The thread about expensive Macallan whisky has me thinking about distilled spirits more generally and wondering what you’re experiences have been with variations between bottles of the same whiskey from the same distiller.
For example, I’ve had two bottles of The Balvenie Double wood 12. The first bottle was great, all the great scotch goodness with just a taste of sherry to sweeten it a bit. The second bottle of the same label of Doublewood 12 had a very much sherry forward flavor, so much so that it overwhelmed many of the other flavor notes and thus lost much of its charm.
I know that distillers strive for consistency between bottles, but sometimes you can’t control all factors as much as might be liked. Maybe the finishing cask was a really fresh sherry cask on that second bottle, I don’t know, could have been something with the first cask instead.
What has been your greatest wtf moment of difference between bottles of the same label of spirits?
Well, from the middle-shelf varieties, which is mostly where I live, I was shocked to pick up a bottle of Writers Tears Irish and found that particular bottle to be superior in character to what I recalled from an earlier bottle, maybe last year or so.
Namely, it actually had flavor to it, whereas before I’d written it off as a basic, bland, flavorless “smooth” whiskey.
Makes me even more interested to keep pestering my local liquor store owners to try to get the fabled yearly cask-strength release from Writers.
Was shocking to me, though. Definitely from zero to hero, in that instance.
Another odd discovery was the Tullamore “Caribbean Rum” cask expression. An enormous leap from what is in its core expression a pleasant, lively, reliable daily drinker. But, that’s to be expected, and is an OT observation for the purposes of this thread.
Well, actually, I found the one liquor store in my area that happened to be open at the hour I was getting home from work that day, and they had a pretty small selection of Irishes, so, I figured, at least it’s guaranteed to be inoffensive!
A pleasant surprise!
Honestly, I would have been fine with a bottle of Paddys, for a bit of rough-and-tumble, but that’s how it happened.
I can’t say that I’m a consistent enough drinker to reliably discern between bottle variations (except where it’s something like a single barrel expression) versus changes in my own palate.
I mean I know my palate has changed over time, so me noticing that I like a particular bottle more than I used to, is just as likely to be because of palate shift as variation in the product.
On top of that, I have a difficult time repeating bottles when there’s so much to choose from.
I know! I have a friend who only buys Scotch when he’s running out. And then, it’s just another bottle just like the empty one.
Geez, take a chance, man…
Like my other friend. Ran into him at Trader Joe’s and he was stocking up on “Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky”, a bourbon cask finish and a 19 year, and “Islay Storm”.
“So THAT’S what you’ve been serving us on your porch! I really thought it was pricey Scottish stuff.”
“For all we know, it could be…” said he.
I’d also like to add that in general, unless it’s a single barrel expression, they’re going to be pretty much homogenous, because they intentionally blend them that way.
Considering that the only difference between say… Old Crow and Knob Creek is in the combination of barrels used to blend it - how long, where they were, and what proportion of each kind, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they had a formula for making each one. “9 barrels of 10 year 3rd level outer wall, 18 of lower level inner, 1 of 15 year top level outer wall” and so forth.
I’d imagine they can get pretty close to the same before they start tasting and adjusting at all, just by knowing the properties of barrels that were stored in specific locations for specific time periods.
I agree with this, distillers have a method for achieving consistency across bottles and batches, but there will inevitably be some variation. In my op, my experience with Balvenie Doublewood 12 is an example of that. I don’t know what was different that caused such a striking (to me) difference between two bottles of “the same” whisky, but it happened.