Safe as Milk

Latest whisk(e)y purchase

January 29, 2009 3:30 pm Dave Neary General

I was hunting recently for any online whiskey supplier who still had some Redbreast 15yo in stock and on sale for less than the current asking price of €120, since I only have about a third of my bottle (bought for €55 in the Whisky Lodge in Lyon) left, but I came up short.

Anyway, that got me thinking that I haven’t bought any whisky in a while, and I went on a bit of a shopping spree on the very excellent Maison de Whisky website. I will soon be receiving, hopefully, 5 bottles in the mail, not one from Scotland.

• Yoichi 10yo: I’m a big fan of Japanese whisky, and this one will make a nice companion to the bottle of Yamazaki 10yo that I have at home
• Redbreast 12yo:The best bang per buck in the world. This whiskey is a monster – there are very few like it in the world, and in the absence of the 15yo which now appears to be no longer on the market anywhere, not even on auction sites (that’s because everyone who’s bought it couldn’t resist drinking it), this is the one you want to discover Irish pure pot still whiskey
• Eddu Silver: On the Malt Maniacs mailing list, I recently asked if whisky from Brittany still tasted like paint thinner, and someone pointed me to this whisky as a very good one. Let’s see if it holds up better than the Armorik I tried about 5 years ago… This whisky has the particularity that it’s made with buck wheat rather than barley.
• Amrut cask strength 2007: This is an Indian whisky which has exploded onto the market recently, and this year the 2008 bottling won the Malt Maniacs 2008 award for best “Daily Dram” (whisky on sale for less than €50). Will have to try that some other time. Unusually for a high quality whisky, this is a NAS (No age specified) whisky, so you don’t know how long the malting matured in casks before bottling. But if it tastes good, I don’t really care.
• Basil Hayden 8yo: I’ve been a fan of good bourbon for a while now – ever since I got to taste test some Baker’s, Bookers and Basil Hayden  at the Collaboration Summit in Austin during the sharks & penguins bash last year. I was thinking of getting a rye whisky, but when I got to try Old Potrero a while back, I thought it was pretty over-priced, so I’m sticking with what I know is a good bourbon.

So there you go – a tour of the whisk(e)y world in 5 bottles (with my excuses to the Scots, the Canadians, the Aussies and the Welsh).