Ledaig 18 Year
The Ledaig brand comprises one half of Tobermory’s output, a heavily peated malt in the 30-40ppm range. The Tobermory distillery, in fact, was originally founded as the Ledaig distillery in 1798. The distillery has four wash stills and four spirit stills, with production capable of a million liters of spirit a year after an upgrade in 1990. The water for the whisky is taken from a small, private loch close to the Mishnish lochs. While the number of offerings in the brand is limited, they occasionally include limited options often featuring special cask finishes or unusual age statements. The Ledaig 18 is finished in ex-Sherry wood, though the official details don’t seem to note specifically what kind of sherry. Others seem to think well of this scotch, as it has won several awards at recent spirits competitions.
Ardbeg An Oa
Ardbeg added another entry to their main line in 2017, the An Oa (pronounced “an oh”) is named after the Mull of Oa located near the distillery. It was released with a quirky little video by way of introduction. The focus of the An Oa is that it has spent time in Ardbeg’s gathering vat, where whisky from many different cask types are blended together. The casks included here are from new charred oak, ex-PX sherry, and first fill bourbon casks, though there is no information on how much of each kind is included. There is also no information on how old any of the whiskies blended into this single malt are, though that is common for No Age Statements.
SnapShot: Del Bac Deep Dive
This SnapShot features four offerings from a distiller from the American southwest, Whiskey Del Bac from Hamilton Distillers. We decided to take a rapid fire comparison of their line after one of our members visited the distillery in January 2020 and brought back a few bottles to share. Over the course of an evening, we went through each a few times and managed somehow to write halfway-coherent notes. As always in this series, these are pretty off the cuff impressions.