July 24: Drammers Portland...

Fellow Drammers!

Very excited to get back to Portland for our next Drammers event there, and a huge thank you to John Farinola for hosting and organizing again!  We’ve got some really fun bottles that we’ll be featuring:

-       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! 

-       Clynelish 20yo Thompson Bros. Pick.  Next up we have another special single malt scotch, this time a barrel pick by our club.  Clynelish is owned by the large spirits and drinks conglomerate Diageo, but very little of what the distillery makes ends up being released as “Clynelish” – instead most of it goes into Diageo’s massive blends (think Johnnie Walker, etc.).  On the rare occasion it is released as a single malt, it is known for a waxy flavor.  We were fortunate that our friends at Dornoch Castle / Thompson Bros. agreed to sell us this barrel just for our members.  We allocated half the barrel to our US members, and the other half to our European members (the US allocation sold out immediately, there are still a few bottles left in Europe).  But we wanted to make sure that our Portland members had a chance to taste it!  50% abv.

-       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).  We’ll, 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.

-       Westland #430 – Drammers Single Barrel.  We are huge fans of this distillery in Seattle, and when they announced they would be shutting down their single barrel program for 5 years – meaning that you would only be able to get cask strength whisky in person at the distillery – we jumped into action.  Luckily, we’ve got a great relationship with their team, and have hosted their master distiller in person at our NYC chapter, in addition to a massive 5 hour event we did with them online last year.  As a result, back in December 2019, they let us buy the last two barrels out of their single barrel program, one heavily peated, one more lightly peated.  We tried the other barrel at our meeting in March, but have not yet featured this barrel at a Portland meeting until now.  Cask strength, 63% abv. 

-       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 Mezcal – 100% Tepextate from Berta Vasquez.  We love mezcal here at Drammers Club, and organize an annual event down to Oaxaca for Day of the Dead each October (which everyone in the club is invited to).  As part of that, we have visited with many of the most celebrated mezcal producers in Mexico, and we had the pleasure of visiting with Berta Vasquez a couple years ago.  She blew us away – she is widely seen as one of the world’s greatest mezcal master distillers (and one of the few maestra mezcaleras !).  The independent bottlers Rezpiral have released a bunch of her mezcal batches, and we love working with Rezpiral, they have incredible integrity in the way they operate, even giving back 20% of the profits to the producers, which is unheard of.  But finding 100% tepextate is very rare these days (it takes 20+ years to just grow the plants!), and while Berta’s blends of Tepextate with other agave types have been released in the US, to our knowledge this is the first time a 100% tep batch has been released States-side.  Special stuff, and we bought the entire batch just for our members. 

That’s our lineup!  There’s always a small chance a bottle will break in transit etc., but on the rare occasion it does we’ll just replace it with an even better bottle.  J  We hope you can join us!

Cheers,
John, Chris, Charlie and the Drammers Club team