Tastes

Tomatin can do awesome stuff... this is not one of them. Cotton candy and oak

I'm with the expert reviewer here..very little going on here. Arran is a decent not to bad but not mindblowing distillery.. this is one of their poorer efforts. Faint green apple vanilla and ethanol

Well if you like creaming soda this is right up your alley..blargh this is one of the weirdest whiskies I'd ever tried. If you asked me to guess what it was I'd say it's like someone got base ethanol and added artificial candy like flavour..how is this so highly rated???

I preferred the Caol Ila moscatel finish. This one is an interesting dram, you get an intense sweet peat hit up front which immediately dissipates and a blast of ethanol washes the flavour away a leaves a long warming glow then a weird pear flavour on the mid tongue. Interesting but not a big fan.

Ah Caol Ila...after a lot of crazy arse drams sometimes you just need a middle of the road dram to remind you what scotch is about. Nothing fancy or exotic just plain old smokey scotch, slightly sweeter than the usual 12.

And final posting for Dramfest 2020! A new NZ distillery which does great stuff. It was in partnership with NZ Spirit Workshops but then split up. I think the distillate or at least the equipment is the same which is impressive as the NZ SW stuff was terrible... Now I had a good chat to them and apparently they get all their micro barrels from Tasmania as there is a place which gets all the Aussie and other barrels in then restaves them and exports or sells them on. All their stuff was great...finally 2 decent whisky distillery's in NZ.

Dramfest 2020.

Dramfest 2020. The first release of their three year old 100% New Zealand Single Malt Whisky. New make spirit made from 100% Canterbury grown and malted barley, mashed, fermented and double pot still distilled. Aged more than 2 1/2 years in a 50 litre virgin French oak barrel then finished in a Pedro Ximenez sherry conditioned 20 litre micro barrel to give a New Zealand twist on a classic sherry barrel malt.

One thing I love about Dramfest is that you often get to chat to the distillers and sometimes even try new make. I like what Hunter Laing does with their bottlings and when I heard they had opened an Islay distillery I was very interested to try some of the distllate. It's a family owned distillery which is rare and the first open on Islay since 2005 with Kilchoman. Every aspect of the set up they have gone top notch. It has Oregon pine fermenters, two lantern shaped pot stills (a 13,000 litre wash still and an 11,000 litre spirit still), the longest lyne arm in Scotland apparently and worm tub condensers. The distillate is made from malt peated to between 40 and 45 PPM from Port Ellen Maltings and undergoes long slow fermentation, around 72 hours. Jim McEwan came out of retirement, consulted on the project and joked that finding the cut point in the spirit was a difficult as giving birth. I also am quite excited that they have a lot of different caskings...the diversity reminding me of Benriach. Primarily they have about 70% first-fill bourbon barrels; then about 20 or 25% first fill ex-oloroso hogsheads and some butts. However they also have some other wines casks, such as Port, Madeira, Muscat, Rioja, and some rum (they do the Kill Devil range) so i'm looking forward to hopefully some great wine and port cask finishing. Anyhow the new make was awesome very biscuity fruity and smokey. Very much hope they have good casks to do it justice.

A lighter acidic type of peat flavour. Not one for me.