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Fellow Drammers!
I hope everyone is healthy and holding up okay, I know a couple of our members are currently battling the disease, which is heartbreaking and our thoughts are with them. For those of us who fortunately are healthy and getting a little stir crazy in our apartments, I'm delighted to invite you to join our 2nd Drammers Global Tasting Party this Friday at 5pm EST with an epic The Balvenie tasting! Joining us will be The Balvenie's brand ambassador and fellow drammer Naomi Leslie! We had been working for months on a normal in-person event when the covid crisis broke out, and we had already sourced some jaw droppers for that event, which The Balvenie has very generously supplemented, as usual. Check out this intense lineup:
1971 Vintage Cask 33yo
We secured our headliner a few months back at auction in what came to about $2,700 after the taxes and shipping and everything (on the low end of what these bottles have gone for in recent years, btw). I had a couple drops while I was preparing the sample bottles, and I can tell it was worth every penny, this is an incredible pour. Distilled in June '71, bottled in April 2005, so just a couple months short of 34 years. This release was from one cask which yielded only 197 bottles. 46.7% abv.
A Day of Dark Barley 26yo
Our friends at The Balvenie generously donated this bottle for us to try, the third in their Stories series, and a quick search will confirm these bottles sell between $800 and $1000/bottle when you can find one. It's darker and heavier than we're used to from The Balvenie, owing to a batch of dark roasted malted barley, more commonly associated with stouts. The story behind this bottle is fun to listen to, which the explain in detail on their podcast (Here: https://us.thebalvenie.com/stories/a-day-of-dark-barley), narrated by our long lost friend and fellow drammer Gemma Paterson, interviewing our former guest David Stewart among others! A big thank you to Naomi and the team for treating us with this expression. 47.8% abv.
The Balvenie Classic Oldest Selection 18yo (Bot. 1980s)
This bottle immediately grabs your attention in that it eschews the normal The Balvenie bottle shape. While I don't have the exact bottling year, from my online research it appears to have been released in the 1980s (if you search for "balvenie old classic" you can see some similar shaped 12yo versions going for 1,000 British Pounds). As always, we love to see how the older expressions compare to The Balvenie we know and love today, so when this came up at auction we snapped it up. Bottled at a modest 43% abv.
Founder's Reserve 10yo (Bot. Approx. 1980s)
Again not sure on the exact date, guessing 80s, and also bottled at 43% abv, so we'll dip into both of these earlier in the tasting. We also picked this one up at auction, and the box comes with a small pamphelet that (understandably) talks up how they are one of the last distilleries in Scotland doing their own floor maltings, and how they even have their own coppersmiths on site to take care of the stills. Interestingly, the expression must have continued to be bottled for some time before it was discontinued, and most of the online pictures of it show it in the normal contemporary bottle we associate with The Balvenie, but this one we'll be drinking must have been from much earlier, coming in a much taller bottle reminiscent of something between a champagne bottle and a white wine bottle.
The Week of Peat 14yo
Our friends at The Balvenie generously gave us not one but two bottles of both this and the Sweet Toast, so everyone will receive in their sample packet effectively a double-pour of this, one to enjoy during the tasting, and one to savor and reflect on later. Also from the Balvenie "Story" series, this bottle tells the story of an experiment that distillery manager Ian Millar elected to do one year when he spotted a weeklong gap in the distillation schedule -- essentially building an additional peat burner to up the peating level on the spirit relative to the usual Balvenie approach. 48.3% abv.
The Sweet Toast of American Oak 12yo
We had the chance to try this close to its launch when we had the honor of hosting Apprentice Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie at Drammers Club last year, and unsurprisingly it was a big hit. This bottle, the 3rd in the Stories line, was her brainchild, wanting to experiment with making an even fruitier, sweeter-tasting Balvenie using virgin oak casks from Kelvin Cooperage to finish whisky that had aged for most of its life in ex-bourbon casks. I personally like to think of it as a traditional Balvenie tipping its hat to Kentucky, which suits me just fine! 43% abv.
Rezpiral Capon Espadin Mezcal
We had so much fun including Ulises Torrentera from Oaxaca's famous In Situ mezcal bar last week, we thought it would be fun to keep the party going, so we've invited Alex White, owner of Rezpiral, which I'm sure most of you know we did a private barrel pick with, so after we work our way through the 6 extraordinary Balvenie expressions described above, we'll take a little mezcal break with our Drammers-exclusive bottle and we've invited Alex to join us (will do my best to update you when we hear back). I've described the traditional capon or "castration" process at length in the past, so I won't repeat it here, but this is a special mezcal and if you need a refresher, we've got all the details up on our website drammers.com. It's also a happy excuse to note that we are in the process of securing two more batches of awesome mezcal from our friends at Rezpiral, two totally different batches from completely different mezcaleros now that the number of bottles we have in stock on this batch are winding down... 46% abv.
That's our lineup, and I hope you can join us! As with last week, those who buy a ticket through our website will get a sample set, which I can drop off on a citibike if you're not too far away ha (or you can pick it up). A quick note on sample sizes -- as mentioned above, for the Sweet Toast and Week of Peat, everyone will get effectively double pours that fill up the sample bottles. For the Vintage Cask in particular (a 700ml bottle) it's approx. a half-ounce pour, a little more for the 18yo dusty and the Dark Barley (both 750ml bottles), and for the Rezpiral and Founder's Reserve (a 1L bottle, hey now!) it's upwards of a 3/4 ounce pour. In other words, it's all over the map, which is entirely dictated by supply, so just FYI.
WHEN: this Friday, the 10th of April, starting from 5pm to 7:30pm EST
WHERE: On Zoom. All Drammers and their friends are welcome to join the video chat at this link (whether you get the samples or not): https://zoom.us/j/414885268?pwd=ZGNBRW9sN05pSVJEci8wQzdXQXgyUT09
Password: 04102020
Please let me know if you have any questions!
Best,
Charlie
Upcoming Events:
Tuesday April 7th - Podcast Premiere Party - 7pm: the episode of One Nation Under Whisky recorded live at our Drammers Club meeting will debut tomorrow night at midnight (effectively Wednesday), but we'll get a crack at it a few hours before, in a live "watch" party (more a listening party) on our Facebook page, where we can listen together, crack jokes in the commentary etc.
Friday 4/17 - Laphroaig with Simon Brooking!
And many more in the works, with a general plan to do a virtual tasting every week!