Of malt whisky, cider and other drinkables. Carpe aqua vitae.
Bottled in 2014, cask reference 7279.
Nose: Quite a bit of citrus and orange peel, bitter vanilla. More towards baked apples with water and hints of liquorice.
Palate: Malt and liquorice (or “sisselrot”, common polypody, or rather the edible root of it which has a vegetal liquoricy taste).
Comments: Something of a surprise, not a typical Blair Athol at all, but very nice, even so.
Tasted at Trondheim Whiskyfestival 2016.
Nose: Green apples, malt and citrusy notes.
Palate: Malt and hay, but big on flavour. Wine gum on the finish.
Comments: Classic lowland, “mild”, but still bold flavours. Very, very nice.
Tasted at Trondheim Whiskyfestival 2016.
Distilled 15 November 1989, bottled at the distillery by Leif Olav 23 May 2015, cask number 4148.
Nose: Fruity. Candied oranges, passionfruit, dried apricot, vanilla and oaky perfumes. With water it gets a faintly perfumed smokiness, incense, perhaps?
Palate: Chocolate confectionery. Dark chocolate with a pssion fruit filling, brittle and i touch of salt. Engine oil shows up when water is added, as does old, dry oak. The finish is long and consists of oak, dark chocolate and dark cherries.
Comments: Very nice indeed. Classic Old Pulteney in many respects, and age has weathered it nicely without letting the oak take over. I’ve only got a sample, unfortunately, I’d really like a bottle – or five – of this one.
Supposedly based on a “recipe” from 1903, the Finealta is “lightly peated” and matured in American and oloroso sherry oak. I purchased it at a reasonable price on the ferry between Larvik and Hirtshals as a travel dram on my way to Billund last November.
Nose: Dry wood, some ashes, fruit; apples and apricots, and fruit trees. The fruit is emphasised with water, approaching dried fruits rather than fresh, and some vanilla makes its appearance.
Palate: Vanilla and heat, dried fruits, black pepper or some other spice. Water brings out oven roasted or grilled fruits, definitely a little scorched. Otherwise much of the same.
Comments: I quite like this. Not a world of complexity and oomph, but a rather nice sipping whisky. It worked well as a travel dram, which needs to be easy drinking and a nice thing to share with others (people who may be newbies in the whisky world), it fullfills those criteria perfectly. I’d happily purchase it again if the price is right.
This spirit has matured for five months in a 10 litre cask of Hungarian oak.
Nose: A fair amount of congeners, vanilla, a little cinnamon and apricots. It turns more towards the vegetal with water, I still find cinnamon, but also some black pepper.
Palate: Rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar. Congeners as well. Rougher with water, but the cinnamon still dominates.
Comments: Seems very young, but then it is. The cinnamon is from the oak, I suppose. It’s a bit over the top, really. Less congeners on the nose would have been better, as it is, I rather like it, but not so much that I regret it being unavailable to purchase.
This edition of Preludium is from Mackmyra’s smoked newmake variety that has matured in ex sherry casks.
Nose: Malt, slight smokey character and liquorice. Water brings out fruit, both fresh tropical and something dried, possibly apricots. A somewhat sharp, young off-note is also present.
Palate: Liquorice and a slight smokiness, but also a somewhat woolly, murky “chemical” feel. With water the liquorice is still present, but also raisins and some congeners.
Comments: This is probably the best Preludium I’ve tasted, though that is not neccessarily saying much as my impression of the series as a whole is not very good (though I AM a fan of much of what Mackmyra has released in later years). Smoke and sherry does a lot to conceal any off-notes, so that even though this also has a “young and unfinished” feel, it’s far from undrinkable.
In a ceramic jug, from the 1990ies.
Nose: Raisins, milk chocolate, caramellised something, fried butter and a little eucalyptus. Water brings out the sherry and some congeners, a hint of cellar, possibly some mould.
Palate: Burnt sugar and oak cask. With water the wood tastes rawer, there are a fair few congeners, but also toffee and sherry notes.
Comments: Somewhat strange on the nose, but not at all unpleasant. The congeners are a pluss, they help make the dram more interesting. I prefer the roughness of this to the elegance of the 17 year old. It’s ovbiously worth keeping a look out for these old bottlings.
Nose: Sweed Panda liquorice, Allsorts also, orange marmelade. With water the buttery part of butterscotch and after a while in the glass a hint of smoke.
Palate: Oak. Water opens it up and I find liquorice and eventually the familiar Springbank bitterness, but on this one it’s not overwhelming.
Comments: Very clean and elegant, not a sherry bomb at all. A little too clean and elegant, in that it gets a little boring after a while, but very nice, by all means.
Exactly two weeks ago I was at Myken to take part in the official opening ceremony for the distillery. It was an experience of a life-time, and it was clear that not only do the Myken gang “with freids” have a star-studded tea, but even the weather gods are rooting for Myken. Brilliant sunshine and blue skies are hardly something you can bank on in this country, but that’s what met us on arrival last Tuesday.
It’s possible to note with a smile that the weather gods had a role to play earlier in Myken’s history as well, as it was when they became stuck on the island through bad weather that Roar and Trude – to of the main forces behind the distillery – fell in love with Myken.
I arrived back home after 36 hours with close on 600 pictures and life-long memories, and whether you want me to or not I will be sharing some of them over the next few weeks. Let’s start with the most important part: A tour of the distillery.
Even though the distillery building is fairly anonymous compared to other disitilleries, it’s not exactly hard to find. Myken is not big. In fact, all distances logged on the local signpost are measured in meters, and the number of buildings overall is limited. As the old, temporary signage for the distillery has now been replaced by a new sign with Metric Designs shiny new logo design, it’s even easier to find the right building. It used to be a processing plant for fish, now it contains Myken Distillery on the ground floor and Bruket bord & bar, a restaurant, above it.
The most important question coming to mind when you see Myken and are told that they distill whisky there should be: “But where do they get their water from?” The answer is a desalting plant which produces clean, clear drinking water from sea water.
Myken Distillery is a microdistillery and will remain so in the foreseeable future. Most of the processes are unusually dependent on manual input, and the equipent is hardly in the same league as the big players in Scotland. The mashtun is a repurposed plastic tank with an added mesh bottom, the washbacks are old milk tanks, which are available to purchase for the not-so-princely sum of 1 NOK per liter capacity. In fact it’s substantially more expensive to transport them to Myken than to purchase them in the first place.
The stills are new and purpose built from copper, but with a somewhat unfamiliar shape if you are used to Scottish stills. This is because they are made in Spain by Hoga Stills Co. The possibility of purchasing stills from Scotland was investigated, but new stills from Forsyth’s would not only have been about five times more expensive, they also had an expected delivery date in couple of years time. As Hoga could deliver within a few months, the choice was made simple for our eager distiller-wannabees. The stills are fired with gas, through gas-powered paella-pans, also from Spain, naturally.
The first spirit was distilled at Myken in December 2014, and throughout 2015 they’ve kept up a steady pace, heading for a total production this year of 5,000 liters. With the equipment thay now have, they expect to be able to increase annual output to a maximum of 15,000 liters over the next few years. In addition they are contemplating investing in another pair of stills, which would put the total capacity at 30,000 liters. Note: Numbers are for actual liters put into cask, not pure alchohol.
Despite the manual processes (and technical challenges) the method should be familiar to anyone familiar with Scottish distilleries. The malt has so far come from Weyermann in Germany, and up until two months ago the 125 kilos Myken use per mash were milled on what can only be descriped as a home brewer’s mill (though powered by drill, not hand cranked). A somewhat more industrial version is now in place. The mashtun, as mentioned, is a converted plastic tank. About 700 liters of worts is produced per mash, with 500 liters of water going in at 64-65° C and then a second water of 200 liters at 80° C. The wort is transported to the washbacks by the simple expedient of lifting the whole mashtun with a forklift and transporting it to the washback so the worts can drain off straight in. Up until two months ago, things were not so simple and the worts had to be carried by hand in ten litre buckets from the mashtun to the washback…
Myken use dry distillers yeast and the wash is left to ferment on average 3-4 days, but sometimes over a week if that’s what fits the schedule. The resulting wash ends at around 7% abv.
700 liters of wash are run through the washstill, and out come around 200 liters of low wines at 24 % abv. Two runs off the washstill are combined in the low wines tank to feed the spirit still with 400 liters.
So 400 liters of low wine are distilled, the head, heart and tail are collected in metal buckets and poured, very manually, into the correct receptacle. Roar told us that the steps up to the spirit receiver were useful in filling the function “time to consider whether this is the correct tank”, since, should someone pour head or tail in there the whole batch would be ruined. Of course it could be redistilled, but then you’d have triple distilled spirits, and something quite unlike the rest of the production. No one has so far made that mistake. After all that they are left with around 100 liters of newmake.
When they have collected sufficient amounts of newmake it is filled into casks. For experimental purposes they have a variety of miniature casks of five to ten liters to get an early indication of how the spirit is likely to mature. If you’ve been to a whisky festival and had Myken spirit with some colour to it, it will have been from one of these. With so much wood to spirit interaction we are talking weeks rather than months or years for the spirit to “mature”. It’s not the same as a ten year maturation in proper casks, of course, or we’d likely see retailers’ shelves bulging with “speed matured whisky”, but it does give an indication of how various wood types will interact with the distinct Myken spirit..
Most of the production goes into ex bourbon barrels (most of them have been fro Maker’s Mark, lately from Wild Turkey), and some goes into 40 liter casks rebuilt from barrels by Thorslund cooperage in Sweden. These smaller casks are open to investors, so if you like you can own your own special Myken cask, if you want more details I published those a while ago.
More pictures to been seen on Flickr: Myken distillery.
Like the Aberlour Glenlivet, this is an older bottling, bottled in the 80ies.
Nose: Dark toffee and dried cranberries. With a lot of water it acquires some maltiness and a hint of fresh fruit.
Palate: More dark toffee and some milk chocolate. Negligible development with water.
Comments: Does nothing to change my impression of Dufftown distillery; They make perfectly decent, but incredibly boring whisky.