Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 44 total)
  • I've won a strange bottle of whisky.
  • thegreatape
    Free Member

    I’m doing rather well in raffles this year – dinner for two, a pair of walking poles, a crate of Bulmers and a venison carcass at the MRT dinner – and a somewhat odd bottle of whisky in the school one yesterday.

    It was donated by a local business who sell novelty plots of land to Americans, and is obviously commissioned by them as it has their name on the label. Rather than a ‘X year old’ like normal, the label states ‘distilled 1987’, is a single malt, cask strength (53%) and produces at the Isle of Arran distillery. I can’t find it for sale on their own website, nor the IoA distillery site, in order to find out more about it.

    Do any of our resident experts know what the IoA malts are like?

    bearnecessities
    Full Member

    Sounds awful, I’ll take it off your hands.

    andyl
    Free Member

    It was donated by a local business who sell novelty plots of land to Americans

    Maybe they bottle the pee* they take?

    *insert proper word here

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    thegreatape
    Free Member

    I will consider your kind offer…

    hebridean
    Free Member

    The Isle of Arran Distillery opened in 1995 so it wasn’t distilled there in 1987.

    scotroutes
    Full Member

    As genuine as the plots of land then?

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Interesting!

    scotroutes
    Full Member

    How’s your arse BTW?

    66deg
    Free Member

    Probably some blended pish, i’ll give ya 50 groats and a wee smile!

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    The business has brought mixed opinions from some locals, some very pro, some very anti. I believe their has been a campaign against them on tinternet. I might email the distillery 🙂 Need to decide whether it’s going to be any good or to fob it off on an English relative for Christmas.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    How’s your arse BTW?

    Much the same, but I haven’t got hold of a suitable shim yet. Working on it! (Well, my mate is, if he hasn’t got one I’ll try it one my CX bike and see how it goes).

    Cougar
    Full Member

    I’ll ask an expert. Hold the line please, caller.

    kcal
    Full Member

    I had some bottles of the original Arran Founders Reserve malt. Around 7 years old, maybe 9/10. It wasn’t anything special, though I think the stuff has been getting better..

    The SMWS now has some Arran malts and they get good reviews, so maybe the cask strength stuff is worth a punt.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Standing by Cougar, standing by.

    Thanks kcal. Guess it could be worth asking them.

    Drac
    Full Member

    While you wait may I send out my deepest sympathies on winning a crate of Bulmers.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    It was orange flavour. No wonder it got donated as a raffle prize. I was embarrassed at my success so insisted that it go back to be redrawn 😀

    Drac
    Full Member

    Jesus it’s worse than I thought.

    neilthewheel
    Full Member

    I visited the distillery a few years ago and brought back a couple of 10 years old. They were splendid. They like to use unusual wine casks to mature them in.

    vorlich
    Free Member

    Highland Titles?

    Andy Wightman (looks like his website is down) covered their scam when it came to light.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    That’s the one. There’s been some arguments back and forth between the ones that think it’s a scam and the folk that don’t. Quite why anyone would spend money on it is beyond me.

    vorlich
    Free Member

    Exactly. Ultimately fairly harmless though, there are worse scam artists out there, preying on the vulnerable etc.

    Back to the whisky, after getting nothing but single malt for xmas and birthdays for years, my collection has finally dwindled to single digits. I’ve been dropping lots of hints for a bottle of Lagavulin from Santa. I was amazed to see Tesco asking nearly £50 for a bottle of Ardbeg the other day, it was £25 last time I bought a bottle!

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Seems a bit steep. The supermarkets are usually quite decent at having something decent on a good offer. Jura Origin for about £15-£18 was the last one I had out of the local Coop.

    dan86
    Free Member

    From what I recall, Highland Titles malt is Arran 15

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    There is a good chance you wont be abke to tell what it is from the label. I say this as a friend bought a barrel and had it bottled under his name. He offered to sell me some and gave me a name to google / price up but had I not had that it would have been impossible to trace/value plus you have to reply on what you’re told

    boxelder
    Full Member

    Could it be something the IoA distillery bought in and bottled to get things moving while their’s matured?

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    I think I’ll email them. Not especially bothered, more intrigued now.

    gordimhor
    Full Member

    If it’s the Douglas Laing bottling of arran 15yo it’s a very nice drop. And if it’s from Highland Titles well I would cover the label the better to enjoy a dram 😀

    Cougar
    Full Member

    The oracle has spoken.

    I’m not signing up an account just to reply, so feel free to pass this on…

    As others have said, it can’t be Isle of Arran. Too early – they didn’t build their distillery until 1994, and didn’t distil until June 1995.

    So the labelling is important. If it says “bottled by” IoA, then it’s a cask they bought and resold to keep revenue flowing.

    If it genuinely says “distilled by”, it’s a fake or a cruel joke. Or a truly bad labelling mistake.

    Either way, there’s probably no way of knowing what it is without going back to IoA themselves (who may have records), or to the company who paid for it (who sound totally trustworthy! Honest!)

    A picture of the label may help, but other than confirming it’s not IoA I can’t do much – sorry.

    Isle of Arran do produce some small scale blends – so they may have had casks.

    That doesn’t help identify it, but does show it may be genuinely a cask of whisky. However, it may have been teaspooned, so has no provenance.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    I asked what ‘teaspooning’ was.

    When someone sells a cask of whisky for blending, they have no guarantee it’ll be used for blending. Well known names fear that this means casks that aren’t their “brand taste” might get bottled with their name on it.
    So before shipping it, they open it up and drop a teaspoon of whisky in from another distillery.
    Hey presto – no longer technically a single malt. Can’t be called that distillery anymore. Can only be used for blending.
    Age statement would still apply, of course (assuming the teaspoon of whisky was same or older) – but makes a poetntially valueable cask quite useless except for blending.
    (Which is not useless at all to my mind, but that’s a different discussion.)
    One teaspoon won’t change the flavour, so no problems there.
    (Well, unless you teaspoon your Auchentoshan with some Lagavulin. But they’re not owned by the same company, so it’s unlikely.)
    Teaspooned casks often use the same region for the teaspoon, so you get a “15yo Highland Cask” kind of effect.
    So if it’s a malt whisky but not a single malt, it could be that.
    The poster says it’s a single malt, but without seeing the label it’s hard to know – it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to assume.
    In the reply, I’d probably emphasis the fact that they have a blend – it’s almost certainly why they’d have such a cask.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    And if it’s from Highland Titles well I would cover the label the better to enjoy a dram

    🙂

    Cougar – can email you a picture or try and post it up on here.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    I think that may help.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Can’t copy the BB code on Flickr, I shall email it.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Update:

    The OP sent me a photo of the label, I’ve forwarded it to my mate and just got a reply.

    Basically, it confirms what I said – either another malt they bottled which was originally meant for one of their blends, or a labelling error
    It said “single malt”, so shouldn’t have been teaspooned
    That’s about the only clarification I’d have to make having now seen it

    So there you go.

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Obliged to you both…

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Here is the distillery’s reply…

    As you might know, we sell private casks and this particular label looks like it has been a private owner’s cask bottled under a private label. When producing a private label, cask owners are obliged to state the origin of the whisky which is where our name comes onto the label. This is something that is entirely normal, however the mention of a 1987 age statement is, as you rightly point out, not correct as we didn’t even exist then! Someone has provided false info on the label and this will definitely not be a whisky from 1987. At very oldest it will be from 1995. Perhaps the person who gave you the whisky would know a bit more about its origins?

    As a great philosopher once wrote…naughty naughty, very naughty.

    RichT
    Full Member

    If anyone is interested, I still have lots of bottles of the Arran Founder’s Reserve Single Malt, which I would be happy to sell or swap. Always looking for bike bits or other interesting whiskys or other booze!

    kcal
    Full Member

    I still have about 3 or 4 too, Rich T 🙂 the slightly golden / bronze coloured ones?

    RichT
    Full Member

    Yes, that one, but I’ve got about 30 bottles…

    thegreatape
    Free Member

    Do you want to swap for a misleadingly labelled exclusive bottle of who knows what? 😀

    RichT
    Full Member

    Yes, why not.

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