Rating: 7/23 I have no idea what to expect from this. I've heard very mixed things, but Bladnoch is usually fairly good with their single malts, so hopefully their blends are good too. N: Fairly tart and a tad meaty. I get some lemon, tangerine, and dry spice, but not really any wood. A waft of smoke, some vanilla, and a little bit of lemon blossom. Some dry mineral perhaps? Unfortunately , there isn't much going on here, so it's a struggle to pick anything out. It has one of those noses that has character, but it isn't all good character. It most certainly smells like the type of thing you'd pour out of a bottom shelf sub-$20 bottle. The floral (I'm getting tangerine blossom now that it's been sitting out for 10 minutes or so) and slightly rich notes are nice, but it still smells generic, muddled, and unappealing. P: Lemon and spice hit first with an unfortunate amount of harshness and a fair amount of alcohol flavor on a sort of creamy background. The lemon turns into citron at times with a bit of artificial sweetener and then a little bit of meaty malt comes in. There's some smoke and some herbal flavor that even treads a little into the territory of Copper Fox Rye's unique profile, which I guess makes some sense given the combination of grain and malt. It tastes very young and mostly not malty. The flavor is light and nothing here is very full. There are a bunch of flavors that don't quite work, though there are some nectary notes that are promising. The harshness is a real problem though. It really burns. And there is sulfur too. F: Dry with artificial sweetener and citron. It reminds me a bit of the Veil citron flavored vodka. It also burns and has sulfur. The harshness really comes out on the finish here and it makes it feel like the flesh is being stripped off my tongue a little bit. Tragically, this seems worse than I had feared it might be. It isn't just that it has a weak flavor. It isn't just that there's sulfur. It isn't just that it tastes young. It isn't just that the malt is weak. This is also quite harsh. The flavor is better than that of Grant's because it has substantially less sulfur, but it isn't quite as good as Sir Edward's 12 and it isn't as smooth as either of them. I think that means that this is about on par with Grant's. This is a fairly poor quality scotch without the harshness, but the harshness is quite substantial. It is actually painful to drink this. It has the harshness of something 60% alcohol while being the bare minimum of 40%. I might actually pay a little bit to avoid having to drink this because of that harshness. The flavor is way better than Glen Logie's and the drink as a whole is substantively better, but we're talking low bars here: Glen Logie costs 1/5 of what this does. At times, I feel like this is like drinking paint stripper. Grant's is plagued by that sulfur and I would say that the flavors here are executed better, but it's still a less complex and harsher dram. Because of the harshness, I can't even pawn this off on someone who doesn't know good scotch. Sir Edward's 12 still has a weirder profile with its oiliness and such, but it's more complex and its flavors are still decent, so I'd say it's better. This is either at the level of Grant's or a step above it, but it isn't as good as Sir Edward's. That would make this a 7 to 8. I'd say that the alcohol harshness is substantial enough that this about aligns with Grant's' quality, so it gets a 7.