June 2023 Digest

June 30, 2023 Whiskery Turnip

Welcome to a brief wrap-up of reviews from June 2023!

June was a time of travel as I hit the road for conferences for the first time since 2019. I spent most of the month abroad, visiting Sydney, Australia, for the first time and returning to Singapore. It was a brilliant, albeit long, month of travel. While I had loads of fun, met interesting and generous people, ate tons of good food, and enjoyed walking around in new environs, I was certainly glad to finally be home again with my beloved cats and sleeping in my own bed.

I included a lot more whisky on the non-work part of my itinerary than I ever had before— though I surely could have included even more had I really wanted to go all out. Before leaving, I did a fair amount of investigating between asking friends for recommendations and searching online. A few bars and shops I visited were surprised to find a random academic walking through their doors; apparently, they do not always get many random strangers coming in who found the place online.

Despite being on the road, I still managed to post many reviews— though not on a set schedule and at all sorts of weird times during the day and night. The first couple of posts during June wrapped up a week of Caol Ila reviews that started at the end of May. One of those, a 37-year behemoth, was a special pour for my birthday earlier in the year. That bottle, which was shared with a half dozen other friends, lived up to the occasion and, in any normal month, would have been the absolute highlight of the month.

One of the places I found during my pre-trip planning was the Oak Barrel, a bottle shop right on the edge of Sydney’s financial district, Chinatown, and bordering Hyde Park. Their well-organized website included a list of events— and would you know it? They had a tasting scheduled for a couple days after I arrived with That Boutique-y Whisky Co. I was familiar with the Atom Brands label but had only tried a few of their bottles. After taking a day to ensure I was healthy— there was no point in attending a tasting if I was stuffed up, unable to taste, or at risk of spreading germs to someone else—, I stopped by the Oak Barrel. The staff there was incredibly generous to a jet-lagged traveler, giving me a whirlwind tour of Australian whisky and hooking me up with the last ticket to the tasting that evening.

I did not expect to taste a 50-Year-old malt during this trip, but that is exactly what happened during the TBWC tasting. You can read about most of the lineup here with separate posts discussing the 10-Year TBWC Birthday Blend and the 50-Year Glenfarclas— clearly the star of the show. I enjoyed the venue and people so much that I returned to the Oak Barrel a few more times during my sojourn in Sydney. The staff set me up with a handful of Australian malts from Sullivans Cove, Cape Byron, and Amber Lane to try. I also purchased samples of the Talisker 30 Year and Royal Lochnagar 16 Year. It was a good thing, too, as my only attempts to visit whisky bars in Australia did not pan out.

Whisky bar visits in Singapore worked out much better. However, there were still a few hiccups, as the opening hours listed on Google were not always correct, and one of the bars we hoped to visit was closed during our first week in the country. Once I have all of my Singapore reviews posted, I will write up a wrap-up for that leg of the trip. Still, tasting highlights included a 45-Year Craigduff, 40-Year Ledaig, and a 50-Year BenRiach from La Maison du Whisky and The Auld Alliance.

Somehow I ended up tasting two 50-Year-old malts in June and 829 years in total age between all the whiskies with age statements. I do not expect to hit numbers like that again, possibly ever. My average score for the month was also incredibly high, which speaks to the quality of the whiskies my wife and I tried during this trip. I may need to spend July recalibrating my expectations!

A few numbers from June: