Soba45
Highland Park 18 Year
Single Malt — Islands, Scotland
Reviewed
August 14, 2020 (edited October 20, 2020)
One of the many bottles I offloaded recently to auction and friends was this one. An older bottling. I think I could have got a lot more at auction but i sold it cost price to my friend...not purely altruisticly as i hoped he would offer me a sample or two when he opened (answer is yes he will!).
Anyhow out at a restaurant tonight I saw this for $12USD on the drinks menu and thought that's reasonable and had a crack. Usually any spirits I see on restaurant menus comprise of a limited range, all of which I've tried and they are heavily overpriced. I was thinking...hmm nice dram however if an old bottling not sad I offloaded...but given it's only a bit above average I suspect it's a new bottling. I checked and yes it was. Light fruity smoke, goes down easy but nothing special. 3.75 to 4 I'm thinking.
When my mate opens the old bottling will be interesting to see how much better it will be. I'm picking 4.25...sadly all the focus on stupid viking NASs means their core offerings seem to have gone down hill as well. The 21 now sells for a mind boggling $400USD here...i think they have definitely fallen further than even Macallan...
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@SeaDyck There are a fair few of us who mourn what a number of these distilleries including HP have become... there are always great new ones to replace them though:-)
@Slainte-Mhath Yes well they are the owners of Macallan as well so straight out of that playbook!
Glad I'm not the only one feeling the same about HP.
@Soba45 Ah, Highland Park. Really impressive to see how they wrecked their reputation among connoisseurs in such a short period of time!
@cascode Yes I'm quite interested to see if the older packaged bottling lives up to the hype. It's only around 5 years old I'd say so i guess it'll depend how long the shift in style has being going on as to whether I'll notice a big difference.
I don't think the new livery coincided with an intentional change to the 18 year old but gradual profile drift, batch variation and changing cask availability are real. I've not had an HP18 since 2016 so I can't say whether I've tasted any difference. I'll be interested to hear what your thoughts are when you get to try it.
@Benji-Robert Cheers mate :-). He definitely owes me a few from all the freebies I've sent to him over the years!
:[ and another one gone and another one gone another bites the dust excellent writing as always and make sure to savor that older edition 18y! your friend knows he owes you a favor.
@PBMichiganWolverine They updated the bottle design and renamed it as HP 18 Viking Pride. I think they claim that the contents didn't change, but many suspect they did.
Was this old one replaced with something else? Can’t keep up with their mind boggling array of Viking themed outputs