Benromach 15 Year
Benromach is a Speyside distillery founded in 1898 by Duncan McCallum and F.W. Brickman and currently owned by Gordon & MacPhail, a brand perhaps more known for their independent bottlings. Benromach makes their whisky using all of their senses: sight, smell, taste, feel. Using only first-filled casks, water from the Chapelton Spring in the Romach Hills they make a subtly smoky scotch that is only lightly peated. The Benromach 15 Year was then finished in ex-sherry casks. We often love a good sherry cask finish. Do you?
Ardbeg Blaaack
2020 marked the 20th Anniversary of the Ardbeg Committee, a fan club of Ardbeg enthusiasts and a way for the distillery to stay in touch with fans of the brand. Every year in the spring, the distillery will release a special Committee Release. While available to non-Committee buyers, members hear about the upcoming whisky first and sometimes have a chance to buy it before retail. The 2020 Committee Release is the Ardbeg Blaaack. The name references a black sheep, depicted on the cover amidst a sea of white sheep. The sheep are there because the whisky was matured in ex-pinot noir casks from New Zealand, another island nation known for having an extremely high number of sheep.
Knappogue Castle 12 Year Burgundy
What does a couple – one an architect – do when they find a run down castle in Ireland? Buy it and use it as the muse for a distillery. That’s at least what Mark Edwin Andrews, former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, and his wife, Lavonne (the architect) did in 1966 to this neglected castle left too long untended in County Clare, Ireland. At Scotchology, we can appreciate fine architecture and fine whiskey, simultaneously when at all possible. This brand is known for producing exceptionally smooth, triple-distilled Irish whiskies. We have sampled some of their core expressions in the past and now we dive into a member of their Cask Finish Series, the Knappogue Castle 12 Year Burgundy. We have loved burgundy cask finishes in the past, so read on to see what we think of this one.