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Save Our Whiskey Bars! Benefit Event for Delilah's in Chicago! Featuring The Glenmorangie's Dr. Bill Lumsden as our Guest Speaker
November 10, 2020, starting at 5pm EST / 2pm Pacific (on Zoom)
Fellow Drammers!
The important whiskey bars in the world need our help, especially in the United States right now, and Delilah’s is one of the great whiskey bars out there, so we’re very proud to be working with Glenmorangie to do the 6th event in our Save Our Whiskey Bars! series in support of this great shrine to whiskey. As most of our members know, we’ve done events recently supporting Jack Rose Saloon in Washington DC, Brandy Library in New York and even the great mezcal bar Ghost Donkey. This time we’re beyond grateful to be able to welcome back a great friend to Drammers Club, the eminent Dr. Bill Lumsden, Head of Distilling, Whisky Creation and Maturing Stocks for The Glenmorangie Company. Together we've assembled an incredible lineup to celebrate this great whisky bar, its owner Mike Miller, and its incredible staff. On to our lineup, drumroll please…
Rare Old Auction Bottles: Everyone who signs up for this event will get 10 samples, and 9 of them will be the same, but for the 10th expression half the group will get one rare old Glenmo we secured at auction, the other half will get to try a different rare bottle. So it goes with collecting at auction. The first 30 people to sign up will receive a pour of the 21 year old Sesquicentennial bottling (43% abv), created in 1993 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the distillery, and we've read it was so limited (this is bottle 102 of 150) that it was only released to the staff of the distillery. We'll have to confirm with Dr. Bill if that's true. The next 30 folks to sign up will receive 18yo Maltman's Special Reserve, a very rare old ceramic decanter (43% abv).
Caskmasters / Taghta Release - Cask A. This is a fun one -- back in March 2013, Glenmorangie launched a "cask masters" program with the idea that fans could participate in all the decisions of developing a new whisky, even helping design the packaging. This was the result, billed as a "crowd sourced whisky". This Cask A was matured in Grand Cru Burgundy casks (see below for Cask B, which we'll also be tasting). This project was created by Dr. Bill, and our understanding is that only 12,000 bottles were released globally. And btw, to save you the trouble, no the cask masters program is no longer active, but we can still enjoy the whisky!
Caskmasters / Taghta Release - Cask B. Same program as above, this time our understanding is the Cask B option featured whisky matured in a Grand Cru Bordeaux.
Malaga Cask 12 year Barrel Select Release. (details on this to come)
A Tale of Cake. Hot off the presses! We're excited that we'll be among the first to try this exciting new release from The Glenmorangie, which sees their trademark juice finished in a Tokaji dessert wine cask. They bill it as a "sweet, multi-layered whisky lusciously reminiscent of cake". And in classic Dr. Bill fashion, it started with an idea -- that so many of Dr. Bill's favorite memories could be associated with cake, whether cooking it with his grandmother, or when his daughter cooked him a pineapple upside down cake for his birthday. Will be fun to pick Dr. Bill's brain about how we settled on this exact formula. 46% abv.
The Cadboll Estate 15yo. Another relatively new. limited edition release, matured in American oak bourbon casks, and (as the name pretty clearly implies) using barley distilled from their own Cadboll Estate. So, in other words, it is using barley they grew themselves in the fields surrounding the distillery, which obviously means the quantities will be very limited. This bottle will give us a great excuse to get Dr. Bill to weigh in on the great terroir debate. 43% abv.
18yo Glenmorangie Extremely Rare. This bottle was released as part of Glenmorangie's "Prestige Range", and features an interesting aging experiment. First aged 15 years in the normal fashion in ex-bourbon casks, then 30% was trasnferred to olorosso sherry casks to age for 3 additional years, at which point the whiskies were blended back together. 43% abv.
Signet. Another big one -- although it has no age statement, it is said to include some of the distillery's oldest and rarest stocks, ranging from 35 to 40 years old in the mix. The concept here was a blend of whiskies produced using two different types of barley, the local Cadboll Estate barley (that we'll also be tasting on its own this evening), and malted chocolate barley, mostly used for craft beers. It was also matured in virgin American oak. To list all the awards this whiskey won would take 10 pages, but this is widely seen as one of Dr. Bill's greatest accomplishments. 46% abv / non-chill-filtered.
Duthac. This is a travel retail exclusive, so another chance to try something you might not otherwise get to try anytime soon. It was partly matured in PX sherry casks, partly matured in virgin oak casks. The name is in reference to St. Duthac from the middle ages, whose grave is located at the Royal Burgh of Tain, and apparently King James IV made an annual pilgrimage to visit the shrine. 43% abv.
The Original 10yo. We'll likely start things off with this bottle -- after all, we need a baseline to compare all these other rare and unusual bottles to! Hard to beat their Original to really drive home the DNA of what The Glenmorangie stands for, and we'll encourage folks to save some to go back to for comparison as we taste through the rarer bottles in the lineup!
That's our lineup! We hope you can join us. As always, while we have no reason to expect this lineup will change, it's always possible a bottle will break in shipping or whatever, and if we need to change the lineup, we'll update it here. Since this event is for charity, unlike most of our events, we are opening it up for non-members of our club. So for those of you who are new to our events, each expression is meant to be about the same as you'd get at an in-person tasting, so call it approx. 2/3rds of an ounce. We'll post the Zoom link for the event the day of the event. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
Cheers,
Drammers Club