Any Whisky Connoisseurs in our mist

suzyb

I want to make sure I'm correct in thinking no one in the whisky connoisseur world cares about bottling year. It's all about the age of the whisky i.e. how long it sat maturing in the cask.

So if you were looking for a whisky as a birthday gift. You wouldn't look for one bottled in the year the person was born but one the same age as them.

londonlivvy

I think you're right, that the taste / flavour is affected by the age in the cask, not by the time in the bottle (once it's in the bottle it doesn't change flavour / develop further AFAIK).

But I'd phone up one of the small Scottish distillers - Oban / Jura etc - and ask their customer services people. I'm sure they'd tell you.

dhope

Paging JonGinge?

Sewinman

My dad worked in the rum industry and was told by a senior whisky man from Diageo that whisky does not improve much beyond 12 years in the cask and that most of the older more expensive whiskys are mainly marketing gimmicks to add some exclusivity to the brand and please foreign buyers who go for that kind of thing.

No idea if that is true though.

pedylan

Pretty much right. Whisky matures in the wooden cask it is placed in immediately after distillation. The period of maturation can be as short as 3 years for some blends but is usually at least 10 years for single malts. The wood, the previous contents (sherry, bourbon etc) and even the location of the bonded warehouse where the barrel is kept all contribute to the colour, flavour and aroma, of the whisky that is fianlly bottled.
In a glass bottle nothing changes so there is no relevance to the time spent in the bottle.

On the age of your intended recipient. The standard priced bottles tend to be 10 0r 12 years old (years in the cask) with a few oddities eg Lagavulin at 16 yrs. So unless you're talking about spending serious money are you giving to an under age drinker?
The whisky market has become much more complex in the last 10 years or so and most distillieries do a proliferation of bottlings so if you have enough to spend you could buy whisky bottled in the year they were born or matured for the same number of years as their birthday or even distilled in the year of their birth (an attempt to mirror the concept of vintage in wine production)

These guys stock next to everything imaginable or can get it. http://www.gordonandmacphail.com/

Mine's a Talisker if you're buying.

suzyb

I'm actually asking because I'm working on a website for a whisky seller. The proposal is to allow people to search whisky by bottling year, but after consulting with a colleague I coded it to use age.

Boss now wants it changed to follow the proposal. But I don't think that's how whisky works.

(although he did point out why no one wondered why there weren't any 60 or 70 year old whiskies)

rolf_f

Fortnum and Mason have some nice bottles in the £5000 pound range

FoldingJoe

Sewinman wrote:

My dad worked in the rum industry and was told by a senior whisky man from Diageo that whisky does not improve much beyond 12 years in the cask and that most of the older more expensive whiskys are mainly marketing gimmicks to add some exclusivity to the brand and please foreign buyers who go for that kind of thing.

No idea if that is true though.

What would somebody from Diageo know about whisky? Jack Daniels was a nice bourbon before they got their hands on it.

allen.coulson

Another factor is that the distilleries - well some of the smaller ones do not distill continuously. So you can get gaps in production - so in one year they produce a lot and botle some 12 years later and some 16 yearls later. I think also that they have to pay duty when it is bottled so that is another reason to keep it in the cask.

If you are really interested, the Islay Malts re:

Ardbeg
Bowmore
Bruichlaiddich
Bunnahabhain
Caol Isla
Lagavullin
Laphroig.

That alphabetical sequence follows the pungency exactly with the early ones being described as 'Breakfast Malts' and Laphroig as 'Liquid Kipper' because of the iodine coming from the kelp in the burn water.

Usually if I tell a girl that information she usually lets me have sex with her.

SimonAH

Diane Fossey on a bender?

estampida

not really a drinker, but now a little about casks

so, you lose 2% approx every year due to evaportaion and leakage

when the wisky is ten years old the cask has lost 20% of the volume, the consumer pays for the loss in the price of a bottle. Thats why 20yr old bottles are expensive, they lost almost half the cask during production, before bottling.

so aged 40 years you would have lost 80% of the cast at bottling, and the cost is primo

they are trying to reduce this but using novel cask shapes, mainly because they are more economical stacking shapes so they can stack more casks and have more to bottle even with the lossage.

I wont bore you with the details............

SimonAH

estampida wrote:

not really a drinker, but now a little about casks

so, you lose 2% approx every year due to evaportaion and leakage

when the wisky is ten years old the cask has lost 20% of the volume, the consumer pays for the loss in the price of a bottle. Thats why 20yr old bottles are expensive, they lost almost half the cask during production, before bottling.

so aged 40 years you would have lost 80% of the cast at bottling, and the cost is primo

they are trying to reduce this but using novel cask shapes, mainly because they are more economical stacking shapes so they can stack more casks and have more to bottle even with the lossage.

I wont bore you with the details............

Known as 'the angels share'. Always loved that.

pbt150

Bottling year is irrelevant - the 'age' of a whisky applies to how long it was in the barrel before being bottled. Hence a '25 y/o' could have been distilled in 1984 or 1985, but if it's put in a bottle after 25 years it'll always be a '25'.

The brief you've been given doesn't make any sense - whisky isn't normally kept in a bottle for very long, unlike wine. So it'd be pretty much impossible (and also meaningless) for me to buy a '1986' whisky bottled in 1986, but a '25' would be fairly easy (but quite expensive).

MonkeyMonster

heh, slight tut at not following the clients brief but I can understand why...

if he wants to sell more whisky to gullable people who will believe there is something different about it being bottle longer etc then so be it. If you know of people like that buy 5 bottles from their birthyear now and give em every 5 years telling him its getting much more expensive each time you do it...

neilo23

If he's really old you could buy a bottle of Jameson 1780 :-)

wgwarburton

Hi,
You should be able to get a single malt distilled in the year of their birth and bottled some number of years later. So, if your person was, say, 40 this year you could get a 1971 Macallan, for example, that was 18 years old, 25 or 30. If you got really lucky you might get one bottled this year that would actually be 40 years old(!)

This could get expensive- eg there's a 30 year old 1971 advertised for £3,000... which strikes me as a bit steep.

You might find a miniature at a more reasonable price, especially if the receiver is younger (eg a 1989 Macallan, 30ml, at about a fiver).
The older the distillation and the longer in the cask the more expensive it is likely to be, and I think you'll only find them with particular single malts like the Macallan, most distilleries don't do this type of bottling.
If you have a specific one you are looking for (favourite malt, "home" distillery etc) then the Scottish Malt Whisky society might be able to help, as they have their own bottlings from particular distilleries, not "branded" as such. This could be a wild goose chase or the perfect gift... You might need to find a sympathetic member to help you.

I'd be tempted to ring a specialist and find out what they have- I bet Royal Mile Whiskies or the Whisky Shop Dufftown get requests like this all the time...

Cheers,
W.

Sewinman

FoldingJoe wrote:

Sewinman wrote:

My dad worked in the rum industry and was told by a senior whisky man from Diageo that whisky does not improve much beyond 12 years in the cask and that most of the older more expensive whiskys are mainly marketing gimmicks to add some exclusivity to the brand and please foreign buyers who go for that kind of thing.

No idea if that is true though.

What would somebody from Diageo know about whisky? Jack Daniels was a nice bourbon before they got their hands on it.

Talisker, Oban, Dalwinnie, Lagavulin etc.

pedylan

suzyb wrote:

I'm actually asking because I'm working on a website for a whisky seller. The proposal is to allow people to search whisky by bottling year, but after consulting with a colleague I coded it to use age.

Boss now wants it changed to follow the proposal. But I don't think that's how whisky works.

(although he did point out why no one wondered why there weren't any 60 or 70 year old whiskies)

Ah, got it. It's a strange client who wants a whisky web site and appears to know nothing about the product.

The only search terms that make sense are age (which is number of years matured in cask) and year of distillation which is stated on a few rare expensive bottlings only.

Cleat Eastwood

I like the title 'Any Whisky Connoisseurs in our mist" but better would have been 'Any Connoisseurs in our scotch mist'

Anyway, I went round a brandy factory in france and the tour guide said that when bottled brandy will continue to mature up to the age of 100 yrs, beyond which there is no change.....unlike whisky, said he, which halts maturation at the point of bottling.

That whisky list by the way was interesting as I've always loved laphroiag and have tried to find a smoky whisky similar to it, seems I was searching at the wrong end of the alphabet. By the way suzyb do you get any freebies

cee

yip.

weird request...

for example:

http://www.masterofmalt.com/whiskies/hi ... ng-whisky/

Distilled in 1986, however, even in 2011....it is still only 22 years old (bottled in 2008)

for real whisky freaks...the dist date is sometimes of interest, particularly for small batch distillers.

suzyb

pedylan wrote:

suzyb wrote:

I'm actually asking because I'm working on a website for a whisky seller. The proposal is to allow people to search whisky by bottling year, but after consulting with a colleague I coded it to use age.

Boss now wants it changed to follow the proposal. But I don't think that's how whisky works.

(although he did point out why no one wondered why there weren't any 60 or 70 year old whiskies)

Ah, got it. It's a strange client who wants a whisky web site and appears to know nothing about the product.

The only search terms that make sense are age (which is number of years matured in cask) and year of distillation which is stated on a few rare expensive bottlings only.

Actually they do know their stuff. But tbh I'm not sure they completely understand what we've said we'll do.

Sadly, we do not get any freebies

Irvinet

suzyb wrote:

I want to make sure I'm correct in thinking no one in the whisky connoisseur world cares about bottling year. It's all about the age of the whisky i.e. how long it sat maturing in the cask.

So if you were looking for a whisky as a birthday gift. You wouldn't look for one bottled in the year the person was born but one the same age as them.

Yep you are right it is all about time in the cask.

Is a Whisky that has spent 30 years in a cask better than one that spent 12? Possibly not... that is not the point of couse. It makes a nice gift to a 30year old and so much of our enjoyment of things is totally subjective so why not hey?

Of course people know this market exists and so you can get them quite easily for the magic years like 21 and 30.

I got my brother-in-law a bottle of 30year old scotch for his birthday that went into the barrel in 1981 and bottled this year so it matched on both counts. Not cheap but not stupid money either. Of course if their birthday is too early in the year then the producers will not have bottled it yet so you have to pick either the year it went into the barrell or the age..

A search for "xx year old whisky" on google will show you the options. Prices vary dramatically depending on the fame of the label among other things.

sketchley

I like Whisky. Current favourite is Oban Distillers Edition which is the normal 14 year old with an extra 2 years in a Sherry barrels. I picked up a bottle of this in Oban last month.

Also big fan of Penderyn Welsh Single Malt Whisky which would give most Scottish malts at twice the price a run for their money ( http://www.welsh-whisky.co.uk/whisky-range.aspx). I would recommend both the Maderia and Sherrywood very highly to anyone out there that's a whisky fan, they also have a peat finished Whisky but I’m not a fan of too much peat but I’ve been told by those that are that it is very good as well. Interesting thing with Penderyn is that it doesn't have an age on the bottle; they simply bottle it when it is ready as some barrels take longer than others. They also distill their spirit to 92% abv which is much higher than in Scotland. I've the dubious pleasure of sampling this 92% spirit and it was surprisingly smooth!

Silly Commuter Whisky tasting anyone?

wgwarburton

Irvinet wrote:

.... Prices vary dramatically ...

Now there's understatement...

Cheers,
W.

NGale

JW Blue Label, Talisker or Jura in my household

I shall be finishing a bottle tonight methinks

Jay dubbleU

Problem is too many variables - you could get a whisky bottled in say 2005 that is 12, 25 or even older. Better looking at the distillation date than the age.

Redhog14

Aha - this is my orignal field of employment - selling expensive whisky and wine.

Wine - the year matters because the weather matters, late frosts, heavy rain, dry spells etc all affect the composition of the sugars and yeasts in the grapes as the grow.

Whisky - does not matter a jot what year it was made in unless they changed the Masterblender, the grain can be purchased from anywhere as long as the quality is right.
The flavours in whisky come from the malting processes, the local water, the shape, size and number of stills and of course the casks it then spends its years "maturing" in. Some whiskies do not have an age statement as their Masterblenders are aiming for their product by blending different maturations together. The age statement is a minimum so a 12 yo may include an amount of 13-14-15-18 year old matured whisky, this is done to produce a consistency in the product.
Recently distillers have answered the marketing mans call by producing all the different varities - sherry casks, port casks and bourbon casks even using wine casks. for unique try "single cask" whisky, more expensive of course each bottle will be indivdiually numbered.
And I am sure that is all you need from me...

unixnerd

My dad worked in the rum industry and was told by a senior whisky man from Diageo that whisky does not improve much beyond 12 years in the cask and that most of the older more expensive whiskys are mainly marketing gimmicks to add some exclusivity to the brand and please foreign buyers who go for that kind of thing.

I don't think that's true. I drink Glenfarclas as a rule, normally the cheaper one which is a 10 or 12 year old. They also do a 15 and it's 3% stronger with a much stronger nose and taste. It's a very different dram even to my uneducated palette.

As whisky ages in the cask a %age is lost each year, the angels share as it's known. I think this tends to make whisky stronger the longer it's aged. You can also buy 60+% cask strength whisky such as Glenfarclas 105, it has a unique taste to it - it's not just about the strength. In fact 105 is the only whisky I put water in, just a drop.

BTW never put ice in whisky. In order to release the aromas and essential oils whisky has to be a little warm.

As regards bottling year some people are into that sort of thing. A bar in Aberlour has a bottle of Glenfarclas from every year since the war. Collectors say there is a slight difference between them.

Irvinet

Redhog14 wrote:

Whisky - (year)does not matter a jot

Quite right. Except for the pure romantic notion that some old geezer was putting this stuff into a barrel at the same time you were being pushed out of Mum.

Which does have a certain appeal for some reason.

sketchley

Irvinet wrote:

Redhog14 wrote:

Whisky - (year)does not matter a jot

Quite right. Except for the pure romantic notion that some old geezer was putting this stuff into a barrel at the same time you were being pushed out of Mum.

Which does have a certain appeal for some reason.

Drinking Whisky distilled before you were born is special, and gets more special the older you get. Nothing to do with the Whisky mind pure romance. I have a simular thing about vinyl records, I simply love playing my original copy of the Rolling Stone's first album in glorious mono, just becuase it's older than I am. I have it on MP3 too but never ever play that as it's just not the same!

Redhog14

Irvinet wrote:

Redhog14 wrote:

Whisky - (year)does not matter a jot

Quite right. Except for the pure romantic notion that some old geezer was putting this stuff into a barrel at the same time you were being pushed out of Mum.

Which does have a certain appeal for some reason.

ahhh Whisky and romance, I've loved certain whiskies in my life a lot longer than certain women in my life - Bowmore for everyday and Glenmorangie 18yo (rhyme with Orangey) for contemplative evenings.

Another wee note on the ABV or strength it depends on taxation - 40% is an agreed industry norm in the UK it is produced by the watering down the matured spirit hence variations of the same label can be quite different in character. The "angels share" is in fact the more volitile spirit lost through evaporation so the alcoholic content comes down slightly, eventually the flavour starts to fade too which is why whisky is matured in an age range from 6 to around 25 years. Once removed from the cask it is stored in Stainless Steel tanks.