For my money the best Travel Retail Exclusive bottle you can buy.

I love the funky profile of Ledaig.  This is the perfect dram to sit back with and explore the layers of funky umami that just roll out.  It is savory and salty with just enough sweet wood spices to keep you looking, trying to figure out how to describe the profile.

No one could blame you if you took a dram of this for breakfast.  It has cereals, fruits, and milk— everything you need to get your day started.

Not the worst blended whisky I have ever had— nor the worst grain heavy mash-bill.  It’s not very complex and the whole of the Amrut single malt lineup towers over it in terms of the depth and complexity of the flavor profile.  While it was alright, I won’t be searching it out again any time soon.  I think I’ll stick to my Amrut single malts.

The bottle has grown on me, slowly.  Now that we’re about two thirds of the way through with our first bottle we’ve started grabbing it out of the cupboard a little more often.  It is still not a bottle we pull out with any reverence, it’s more like a bottle we have two of and might as well polish off.  I think on the whole I still prefer the Quarter Cask and the travel retail PX Cask.

Apple is probably my wife’s least favorite note to find in a whisky.  If she describes a dram as ‘apple juice’ then I know it is not something she ever wants to drink again.  While we’ve had other great pours from the Elements of Islay series, this one did not hit the spot.

There is something intensely romantic about cupping an older whisky and getting lost in thought.

A friend of ours called this bottle a masterpiece of wine influence.  I think my wife and I both found it far too sweet for our tastes.  The bartenders at LMDW seemed to feel the same way, after they tried their own taste of it, they quickly pulled out a 7.3 for my wife to taste in comparison.  

My introduction to Westland and what a cracker it was: peat, sweet, and bbq all come together beautifully.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this.  While the finish was weak, the nose was wonderful and the body was more complex than I expected with both sweet and savory notes present.  My experience with mass market blended scotch has not been very good, lots of cheap entry level bottles are mixer material and not always good to drink straight up.  This blend is a much better testament to what a blender can achieve combining some 20 different component single malt and grain scotches.

The Glen Scotia had a fascinating blend of ripe, sweet, and starchy tropical fruits with an unmistakeable dose of bleach.  It is the antiseptic bleach, Clorox, or chlorine that ties this dram together from faint hints on the nose to a dominant part of the long finish.  For a boy who grew up in the midwestern United States, the pungent smell of swimming pool cleaner chemical is the smell of summer.

This Laphroaig offered remarkable savory herbal notes which were enhanced by the aged and muted phenolic smoke in the background.  The nose and the palate did not quite match, but each was very enjoyable on its own.  While I said the metallic notes were not exactly unpleasant, they were a bit of a distraction from the rest of the flavor profile.

The Arran 14 took me a while to figure out.  I wrote up notes on it several times.  I loved the 10 Year and I loved the 18 Year, but the 14 Year really seemed to suffer middle child syndrome.  It was not the fun introductory malt anymore than it was the mature elder.  It lost some of the refreshing youth of the 10, but did not have the depth of the 18.  Was it an awkward teenager; no longer a cute child but far from a mature adult?

Curiosity satisfied.  I loved this.  The baked earthen oven and caramelized vegetable notes hit my right in the savory spot.  The unpeated Indian malted barley and the peated Scottish barley are in perfect harmony in this bottle.  One brings savory spices, the other sweet peaty smoke, each furthering the complexity of the dram.  The whole scene takes me straight to a beachside “Baby’s First Luau,” hanging out with parents and friends in the shade, salty ocean in the air, food slowly cooking.

The store pick Machir Bay might be great for someone who is ‘peat curious’ and wants a window into the range of flavors that scotch can pick up from peat, without being overwhelmed by lots of sherry or a viscous mouthfeel.  It might also be great for someone who needs a scotch with great smokey notes for a mixed drink where the let down on the mouthfeel will not be obvious.

The lightly peated ‘Edited’ is the middle child of Paul John’s core retail range, sitting between the unpeated ‘Brilliance’ and heavily peated ‘Bold.’  It combines elements of both, balancing the influence of Scottish peated malt against the tropical and tangy malted six-row barley from northern India.

Widow Jane sits in a charming, semi-industrial, quickly gentrifying, corner of Brooklyn a way off the closest metro stop.  It shares an open brick building with the Cacao Prieto chocolate factory and the two were once part of the same operation.