Jul. 26: Drammers Los Angeles!...

Fellow Drammers!

Our next Drammers Los Angeles meeting is Monday, July 26th at 7pm. One of our members, Beks Opperman, has generously offered to host at her place downtown (1250 Long Beach Ave., Apt 120, 90021 -- it's Long Beach Ave in downtown, not in Long Beach, ha!). We've got a fantastic lineup we'll be tasting, drumroll please...

• Bowmore: 2017 Feis Ile Bottling.  This is a rare gem – it was only available if you went to the Bowmore distillery on Islay in Scotland for their big annual festival (Feis Ile) in 2017 and lined up to get this special festival release, 1 of only 2,000 bottles released.  Aged 11 years and billed as a marriage of sherry and wine casks.  Unlikely we’ll get another chance to try this one, sadly, but then again, we suspect the people who made it would want it enjoyed exactly the way we’re going to do it! 

• Highland Park 13yo Drammers Single Barrel.  We selected this barrel during our November 2020 event with the Highland Park team, and we were incredibly honored to learn that this was the first time Highland Park has ever agreed to sell a single barrel to a whiskey club in the Americas.  Matured its entire life (of 13 years) in a sherry hogshead, unlike the much more common “finish” usually only for 3 months at the end of the aging process.  The sherry influence is loud and proud here, but so is the European oak, which differs from American oak in bringing more spices and dried fruit notes that are easily identifiable here on the back of the palate.  Cask strength of 63.9% abv.

• That Boutique-y Whisky Co - Reference Batch I.1 -

• Starward Australian Single Malt - Drammers Barrel Pick.  We’re big fans of the burgeoning world whisky scene, almost all of which is made in the Scotch style.  Starward has consciously sought to go the other direction, expressly saying things like they’re “trying to do everything they can to not be Scotch”, ha.  Early on, they decided to make maturation in big Ozzie red wine barrels their signature, and our club’s barrel pick certainly shows that front and center, as does the fast maturation inherent in Melbourne’s climate.  Very few Starward single barrels have been released into the wild to date, making this a rare chance to try their whisky at cask strength!

• Version Francaise:  Artesia 2018.  We learned about this new collection from our friends at La Maison du Whisky during our latest Drammers Paris outing – it’s like advance scouting for the next wave of great French whisky producers, and LMDW is keeping a lookout and sourcing single barrels, often the only chance anyone has ever had to try them.  Take this release for example – who has had whisky from the Artesia distillery?  We’re pretty sure the answer is nobody outside of Paris (as we understand it, less than 1,000 bottles have been released anywhere).  Well, we'll be drinking one of them, and we’re working on doing a much bigger overview of this series of releases soon.  From the Hauts-de-France region, 50% abv, 2018 distillate (so presumably 3 years old), 1 of 315 bottles.

• Westward - Club Edition - American Single Malt - Tempanilla Cask Finish. We just had an event with our Portland chapter a few days ago, and we managed to pick up a distillery-only special release, which takes their single malt finished in a Tempanilla cask. This is part of their announcement that their whiskey club, previously only available to residents of Oregon, will now be available nationwide, which makes one-off special releases available to club members (like this bottle, which was their most recent release).

• Wyoming Whiskey – 2 Drammers Barrel Picks.  Next up, let’s taste some bourbon!  This distillery made big waves, when they launched back in 2009, convincing the master distiller for Makers Mark to come out of retirement to be their master distiller for a while and show them the ropes, eventually passing the baton to their own home-grown team.  We’re big fans of their juice, and we were curious what happened when they finally made the transition – so we flew out to Wyoming for a big online Drammers event, tasted a ton of barrels, and picked one of each from just before and after the master distiller transition.  We’ll taste both on Saturday, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you can taste a difference, and if so which you prefer!  Bottled at cask strength as always.

• Rezpiral - Capon Espadin. Our very first bottling, Drammers #001! This bottle is nearly sold out, with about 13 remaining as of this writing, so we wanted to give our LA members one last chance to taste it. This was produced by maestro mezcalero Aureliano Hernandez, and it was such a hit that we went back to him to get another exclusive batch for Drammers, his Tobala con Frutas. This first selection resulted from a visit by Rezpiral founder Alex White -- we tried 10 expressions, and this was the one the members loved the most. Two key things to know about this mezcal - it was rested in glass (oxidized, essentially) for over 9 months, much longer than the public releases by Aureliano, and that makes a BIG difference. Second, it is a "capon" espadin, which means "castrated" -- just as the agave shoots up the giant stalk to reproduce (at which point the plant dies), the mezcalero cuts the stalk -- the plant still thinks it needs to generate sugar for the reproduction process, resulting in a hyper-sweet agave, and ultimately a sweeter mezcal.

That's our lineup, and honestly we'll probably pull out a couple more, ha. In any case, we hope you can join us!

Cheers!
Drammers Club