Oloroso casks. Nowadays, they're Sherry seasoned casks. So their Sherry sits in them for three, four years. Yeah. Then the Sherry gets turned into vinegar and then they send the casks out. But that's more for those big industrial distilleries. I do feel like if it doesn't tell you what it is, it's probably Oloroso, but they'll call PX out. yes. That's generally my sense too. They will call non Oloroso out. They'll call PX out. They'll call Fino out. They'll call Amontillado out. Amontillado is relatively rare. You do see some Fino casks, Scotch. Palo Cortado. Yeah. So again, with the Pete here, this is like a subtle iodine on the nose. It's there. It's subtle, which that's normally something I would associate with a maritime smoky whiskey. Yeah. It's definitely there. But again, I find the nose to be beautifully balanced. It's not screaming smoke. Yeah. But this low key might be my favorite whiskey of this entire tasting of this entire crop. The nose is deceiving because on the palate, it is rich honey with like floral life above. Rich honey. It's really super. But it's like real honey with like dried figs on like a cheese board. Like it is real fruit and real honey. I'm geeking out a little on this one. I absolutely adore this whiskey. And now it's a hogshead. So it's yeah, there's not that much of it around then. You know, the outturn should be around at that age, it should be around 230 to 250 bottles, something like that. That is absolutely delicious. Isn't that so good? Beneromic whiskey is so good. And it's often overlooked on our shelves. We run in the tenure on sale, like all summer long for like $35 or something. You know, normally it's like 60 bucks. There are other Beneromic's available and they are just absolutely stunning. And you can get actually good deals with some of the older stuff. Like we had one of our big high roller customers in buying a bunch of stuff from us, buying, you know, way, way, way, mega bucks kind of stuff. And he was going to carry it all back to home on his jet type of customer. And I was like, you know, we have this 42 year old Beneromic here. It's like, well, have you tried it? I was like, yeah, I tried it at the distillery a couple of years ago. Like, it's really good. But I think for what its price for what you like, this could just this should just be like your daily thing. That's his bar pour. Because it was like $1,200 for a 42 year old. And then he's spending, you know, $50,000 on a single 42 year old McCallan or something. That's going to be some trophy behind the bar and going to get poured at some point. Like, that's the kind of whiskey you like. Like this is a round and it can and it's price to drink. As crazy as that sounds. Price to drink. Yeah. I mean, this is fantastic. This is price to drink. It's like 90 bucks. I feel like when I put this in my mouth, I feel like I'm laying in a field of wildflowers next to an apiary with somebody, smoking a country ham in the distance. Well, now you've got my attention. I mean, it's really. Haven't we done this bit before either? I have deja vu where we've literally done this bit before. Definitely enjoyable. I though I definitely know to pick up on the peat more. And it's compared to what we've tasted so far, it wouldn't be my first grab. I think I'd probably describe my taste as the more like traditionally feminine style of the ones we had earlier, but this is still very enjoyable. Well, this is why we have two, because this is a good experiment. So that was a nine year First Fill sherry barrel. Now we have an 11 year old First Fill bourbon barrel. This is 56.2% alcohol, 2010 vintage. Worth saying, I mentioned PPM earlier with Scotch distillation. Ardbeg is distilled to 50-51 PPM, or that's the spec of the malt before they distill. After it's done being fermented, it's 42 PPM. After distillation, it's 35 PPM. After it's done being aged, it's 23, 26. After it's done being aged, after 40 years, it's 15, 18. So that peat concentration is constantly dropping through the whole process. these guys are supposedly modestly peated. This goes to speak to how much cask influence has over the flavor of the whiskey. So that nine-year-old, same spec whiskey, younger in theory should be more peaty. But the sherry really, you're tasting a lot of the cask. Here is a First Fill bourbon cask of the same distillate at two years old or at 11 years old. Or, you know, the nine years almost a ten year. And taste and tell me what you think of the peatiness in this whiskey. Is the alcohol higher on this one? Slightly. 60.6 for this one versus 56.2 for the last. More medicinal. Yeah, I think it definitely shows more of that finality. It shows a lot more peat. Yeah. And it's got that gritty earthiness in the finish that just kind of lingers and hangs on. This is probably where I like draw my line or if like someone gave this to me, I'd be like, oh, this was really good. Right there with you. Where's the nearest potted plant? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wouldn't want to offend, but this would be where I draw my line with peat. I think this one's a little simpler. Yeah. I think it's a little more monolithic and a little more basic. And it's probably just bourbon barreled caramel and peat and that kind of breadth. I agree. I think the other one showed a lot more layers of complexity. Hey, damning with faint praise. Yeah. I think this shows more what Ben Roemick is. This lets the distillate do the talking. And this is what it is. It's earthy, but it still has some fruit. It's not as honeyed, not as sweet, not as leathery. There's spice, but this is more of a pepper spice, whereas the Sherry Caspers are more of the brown spice. And I feel like I got a lot of high-toned floral notes out of the other one, and here they're absent. Here there's a lot of orchard fruit, though. Yeah. A lot of orchard fruit. I think it's a really fun side by side. They're both 90 bucks. Something fun to do with your friends. cheesing. It's fun to do. And it smells kind of like a... Do you deserve this next bottle after that comment? I will say these really, like you, in the beginning, you were like, well, I saved the really heavy, like peated ones for the end. And none of these have like totally destroyed my palate. Listen, we got one whiskey left. So our next whisky, we're back to a signatory. This is seven years old from the Buna Havin Distillery. A Buna Havin? But it is Stoisha heavily peated. So this is seven years old in a D-Char Re-Char Hogshead, 269 bottles, 58.4%. So this is the second whisky we've had D-Char Re-Char. Did you explain that earlier? yes, the Mannochmore. So, you know, recupering a barrel to give it a new set of life. Scraping off the old char layer. Re-Charred. Yep. And then it gets re-charred. So you are creating more toast layer in there. You're creating a whole new char layer. So, Bunahaven, famous for being one of the two distilleries on Islay that does not peat their whisky. Bunahaven 12, Bunahaven 18, Bunahaven 25, out on our shelves, unpeated whiskies. Starting in the early 90s, I want to say around 93, they started peating about 5% of their yearly outturn to be used in blends, White and Mackay blends that were like sold in Spain and France and stuff, nothing really sold here. Throughout the 90s, that gradually grew to like 10%. And now, I've heard it's as high as 20% of their annual output a year is heavily peated stuff. So, whenever you see a Bunahaven with a goofy Gaelic name like Stoisha, S-T-A-O-I-S-H-A, that is a heavily peated Bunahaven. And so, what does Stoisha mean? I forget. I don't know. Okay. And now, this is more peated to the classic Isla spec of pushing 50 ppm. I will say it doesn't have the iodine medicinal character that something like the Froyg has. I don't think it has the briny character that something like Ardbeg has. This is just... This is peat. This is dirt and earth and smoke. And like a... But a clean smoke. A savory quality. The smoke... Brett hates this descriptor, but ham... This one's hammy. It's ham and fruit loops. I would describe it as a clean, meaty smoke. But never ham. Some other smoke. Yeah, bacon. Dude, it's filthy on the palate. It smells like... It is so earthy. So earthy on the palate. I love it. This is peat. This is what peat tastes like. Like if you dropped your Easter ham in the dirt. Yeah. Roll it around. Yeah, you just stayed in that garden too long. It had that honey glaze on it, so it really dropped a thick layer. You'd grab it on those families that look down on things like that. I don't hate it, but I don't enjoy it either. It reminds me of the Glow Night War. The important thing is you don't hate it. This is very peaty. It's very peaty. Drakkar Noir. It says matured in D'Kar R'Kar hogsheads. Are those real words? Yeah. Right. Drakkar Noir. Oh man. No, that's very meaty. That's very savory. Those are characters from House of the Dragon, right? We have done- Prince D'Kar. Yeah, Prince D'Kar Targaryen and his brother, Rickard Targaryen. Do you know what that means, Pat? D'Kar Rechar. Oh, D'Kar. Oh God. I will say this is like the fourth year in a row, I want to say that we've done some- Drakkar Noir? Yeah, a young, heavily petered boonahobin. Drakkaris. We actually got one as young as four years old, so it can't be a single wall Scotch until it's three years old. But these taste mature beyond their years, they are awesome. People who are peat heads snatch these up like crazy, they're always like the first cast that sells out. Can I have a sample of one of the earlier ones that I really liked more? Yeah, sure. I just want to take this home in a good place. I agree, John, it's a bit much for me. There's a reason we taste that last. Yeah. You have to. But that's what I've got for new Handpicked Scotch. It's gorgeous. I just tasted it for the first time. It's very earthy. It's very earthy. It's filthy, dude. Very textural. Yeah. There's tannin. Yeah. But it's interesting. It has no business having that much complexity and that much body at seven years old. It's ridiculous. Right. I wouldn't get so excited at a much older age. yes. For sure. I'll give my classic nice response. It's very well made. I just don't like it for me. I'm going to blame the Drakar and Noir barrels. I want to try the Craigellachie again. I really like that one. What was the first one? The first one was my favorite, I think. Mannochmore. Mannochmore. Mannochmore has been a hit. Mannochmore. depressed less. Oh, there's the Targaryen one again. Mannochmore. Jenna really wants some. You definitely need to go to Kerry, okay. Nope. yes. Nope. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. Nice soft ball of fruit with a little bit of spice and a little bit of the 15% of the fluid just being all the stuff that was stuck to the glass before. Of Stoisha? Yeah, it comes out kind of balanced and still a little. dribbles of Stoisha was Chris' debut album. I'm only laughing hard because you're right. So these hit now, these are on shelves. They are unique in that when they are gone, they are gone. They're the most unique bottling so far. Most unique. They're so very unique. There couldn't be more unique. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard combined with sandpaper on teeth. That's a unique sensation. That's horrible. Yeah. Yeah, these are pretty good. Available at your local Binny's. In the grand scheme of things, very reasonably priced. A couple of them ludicrously so. Yeah. Yeah. I'll raise a wee dram to the whiskey hotline. Hell yeah. Nice job. Again, these were last October's picks. We are still waiting on this past May's picks, so. Wow. If you're uninitiated and you made it this far in this episode, first of all, congrats and thank you. Second of all- Are you talking to Jenna? Yeah. It's terrifying seeing these on the shelf because the bottles are all the same, the labels aren't pretty, there's less marketing put on these packages because they're a standard independent bottler and they're not going to put a bunch of fancy labels on stuff. But what's in the bottle here is some of the most interesting, some of the most complex and some of the greatest values in whiskey. Definitely. Then once again, if you're a bourbon head and you made it this far, you got to give it a try. Yeah. As a newly minted bourbon bro, I approve of all of these except for the last one. Bourbon bro. Yeah, none of these are lacking in character. They're really distinctive and fantastic. And I'm waiting for you to be like, surprise, there's more, here's six more bottles. That's all I got. I got an appointment a few for Barrel picks later, so I had to get in and out of here after 10 bottles. We're all gonna be saying, whew, when we get out of here. Who invited him? I think someone in the wine department. Oh, man. Okay. All right. Yeah. Hope you guys learned something. Hope you enjoyed tasting some new stuff. Listeners, I hope you made it through this. There's a lot of new whisky, but if you are at all interested in malt whisky, you owe it to yourself to check out some of these at your local Binny's. They are available and priced to move. If you like this, do us a favor, leave us a review. We'll talk to you next week. I'm Pat. I'm Greg. I'm Jenna. I'm Chris. Keep tasting. What? Pat gets to keep tasting. No, it's mine. It's all mine. F**k you. Keep tasting. Who are you f**king? Him. No, him. Listeners, he was f**king you at you. Jim's gonna have to do another mashup of all the times Butt is said. Sherry Butt. First Fill, Sherry Butt. I already laughed when I saw Butt. Oh, we got more Butts to taste here too. First Fill, Butt. Sherry Butt. Refill, Sherry Butt. Sherry Butt. It's Big Butt. I like big butts, I cannot lie. Second Fill, Sherry Butt.