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Fellow Drammers!
Our next Baltimore chapter meeting will be on Thursday, Apr. 15th starting at 7:30pm EST. A big thank you to our Baltimore chapter head Katie Janian for organizing and hosting! We’ve got a great lineup of whiskies we’ll be tasting:
Highland Park 13yo Single Barrel. This is our club’s barrel pick, and it’s the first time that Highland Park has agreed to sell a barrel to a whisky club in the Americas! Our club members selected this bottle in an online event last Fall, and now that its arrived, its truly as delicious as we remember. Key fact here - it was not finished, rather it was matured all 13 years in a European oak sherry butt, so the sherry notes here are wonderfully enormous. Obviously most Highland Park (and nearly all Scotch for that matter) is matured in ex-bourbon American oak casks, making this an unusual opportunity to try fully sherry cask matured whisky, and the European oak notes bring in the spiciness and dried fruits you are less likely to find on the American oak cask. Bottled at cask strength of course - 63.9% abv!
BenRiach - The Smoky Ten. Our second whisky of the evening is also a single malt scotch, the time implementing 3 different cask types, (ex-bourbon, ex-Jamaican rum and a virgin oak cask), and as the name implies, this whisky has a distinct smoky flavor. 46% abv.
3 variations of Barrell Craft Spirits Private Release. We love the team at Barrell Craft Spirits, and they put out a series of experimental finish barrelings last year that are pretty cool. We were thrilled that they let out club select one of them just for our members, and so our club held a big event last fall and picked their barrel finished in a St. Agrestis Brooklyn Amaro cask. We’ll also be tasting the runner-up barrel that we almost bought, this time Kentucky whiskey finished in a ex-pear brandy cask, and then a third variant that our friends at Baytowne Wine & Spirits selected — this time finished in an Armagnac cask. Btw, the eagle-eyed among you may be wondering why it’s “Kentucky whiskey” and not “bourbon” — good question, and we’ll get into the reason for that at the event. All three bottles ring in just under 60% abv btw.
Alfred Giraud French Malt Whisky - Exploratory Range: Voyage. Many would see this bottle as the headliner of our event — Alfred Giraud is one of the leading French whiskies to emerge in the last few years. Drawing on centuries of cognac making expertise, the Giraud family has brought together sourced distillates, and then they apply their blending expertise from their cognac backgrounds to come up with special releases. This is the first in their exploratory range, only available at one site in France, and we had it imported for a major event with their founder a few months ago, but we have 60% of a bottle left and want to put it to good use, so we’ll be tasting this on Thursday as well. 1 of 429 bottles, bottled in September 2020. Matured in a blend of Robinia, cognac and Sauternes casks. 48% abv.
Starward Single Malt Australian Whisky - Nova and our Club Private Barrel. While we’re at it on the world whisky front, we’ll also take a look at this leading Australian whisky distillery based in Melbourne. We’ve done a lot with this company, even selecting a private barrel for our club. This distillery has made its identity maturing whisky in Aussie red wine barrels, often barrels that were freshly dumped down the road only hours earlier. We’ll be comparing two expressions. First their core-range Nova bottling, coming in at 41% abv. We’ll also be trying our private club barrel, selected by a committee of our members, and coming in at a whopping 55.5% abv. That barrel was an American oak fresh red wine barrique from the Barossa Valley, and yielded 240 bottles total when it was bottled in June 2020 (aged 3 years).
That’s our lineup! We hope you can join us!