Kilchoman 100% Islay (2nd Edition)

I love this whisky. I really do. I love it in a way that's difficult to articulate. This isn't The Best Whisky I've Ever Had - although up against objective measures it stands up as a very fine whisky. But I can't quite put my finger on why I'm so enamoured with it. To draw an analogy I feel like Kilchoman is a new band and I have just heard their awesome debut album.

The good things about it – the smell is amazing, it gets off to a good start with a massive blast of sweet smoke, I confess I couldn’t stop taking the top off it for a niff.

The taste is lovely. Maybe it’s the youthfulness but it comes across as very fresh. It’s a little bit like the Caol Ila I’ve described elsewhere but with a more creamy edge like the Laddie 10. It has a very appealing straw colour that might make you think it was a bit weedy if you didn’t know better.

As I say, this isn't the perfect whisky; it’s very smooth for its age but still a tiny bit jagged on the edges and the finish isn’t the longest. But it’s exciting, it leaves you wanting more. It’s the unpolished 30 minute album that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I can’t guarantee that other people would love this whisky - in the same way that your best friend might be utterly non-plussed when you introduce them to you new favourite band - but I’ll be proselyting.

What else is there to say? Well I’m clearly not the only one getting excited by Kilchoman, their various expressions have been getting some good reviews. The Kilchoman Distillery itself is a very interesting operation, Islay's newest distillery in 100 years, very small output, big on provenance etc but you can look all that up.

Some might take issue with the price and might balk at the idea of paying £60+ for this expression  or others (£40 for their standard Machir Bay bottling) considering none of their whisky is even 10 years old yet. But considering the entire operation takes place on one farm (including growing the grain) the price does seem to reflect the input. Plus there is a scarcity vale due to the size of the operation. 

As you might guess I'll be trying more.

Bruichladdich 10 Year Old

The Laddie Ten – there has been plenty written about this whisky already. It is the long-awaited standard bottling from the resurrected Bruichladdich distillery on Islay. Obviously lots of people were keen to taste and review this when it first appeared but I’m going to add my thoughts anyway, mainly because I’ve just polished off a wee 20cl bottle that I picked up recently.
 
This is really good stuff. I tried it once at the Bruichladdich distillery and kind of dismissed it. At the time, I was on Islay to drink peaty whisky so didn't pay this much mind. Also, I was giddy at the prospect of trying the Octomore 4.2.

But more recently I’ve had the opportunity to try the Laddie Ten in isolation. And taken on its own, away from the smoke monsters from the rest of Islay you can appreciate how good this is. It’s creamy - that’s the main thing that I’ve got from it. It reminded me strongly of Ice-Cream soda – vanilla flavour, dairy richness with a bit of lemonade sweetness. But it’s not sickly sweet - it's just like a lightly creamed and sweetened water (you can have that slogan for free Bruichladdich). I'd even go as far as to say delicately flavoured, it's easy to see how this might get a little lost up against a Laphraoig or an Ardbeg. But this is easy-drinking and very moreish. And creamy - did I mention that?

In terms of smell (sorry, nose)  – I got butter mixed with a bit of burnt sugar. Strangely, a bit of balsa wood and woodglue. It looks nice too, pale with a nice oiliness to it.

The bottle and packaging are nicely stylish – very clean and bold. As I’ve said before, thankfully Bruichladdich manage to back-up their eye-catching packaging with excellent whisky. 

It’s not the cheapest – at least £30 for a bottle, although that said it is bottled at a slightly higher than average 46%.  

There are many whiskies I’ve tasted and enjoyed thoroughly but usually after finishing a bottle I'm keen to try something else. The Laddie Ten has joined the small list of ‘I’d buy another bottle’ which to be honest is about as strong an endorsement as I can give.

Bright Young Things

So I was just talking about whisky possibly being “too old”. But what about youth in whisky? As I said in my last post, the impression you get when starting out in the world of whisky is that single malt has to be at least 10 years old to be any good. 10 or 12 seems to the minimum age of most distillery entry level bottlings.

Obviously whisky can be younger (although it needs to be at least 3) but most stuff released before it turns 10 goes straight into making up the numbers in blends. But is there any good single malt whisky under 10?

Yes, of course there is. I just didn’t know this until recently. The realisation came about during two distillery visits on Islay. The first was genuinely a shock. You may have heard of Octomore whisky – it is produced by Bruichladdich and is the world most heavily peated whisky. It is £100 a bottle.

Also it is only 5 years old.

It seemed amazing that they would try and charge £100 when you could get a 20 year old for that kind of money. Thankfully I was lucky enough to try Octomore 4.2 at Bruichladdich and it’s one of the most amazing whiskies I’ve ever tasted – it was fresh and smooth and surprisingly light given the extreme phenol levels. I didn’t take any proper notes and this isn’t a review but one of the things that surprised me the most, considering the age, was how smooth it tasted. £100 is a lot of money but I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to shelling out that much for a bottle.

So an exceptional young whisky – but maybe that was it, it was an exception. An experiment with high phenol levels that’s produced a freakishly good 5 year old.

The next encounter with young whisky also took me by surprise but mainly because I didn’t realise it was under 10 until after the tasting. I stopped by the Laphroaig distillery, firstly trying the 10 Year Old (a familiar favourite) and then tried the Quarter Cask for the first time. I was won over by this – it really is very flavourful and I’ll post a review in due course. However I had assumed at the time it was a variation on the 10yo but didn’t realise until much later on that whisky is only 6 or 7 years old. The whisky spends 5 years or so matured in full sized casks and then is finished in ¼ cask. The greater surface-area to whisky ratio of the smaller cask means its finished differently and more speedily. Not to the detriment of the whisky I hasten to add - quite the opposite.

So two young whiskies discovered within a couple of days. One of them an experiment but the other a widely available standard bottle.

And the more I’ve looked into this they seem to be everywhere (often referred to as No Age Statement). Sometimes it seems they are bottled at a younger age to get a preview of what they will be like later on. The consensus on tasting notes is that younger whiskies are shorter on the finish but a bit fresher in the taste.

So that’s it. My interest is piqued and it is another facet of whisky to explore. The next whisky in the crosshair is an expression of the highly regarded Kilchoman - the oldest of which is only 5. Watch this space.

A note on “authenticity”

A few thoughts on whether “authenticity” matters.

Lagavulin produces some very, very good whisky. It has a very charming old distillery, stone-built with white-wash walls, right on the rocky southern coast of Islay. The décor in the tasting room is very erm… tasteful. Big armchairs, wood panelling and tartan print wallpaper, it feels like you’re sitting in a Laird’s hunting lodge.

So when I was sitting in that  tasting room a couple of months ago everything was set for an enjoyable tour. And like every distillery tour it was enjoyable, but two things left me feeling slightly disappointed and maybe even a touch disillusioned. The first was hearing that the Lagavulin distillery runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and only requires one person to run its operations. And the second was that, once distilled, the spirit is put in a tanker, taken to the mainland and put into barrels to mature.

This wasn’t my first trip to a distillery – I already knew that most of distilleries are owned by large parent companies (Lagavulin is owned by Diageo). And that most distilleries don’t do their own malting, and that in fact many of them use barley that isn’t even grown in the UK.  That’s fine and understood.

But being hit with those two further things just seemed to make it a little bit too far removed from the romantic image of whisky production I had in my head.

The image of one man watching a computer screen and monitoring computerized systems from an office and then pumping 20,000 litres into a tanker to be shipped to a warehouse on an industrial estate outside Edinburgh just doesn’t seem quite as romantic as one might hope.

Now obviously I’m clearly a bit of a sucker for being buying into by the hoary old sales guff that the whisky industry peddles about the tradition and mystery of their product. But it is a seductive image nonetheless, and that’s the problem – if you’re being sold the image of whisky being the “authentic” taste of Islay or Speyside or wherever it is disconcerting to have that image rattled.

I don’t mean to pick on Lagavulin either – I know most distilleries operate in similar manner. And at least they were honest on the tour - would I have preferred it if they had tried to pretend that everything was produced on-site by kilt-wearing, barrel-chested yeomen using wood tools and going on about the “art of making whisky”? That would have been just as inauthentic. Maybe it is just my realisation that whisky making isn’t an art after all, maybe it’s a science – or at least merely an industrial process. Just because the end product is magical and evocative doesn’t mean what goes into it is too…

So does it really matter? I suppose not. Certainly it’s not going to matter to Diageo what I have to say. Making Whisky is an industrial operation and it just so happens that a small proportion of whisky-drinker prefer drinking single malt to blends. And a smaller proportion again of those are actually have enough of an interest to visit a distillery. They are hardly going to change their production so single malt enthusiast can feel slightly more contented.

And even despite my minor disappointment I can honestly say that when it came to the tasting I enjoyed Lagavulin as much as ever. Coal Ila (like Lagavulin owned by Diageo) has always been one of my all time favourites and remains so.

The closest thing I think of as an analogy for this experience is that it’s like reading an interview with your favourite musician and hearing them say something you don’t like. It might lessen your opinion of them slightly and even annoy you. But they won’t change anything that they do and despite what you think, the next time you hear your favourite song, your hairs will still stand on end. There is no fooling your ears. Or your tastebuds.