I’ve been using these sticky posts as a place to display the key art I made for the week’s reviews, and most of them have focused on specific distilleries or regions. That made it easy to write something up about them; history, style, my thoughts: whatever felt right.

This week is a bit different; we’ve got a collection of very old malts, and one youngster, from the independent bottler SMWS.

I have been a member of SMWS for about six years now. My pathway to the independent bottler started when a friend organized a small bottle split group that could share SMWS bottles brought back from Japan. While we discussed maybe getting bottles from the US, the US chapter bottle prices tend to be higher and shipping was far more expensive so we stuck with Japan (those issues are not quite as pronounced today, especially shipping.)

It turned out, however, that we enjoyed the social aspect of pouring and sharing whisky, of trying to describe it to one another, and generally making a raucous with our tastings. Having now been to many other tastings of different sorts, I have come to appreciate ours as far more open than a formal tasting guided by a single person, but also fairly regimented and directed compared to an open event… I have no doubt this is due to my experience corralling students in the classroom because when I am gone, I hear it is chaos.

We learned very quickly that tastings need food… and that there is an upper limit on just how many bottles you can pour and expect to get anything out of. We preserved and tastings became not just about the whisky, but about the food we all brought to share.

With a need for more whisky than we could get from group members occasionally dropping by Japan to collect bottles, we started ordering occasional sets from the US chapter of SMWS, and then many of us started setting up our own accounts, because maybe sometimes we did in fact want a whole bottle and not just an ounce or two.

The pandemic permanently shifted us to the US branch and what we could have shipped from overseas auctions. Travel to Japan was difficult to impossible, and so our whisky group grew: everyone was looking for something to do during the pandemic and so we hosted Zoom tasting sessions once or twice a month until we all burnt out a bit and could finally start traveling again.

Our tastings are closer to a quarterly occurrence now and the Creator’s Collection, a new bottle series that SMWS started at the end of 2024 and continued in 2025, has been perfect for organizing a tasting event with the local group. The bottles have a theme, a connection, and some wonderful artwork.

The tasting we did with these bottles was close to our six year anniversary and what a set to pour!

Artwork this week is my own: here we have an imaginary whisky bar staffed by the indefatigable Turnip. The thought behind the art was cosy camaraderie because that is something whisky can provide, so what better vision of cosy and camaraderie than a few cool cats sharing some drams in a fashionable whisky bar as the sun sets over a soft city pop color palate. City skyline partly inspired by my memory of one in Glasgow.