Balvenie 14 Year Peat Week
The Balvenie are large and successful enough to not only keep their full stock of standard offerings in full swing, they’re also keen on playing with all the elements available in whisky production to create more limited offerings. The Balvenie 14 Year “Peat Week” is so named because the distillery has apparently been distilling peated whisky since 2002 for one week a year. Hitching their cart to the transparency train, Balvenie does a brilliant job of listing exactly what week in any given year this scotch was distilled during, along with some particulars about how peat characteristics are imparted to whisky in general. While not part of their standard lineup, it appears that Balvenie is poised to make this scotch a regular or semi-regular offering, even if only ever in limited quantities.
Kilchoman Winter 2010
Back in Kilchoman’s early days, less than a decade ago for those keeping count at home, the distillery would put out seasonal releases for lack of having anything steady and regular enough for what their Machir Bay later became. Kilchoman doesn’t do this biannual release anymore, having transitioned to a more stable (though still not completely stable) line up of offerings. This Winter 2010 release followed the Summer 2010 release and, unsurprisingly, neither are readily available now. Still not sure how we ended up with this one, other than it being dragged out of some dusty cellar after gathering cobwebs for a few years. Not complaining in the slightest, however.
Port Charlotte Islay Barley 2008
Bruichladdich has been pushing the sense of locality and terroir with their NAS offerings lately, and this Port Charlotte is no different, made with barley exclusively from the island of Islay, something the Peat Project we tried a few years ago didn’t claim, and a variant of the Scottish barley used in the Classic Laddie we recently had. The grain was harvested in 2008 from the farms at Coull, Kynagarry, Island, Rockside, Starchmill & Sunderland, then distilled that December before being aged on the shores of Loch Indaal. You’d strain to find a more local dram.