Swirls wrote:Last night I snagged a bottle of Elijah Craig Small Batch at my local liquor store for $69.99. They said they only got 3 bottles in, and were super excited to get that many.
Is the paper label at the bottom black and in gold does it say "Barrel Proof"? If so you got a hell of a bourbon and paid the right price for it.
Jocephus wrote:has anyone had ron swanson's drink, lagavulin 16yr scotch whiskey?
Sure, classic.
When I was getting into Scotch I went down a big rabbit hole of reading and tasting and spent a lot of time with the book "The World Atlas of Whisky" by Dave Broom. I'd HIGHLY recommend that book for a Christmas gift for the Scotch drinker in your family or for yourself if you're interested in the history of literally every distillery plus some really awesome tasting notes. In that book, re flavor and tasting, Broom does a couple things.
1. Breaks single malts into five camps: Fragrant & Floral, Fruity & Spicy, Malty & Dry, Rich & Round, Smoky & Peaty.
2. Puts them all on a X/Y axis. X axis is light to rich body, y axis from bottom to top is delicate to smoky for peat content.
If you do a google image search for dave broom single malt flavor map you'll find a few images. Most are wrong, they're people re-creating the map without color-coding the dots to correspond to #1 above.
Anyway, imagine an X/Y axis, Lagavulin is at almost the extreme upper right. On the axis of Light -> Rich, it sits about 90% of the way to the right--it's very rich. On the Y axis of Delicate -> Smoky it's about 98% of the way to the top--only a couple Ardbeg expressions come in smokier. The dot that indicates its flavor family is the one corresponding, of course, to "Smoky & Peaty."
Here's where that becomes fun for me. Say you can't find Lagavulin 16.
Laphroaig 15 is nearly as smoky and just a bit lighter in body.
Lagavulin Distillers Edition is quite a bit richer--the richest on Broom's map--and a bit less smoky.
After that you're going to Caol Ila 18 (much lighter in body, and decidedly less smoky) or Talisker 25 (same richness, lots less smoky). So the Broom map kind of tells us for the Lagavulin 16 that there are really only 1-2 things that are very close, and that Lagavulin Distillers Edition is tougher to find than the 16. So if someone we know loves Lagavulin 16, we can really gotta put the legwork in to find that Lagavulin 16, or in a pinch go Laphroaig 15.
A lot of scotch whisky is like this at the extreme ends. If you go to the other top corner of the flavor map, Ardbeg 10 stands alone. Nothing close to it at like 5/100 on the Light-Rich axis and a 100 on the Delicate-Smoky axis. Laphroaig 10 is the next closest thing and it's quite a bit heavier. If you like a very light body and a metric [expletive] ton of smoke, Ardbeg 10 is effectively un-swap-out-able. If you like Spingbank 10--a whisky that is very light in body, and runs about 70/100 on the Delicate-Smoky axis but is not defined by it's smoke, then Springbank 10 is about all you can get in that immediate ballpark because the fruit/spice-iness defines it more than the smoke.
However, if a person's taste lives in a few other neighborhoods then there are a some areas of the flavor grid where there's a wealth of whisky. If a whisky drinker likes either:
Fruity & Spicy, and around the halfway point of both Light-Rich and Delicate-Smoky
Rich & Round, at the extreme end of Light-Rich and the midpoint of Delicate-Smoky
Then there are at least a dozen easily attainable single malts on the market for that drinker, plus heaps more in private labels like Cadenhead and Gordon & Macphail and so on. Those are good neighborhoods to be in as a drinker, since you have the ability to explore different things that don't force you too far out of your comfort zone.