Loch Lomond Single Grain

Nov 2019. Clear light gold. Medium small tulip. Aromatic gentle sweet spicy, light vanilla, pear, sweeten apple, light nutmeg, light dried spicy in nose. Medium minus body with surprisingly lots of wood spicy, licorice, wild floral honey, candied cinnamon biscuits in palate. Good balance m finish. A single grain made exclusively from malted barley! We’re not the most! What a great soul and courage.

I've recently put myself in an inconvenient position of being unable to mentally pass on from one distillery to another leaving the most of its off-the-shelf range whiskies untried, so here's yet one another review about the lot offered by the newly reformed Loch Lomond distillery. Due to the scotch whisky regulation issues LL Single Grain cannot be considered to be a single malt though they use only malted barley during the production. The reason is simple and it lies beyond all the adequate measures - at Loch Lomond they use way too many different techniques so it's hard to tell if the malted barley that has undergone the continuous distillation in a Coffey still can still be considered a single malt at the end of the process. Well, off we go to the whisky itself. It definitely has much from both single malt and single grain types of whisky and still it remains a whisky from Loch Lomond what becomes obvious as soon as you open the bottle. Aroma is full of bright vanilla, even Vanilla Coke as vanilla here is massive, heavy and biting. Also there are some ripe peppery-sweet yellow apples and pears. It lacks of a certain complexity relevant to all the single malts but still is a better piece of a whisky-art then Girvan for example (no matter how many years this bloody Girvan has been matured in oak casks). The taste is bold and aggressive with sour notes, fresh herbs, vanilla and some oriental delights such as baklava and rahat-lokum. The finish is nice, short and warming and it also delivers a vodka style so familiar from the Girvan tasting. LL Single Grain is nice in overall and I place it higher than LL Original Single Malt but that's only because the Original was a bit of a disappointment. As I see it, the single grain whiskies have already lost a war against single malts over the market no matter how much some of the big companies try to start this "matured single grains are no worse than classic single malts" trend.

Very sweet on the nose with potent vanilla palate. Not the strongest finisher. Easy drinker.

Sweet, gentle, cough medicine. Interesting and different but one dimensional.