Ardbeg Heavy Vapours has no age statement, is bottled at 46% ABV, and sells for around $130. This is the worst bottle that I have opened in 2023. I have started buying a few bottles as financial investments, and with no intention of opening them. The Ardbeg Day special releases are part of my “portfolio” now. I was inspired to crack open this Ardbeg Day special release by the only YouTube whisky reviewer who I still watch on a regular basis, Eat Smoke Drink, because he absolutely and hilariously goes into a rage about how atrocious this whisky is. Ardbeg Heavy Vapours is so monumentally bad, and such a malicious rip-off for the consumer that it belongs in a museum, perhaps next to the modern Macallan 18 Double Oak. This is Ardbeg Wee Beastie that they fucked up by forgetting a purifier on the still, and instead of throwing out the ruined product, they decided to come up with a marketing gimmick for this garbage and sell it for more than twice of the price of Wee Beastie. This whisky does have some average density vapors on the nose, and smells decent, but completely falls apart on the palate and finish. This is young, young whisky that tastes like smoky vodka. There’s unflattering notes of plastic, unripe banana, and potatoes. Thankfully, there is no finish with this whisky. Ardbeg is a distillery that has recently started to evolve into a long-lasting Ponzi scheme, and, fortunately, there are still plenty of new clueless “Ardbegians” to inflate the prices of discontinued bottles, so buying bottles of Ardbeg will probably still make financial sense for many years to come, if you are not planning to drink what’s inside. And, if you have the disposable income, you can still open a bottle for shits and giggles here and there, when the mood hits. I must give Ardbeg credit because Heavy Vapours is, in its own special way, awe-inspiring. They have stopped making whisky and they are just bottling their own piss. And I must yield a bemused stunned smile as I drink $130-a-bottle piss.