Dreaming-of-Islay
Haig Club Single Grain
Single Grain — Lowlands, Scotland
Reviewed
May 10, 2017 (edited August 11, 2017)
Rather than piling on I'll offer a suggestion for how to use this: mix it 3:1:1 with Cointreau and amaretto, serve up with an orange rind to garnish. It produces a fine cocktail. I agree it's not a sipping whisky (perhaps not even a whisky at all). But if it's on discount (and I got it at a pretty steep discount that brought it down to around $30), it's a fair mixer!
Here's another odd scent note: when I poured a little of this and had it with a cigar, the aroma was a dead ringer for chocolate ice cream, so much so that it was a little eerie. So there is some nice quality hiding in this scotch, and I'd be intrigued to try a version that is aged a little longer and not rolled out to the market with this over-the-top, Beckham-fueled marketing hype.
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Without offending any 'experts', but for a well-working rating system, you need standards what a certain score actually means. With probably two dozen people on the Distiller tasting board, and lots of rather high marks (HP18 = 99 pts!?), I feel not everyone knows how to use these points. One reviewer might think 80 equals 'average' while others have a tendency to give most malts a 90+. This has been seen and discussed many times on Distiller. Furthermore, each and every rating will reflect the reviewers taste and personal preference - it's never objective. Batch variation is also an issue: when was a malt actually tested? Years ago? I wished we as users had the possibility to give half stars, as the average of hundreds if not thousands of user ratings will *always* be more objective than one single expert review.
With scores like these, it makes you wonder if the "experts" got a *special* bottle somehow. :)