Dalwhinnie 15 year old is considered by a fair few to be a bit of a lady’s drink, not quite suitable as a man’s dram. Quite how it earned this reputation I do not know, though I would suppose that it is due to a combination of its mild mannered characteristics and the label being just a tad too neat. That doesn’t mean that any man ordering it in a Scottish pub will get laughed at, though if that is an outcome you fear then I would avoid ordering it in rougher parts of town, perhaps going for a nice pint of Carling instead (even just writing the name made me feel queasy).
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Since I’ve mainly been drinking foreign whiskeys lately, I guess I’ve been trying to widen my horizons, I felt an uncontrollable urge just now to return to the hills of home; the highlands of Scotland. And what better way to do so than to have a dram of (proper) whiskey? The question, then, was which one to go for. I wanted something nice and creamy, with a body as voluptuous as that of Miss Monroe and a scent as potent as can only be found lingering in Auld Reekie. As the names of potential candidates flew by in my mind’s eye, one stood – Glenmorangie.
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The Scottish highlands are known for a variety of things; their rugged hills and mountains including Ben Nevis, the highest in the UK, fantastic nature and well preserved wildlife, the all-but-sparse flow of naturally crisp and pure water, but perhaps more than any of those it is known for, you guessed it, fantastic whisky.
The highlands region is home to a host of distilleries including Oban, Glenmorangie, Glenturret and of Dalmore – which is the distillery we’ll be focusing on in this post. More precisely, I’m going to introduce you to their quite unusual King Alexander III, and I really do mean unusual. The process that gives it its flavour is not unusual in itself, though they’ve gone rather further than average in a certain, and for this whisky crucial, element of the production; selecting their casks.
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The Clynelish distillery is situated on the north-eastern coast of Scotland, in the town of Brora. Founded in 1819, it was originally known as Brora, and would be for quite a few years until a new distillery was built along side the old in 1968; the whisky produced in the new distillery, still a part of the same company, would instead be given the name Clynelish.
It is not at all unlikely that you will never have seen or even heard of Clynelish single malt, and there’s a quite simple reason for that; only 1% of the whisky distilled is sold as single malt, with the rest going in to the Johnnie Walker blend.
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