@Rick_M So is the funky smell of a Springbank sulphur? I asked somebody else that recently and they said no.

@cascode - yes, this is true. Think Springbank.

You can get rotten egg, rubber, sweat, cabbage water, burnt match and other taints from sulphur in whisky, but you can also get "meaty" heft and funky overtones like a rum hogo when "good" sulphur compounds are present in small concentration, and it varies from cask to cask as well if it was an ex wine or sherry cask that was sulphur fumigated.

@Rick_M I’m mostly near Trump’s wall nowadays

@Richard-ModernDrinking - what are you waiting for? As a Brit, don’t you travel above Hadrian’s wall? :)

@Rick_M Right, that’s what I’ve always understood sulfur to mean, but either haven’t come across it or am immune to its presence! Jealous that you went to Campbeltown.

@Richard-ModernDrinking - it was a pour from our hotel bar. Sulfur is a natural byproduct of fermentation of both grapes and grains. Copper stills and barrel charing will reduce and eliminate sulfur compounds, but sulfur taste in whisky seems more common in sherry or wine barrel aged spirit. Think stink bombs and rotten eggs.

@Rick_M Was that a distillery bottling? My tasting vocabulary lacks the experience of a sulfurous cask, for better or worse

Last year in Campbeltown, the Longrow Malbec was the only whisky I didn’t like. Very sulfurous finish; maybe a bad cask.

Nailed it, and I concur about the Malbec expression