Content with the tag: singlemalt

Cask strength posting on Japan

I have just noticed an inter­est­ing post on caskstrength.net about a trip to Japan. This first post is about expertly made cock­tails and the Yamazaki dis­tillery. There is another com­ing on Hakushu.

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Does the world need another whisky competition?

Well, to be hon­est, I am not sure it does. I was talk­ing to a chap at Nikka’s Miyagikyo dis­tillery last year who said they were already con­fused about which com­pe­ti­tions were really to be taken seriously.

Nev­er­the­less, the newly minted “Inter­na­tional Whisky Com­pe­ti­tion” held at Hotel 71 in Chicago ear­lier this month is at least wor­thy of men­tion if only because of its inno­v­a­tive approach. The event was broad­cast live over Ustream to view­ers around the world, who were encour­aged to vote on their favourites. The pop­u­lar choices were awarded under a spe­cial “Wis­dom of the Masses” cat­e­gory, while the other sec­tions were judged on the basis of a blind tast­ing by a panel of six.

Japan (or, to be more spe­cific, Sun­tory) did well, win­ning, among other gongs, the “Whisky of the Year” award with the Yamazaki 1984 and scoop­ing the third place in the same cat­e­gory with the Yamazaki 12. The Yamazaki 18 came sec­ond in the “Sin­gle Malt 18–24″ cat­e­gory and Suntory’s Hibiki 12 was third in the “Wis­dom of the masses category.“

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Genshu Single Cask 10-year-old

Review by Non­jatta con­trib­u­tor — Dram­tas­tic

“Gen­shu Sin­gle Cask 10-year-old (bought at the Yoichi dis­tillery) Cask No. #408511 61%
Nose: Huge oak, huge stone fruits/stone fruit seeds, var­nish, a hint of soap­i­ness and some flo­rals com­ing through with time. Then some nut­ti­ness and smoked fish as the flo­rals and oak get a lit­tle big­ger. Sounds like it’s a bit all over the place but it’s a com­plex sin­gle cask and
I love them because of their indi­vid­u­al­ity. The palate is mas­sive, with giant hit of spice/salt infused oak and nuts. If it had had some of that lovely Yoichi peati­ness in there some­where it would have scored a point or 2 higher. The fin­ish is long and warm­ing and a lit­tle dry.
Rat­ing: 92/100 points.” (Dramtastic’s rat­ings explained)

Note: Gen­shu means an alco­hol that has not been diluted at bot­tling (cask strength). It is a word used in the sake and shochu indus­tries but also seems to be increas­ingly used by Japan­ese whisky mak­ers. This par­tic­u­lar spirit was bought at the Yoichi distillery.

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Japanese whisky tasting in Dublin

The Irish Whiskey Soci­ety is hold­ing a Japan­ese whisky tast­ing at Brooks Hotel, Drury Street, Dublin from 7.30pm on Thurs­day, May 27.

Com­mit­tee mem­ber, Zoltan Vari, a com­mit­tee mem­ber of the soci­ety, vis­ited three Japan­ese dis­til­leries (Nikka, Yamazaki and Hakushu) on the Japan leg of a world trip in 2009. He will share some of his pho­tos and expe­ri­ences from the trip and also at least two Japan­ese whiskies that are hard to find in Ire­land: Nikka All Malt (a very unusual blend of pot still malt and Cof­fey still malt) and Nikka Tsuru 17yo.

Entry is €15 for IWS mem­bers. You can pur­chase mem­ber­ship along with your ticket. Entry is €22.50 for non-members. Book here.

You scratch my back… 2007 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Harajuku

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Karuizawa 14yo (Swedish Independent Bottling)

Life seems to be going by in fast for­ward. Back in Octo­ber last year (I can’t believe it was so long ago!) Tapani Kuusela and Johan Hof­van­der con­tacted me to say they had bot­tled their own Karuizawa 14-year-old sin­gle cask whisky (cask 5024). It was dis­tilled back in 1995 and matured and aged in a wine cask. There are 114 bot­tles at 66 per cent alco­hol and Tapani was kind enough to send me a sam­ple. He also advised me to make sure I added some water when I tasted it. My impres­sions:

I tasted it a few weeks ago and then tried it again in my footy-viewing-cum–Chichibu new­born–tast­ing ses­sion. The nose was much less active than the newborn’s: very con­trolled and not at all out­go­ing. A bit of snuf­fling around and slight cereal and but­ter smells began emerg­ing. Despite Tapani’s guid­ance, I sipped with­out water at first. It was very over­pow­er­ing but I just about caught the sweet, slightly winey, piney tastes.

I added a num­ber of drops of water, which it def­i­nitely needed, and found a pleas­ant, warm­ing drink. A really dry char­ac­ter emerged. My notes read like this: “Dry. Wood, tobacco on my tongue like when smok­ing a badly made rol­lie. Fin­ish: long brewed tea (no milk).” I liked it. Right at the end of the ses­sion, I added another drop or two of water and the taste seemed to take another sharp turn: the sweet­ness was back, with a really sat­is­fy­ing but­ter­scotch taste in my last sip. But, sadly, the sam­ple bot­tle was empty, so I could do no more explor­ing. I sup­pose it is expe­ri­ences like this that make me skep­ti­cal about my (not other people’s) abil­ity to cat­e­gorise whiskies with a wham-bam-thankyou-mam “Nose, mouth, fin­ish” sort of clas­si­fi­ca­tion. They move too much for me.

Over­all, I enjoyed this expe­ri­ence and feel a lit­tle envi­ous of of Tapani and Johan’s enter­prise in arrang­ing this unique indy bot­tling. The dry­ness will stay in my mem­ory. I wavered between a three star and a four star for this one but thoughts of Hakushu 25 and other clas­sics reined me in.

My rat­ing

(“Pour another one, would you?”)

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Pure Malt Black, Product of Nikka

Whisky type
Pure Malt

Review by Non­jatta con­trib­u­tor — Dram­tas­tic

“Nikka Pure Malt Black. 43 per cent alco­hol
Nose: A big step up from the Nikka Super blended whisky I just sam­pled. A lit­tle bit flo­ral. Peaches, oak, peat, var­nish, and pineap­ple. Malty, com­plex and smooth.
Palate: Very malty, bub­blegum (a trait I find in many a Nikka/Yoichi/Miyagikyo whiskies), pep­per, nut­meg, sweet peat and gen­tle smoke.
Fin­ish: Excel­lent length, with peat, pep­per, nut­meg, mint choco­late and lin­ger­ing smoke.
Gen­eral com­ment: I think this is more com­plex than the Pure Malt White, but over­all I pre­fer the White’s peaty wal­lop.
Rat­ing: 87/100″ (Dramtastic’s rat­ings explained.)

Non­jatta note: This is one of three pure or vat­ted malts mar­keted by Nikka under one word colour titles — Red, Black and White. The “Red” is mainly made up of whisky from Miyagikyou dis­tillery. The white is based on whisky from Islay in Scot­land with some Yoichi in the mix. This one, the “Black” is mainly based on whisky from Yoichi.

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Pure Malt White, Product of Nikka

Whisky type
Pure Malt

Review by Non­jatta con­trib­u­tor — Dram­tas­tic

“Pure Malt White, Prod­uct of Nikka, 43 per cent alco­hol.
This whisky is a vat­ting of Yoichi malt and an Islay whisky.
Nose: There is a good whiff of peat as well as wal­nuts, wet moss, leather, sea spray, pep­per, wood stain (after breath­ing for a while) and nec­tarines. After some time, there is a hint of lemon.
Palate: Nicely oily (nut oil). The peat comes through big time. Also char­coal, pep­per and a slight bit­ter­ness. The sec­ond sip adds wal­nuts, creamy macadamia and a kind of minted tof­fee to the pic­ture.
Fin­ish: Medium length with earthy/vegetal peat dom­i­nat­ing; macadamia, spice and mint. Slightly dry­ing.
Gen­eral com­ment: This is ever so mor­eish and a real bar­gain. One for lovers of peaty whisky.
Rat­ing: 89/100″ (Dramtastic’s rat­ings explained.)

Non­jatta note: This is one of three pure or vat­ted malts mar­keted by Nikka under one word colour titles — Red, Black and White. The range has been around a sur­pris­ingly long time. I think it was first put out in 1987. The “Red” is mainly made up of whisky from Miyagikyou dis­tillery. The “Black” is mainly based on whisky from Yoichi. This one, the white, is a bit dif­fer­ent: it is based on whisky from Islay in Scot­land. It also, as Dram­tas­tic says, has a good quan­tity of whisky from Yoichi in the mix.

The mys­tery, of course, is which Islay dis­tillery the Scot­tish por­tion came from? I am assum­ing it is just one dis­tillery. A post on syakkindaimaou.usukeba.com had a shot in the dark at the ques­tion a cou­ple of years ago: Caol Ila. Two dis­til­leries were ruled out because they were either owned by Sun­tory or involved in part­ner­ships with Sun­tory (Bow­more and Laphroaig) and oth­ers were elim­i­nated because they were not known for the style of peaty whisky evi­dent in this vat­ting. To be hon­est, I am not sure the logic quite takes us all the way to Caol Ila’s door but it is an inter­est­ing guess anyway.

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Single Malt Newborn Double Matured (Cask 447; bottled October 2009)

Dis­tillery
Chichibu
Euro­pean importer
No. 1 Drinks

(Scroll down to the bold text below if you want to cut the blather.)

I don’t know what the drink writer’s equiv­a­lent of a writer’s block is called. A “drinker’s block”, per­haps? Any­way, I have spent a while now, deeply mired in a “drinker’s block”. While I have been happy tip­pling away and very hap­pily writ­ing whisky news and fea­tures on Non­jatta, I have not been post­ing my own tast­ing notes. [The reviews on Non­jatta have been mainly from Serge and, more recently, Dram­tas­tic and I hope we are going to be able to get more review­ers to lend their arms to the oars.]

Back to my block: the rea­sons behind it are really mixed up in the book I have been writ­ing on Japan­ese alco­hol. My research took me to dozens of brew­eries, kura and dis­til­leries all over Japan. I met peo­ple who were over­flow­ing not only with a pas­sion for their alco­hol but a extra­or­di­nar­ily impres­sive under­stand­ing of its cre­ation and appre­ci­a­tion. In some cases, I was meet­ing peo­ple from fam­i­lies with gen­er­a­tions of exper­tise in dis­till­ing or brew­ing. It was an educa­tive but also hum­bling expe­ri­ence and I am afraid one of the side effects was my “drinker’s block”. I have been tast­ing quite inten­sively in the mean time, strug­gling to work out how I am going to do tast­ings that I am happy with pub­lish­ing, but I have felt a much greater weight on me than I used to. It is not that I feel purely sub­jec­tive tast­ing notes from a non-expert like myself are a bad thing. Quite the oppo­site. Looked at log­i­cally, I think such notes are actu­ally just as use­ful, per­haps more use­ful, for other new­bies as the notes of extremely expert review­ers. But who­ever said “writer’s block” or, in my case, “drinker’s block”, was a ratio­nal thing?

Some con­struc­tive thoughts have come out of this block. Quite early on, I con­cluded that all I could hon­estly offer was a purely sub­jec­tive descrip­tion of my drink­ing expe­ri­ence. I have always tended towards this assess­ment of my tast­ing abil­i­ties (and so, for exam­ple, have never gone beyond a very crude 5 star rat­ing sys­tem), but, more recently, I have been think­ing about how this relates to my method of writ­ing reviews.

What struck me was that there was often a diver­gence in my expe­ri­ence of a whisky, depend­ing on whether I was just drink­ing it for pure plea­sure or sit­ting down and try­ing to “taste” it. Since alco­hol is made for drink­ing for plea­sure, this was a prob­lem. I also noted that I would have quite dif­fer­ent impres­sions of the same whisky in dif­fer­ent tast­ings. And, per­haps most sig­nif­i­cantly, that the taste of many whiskies evolved and changed in one sit­ting: my mouth would change with the whisky, the sec­ond sip of a whisky would some­times have a totally dif­fer­ent world to offer me than the first, and the sev­enth sip was dif­fer­ent again; the nose after 10 min­utes of relaxed drink­ing was utterly dif­fer­ent from the first sniff. This was prob­a­bly a phys­i­cal real­ity, to do with the coat­ing of the glass and the expo­sure of the whisky, but it was also a sub­jec­tive phe­nom­e­non too. So, how did this relate to my old: colour, nose, mouth, fin­ish, final com­ments, method of writ­ing my notes? That is the clear­est, per­haps the only way for pro­fes­sional tasters to cat­e­go­rize a whisky for their read­ers but, for some­one like me, who only aspired to sub­jec­tive descrip­tion of my expe­ri­ence, did copy­ing this method from the experts really allow a free flow­ing enough structure?

To cut a long story short, the out­come of this is a slightly dif­fer­ent, slightly less com­part­men­tal­ized struc­ture for my notes. You might not notice the dif­fer­ence, but I am hop­ing I will. I hope this will help con­quer my “drinker’s block”. For my come­back match, I am going with the bloody mar­velous Sin­gle Malt New­born from Chichibu distillery:

I drank the dou­ble matured new­born from the new Chichibu dis­tillery watch­ing the Fulham-Liverpool match after a great meal over a shared bot­tle of Japan­ese white wine. My over­all impres­sion of the spirit was that it was extra­or­di­nar­ily good for such a young whisky. Quite phe­nom­e­nal really for a drink dis­tilled at recently as April-May 2008. It had quite an intense and com­plex smell. The first impres­sion reminded me of stand­ing in a hot field when pollen is heavy in the air: a flo­ral, sweet smell. Later sniffs brought out a sharp lemon and honey (this had been my over­rid­ing impres­sion on a pre­vi­ous tast­ing) and touches of melted but­ter. Sip­ping it straight, I got dis­tinct lemon and pine tastes but lit­tle else because it was so over­pow­er­ing. With a cou­ple of drops of water, the lemon and honey really came out with an under­ly­ing whole­meal bread sub­stance under­ly­ing the cit­rus sharp­ness. It fin­ished with quite a piney taste. Later sips brought out liquorice flavours for me. I found this a really relax­ing drink, much eas­ier to drink than either of the new­born Chichibus from last year, which were inter­est­ing but extremely chal­leng­ing (will try to dig out and post my notes on those over the next cou­ple of weeks).

Some more data on the New­born Dou­ble Matured Cask 447. It is a sin­gle cask whisky, dis­tilled April-May 2008. It was first put in a Heaven Hill Bour­bon bar­rel in May to June 2008. It was trans­ferred to a New Amer­i­can Oak Hogshead in June 2009 and was bot­tled in Octo­ber 2009. There are 352 bot­tles of it and it is 61.3 per cent alcohol.

My rat­ing

(“Pour another one, would you?”)

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Suntory fishing in Irish waters

David at the excel­lent Irish Whiskey Notes put me on to a one line men­tion in the Scots­man news­pa­per at the start of May that Sun­tory had been foiled in an attempt to grab itself slice of the Irish whiskey indus­try. David is in a much bet­ter posi­tion than me to give the Irish back­ground to the story but the long and the short of it is that Sun­tory had been in the bid­ding for a num­ber of spirit brands owned by the C&C Group, includ­ing Tul­lam­ore Dew whiskey. William Grant, the Scotch whisky com­pany, fought off the Japan­ese inter­est with a £260 mil­lion acquisition.

It seems Grant are now plan­ning a new Irish dis­tillery. As Irish Whiskey Notes says: “Now that they’ve thought about Irish whiskey seri­ously, per­haps Sun­tory would like to build their own dis­tillery here? C’mon, Japan, everyone’s doing it!“

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Suntory fishing in Irish waters

David at the excel­lent Irish Whiskey Notes put me on to a one line men­tion in the Scots­man news­pa­per at the start of May say­ing that Sun­tory had been foiled in an attempt to grab itself slice of the Irish whiskey indus­try. David is in a much bet­ter posi­tion than I to give the Irish back­ground to the story but the long and the short of it is that Sun­tory had been in the bid­ding for a num­ber of spirit brands owned by the C&C Group, includ­ing Tul­lam­ore Dew whiskey. William Grant, the Scotch whisky com­pany, fought off the Japan­ese inter­est with a £260 mil­lion acquisition.

It seems Grant are now plan­ning a new Irish dis­tillery. As Irish Whiskey Notes says: “Now that they’ve thought about Irish whiskey seri­ously, per­haps Sun­tory would like to build their own dis­tillery here? C’mon, Japan, everyone’s doing it!“

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