Aberlour Casg Annamh #1
Batch #0001 “Highland Speyside Malt” | 48% ABV
Score: 6/10
Good Stuff.
TL;DR
A decent opening gambit in the batch series
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Flannels.
A different perspective. A different outlook, on life and of place. A change of circumstance. Whatever it is, I feel like now is the time to take stock. To draw a line and address, in retrospect, where I am in my whisky journey.
I’ve successfully went splatbusters with my buying in the first year and a half, buying whatever I fancied, when I fancied and in multiple fancies if it took my fancy. Then I slowed, having found my seam, and set about mining it for all its worth. Gold nuggets aplenty, lateral thinking was the next step - what am I missing that could ignite a hidden fuse? It began in earnest and ended abruptly with Tomatin’s Italian Tragedy, and my eager fingers, freshly burnt, retracted back into their sleeves.
For the year I’ve lived on the misty isle I've slowed my whisky buying quite dramatically. At one point it was surely 4-6 bottles a month I was covertly diverting to garage sanctuary before Mrs Crystal caught wind of them, and made good dents into their golden promise soon after. Stashing whisky isn’t my game. Well, it hasn’t been for a while; in the early madness phase of my journey I was often buying multiple bottles of the same whisky because of nothing more than listening to advice. It might have been Ralfy. It might have been Roy. But the game was, if the whisky is resonating with you, buy as much as you can before it’s gone.
I’ve long since lost the impetus to stash, and if you don’t believe me I’m going to list off my full stash of unopened bottles - 14 in total that I have in my garage right now - and then I’m going to review every single one of them until they’re all open. Zero stashed. Why? Well a few reasons actually.
The first is that I feel like a lot of the whiskies I’ve reviewed in these past few years - almost 140 now - were in the early phase when my palate was green. I was in discovery mode, and measured whisky against my own limitations of smell and taste. 140 whiskies, 11 contributions and countless unwritten bottles, samples and cask experiences that have shaped my face into a receptor of whisky and its complications. It’s still green, I’d argue, just a little less vivid. But I think that my ability to discover whisky in the true sense of the word, to find what’s inside it, has increased. I wonder if I’ll find new things in these whiskies that I tried in the early stages of my journey.
The second reason is that I’m nosey. I see those bottles sitting unopened and I think I remember what they taste like, but I can’t quite remember. I’m able to re-read the reviews I wrote about them, and that jogs the memory banks, but my curiosity to try it again through a contemporary facehole is too much to ignore. I want to open them and see if I still love them, hate them or change my mind.
The last reason is that my buying has slowed significantly recently, not because I am falling out of love with whisky, or because there’s literally too much whisky being released week after week that it’s harder to keep up. It’s more because my decision making is based on seeking things I will really enjoy, rather than buying it just for the experience, come what may.
That might be selfish, and I’ve loved the ups and downs of whisky buying and reviewing when they’re not quite what I’d hoped they would be, but buying £70 whisky that stinks can only be repeated a few times before serious questions are asked about what it’s all for. More recently, and in full honesty, I’ve hit a realisation of the cost of persistent whisky buying in relation to other things.
I am totally content to pull triggers on 3 or 4 bottles of whisky in a month, costing upwards of £100, because I want to see what they taste like and still find a thrill in the newness of it all. But at the same time I’ll swither and dither and ruminate over other things that we actually need, because it costs money. I think my love for Dramface and my eagerness to remain relevant and wise in whisky is making me sorely imbalanced. So I’ve started to redress that discrepancy of judgement, by looking inwards at what I have sitting there waiting to be opened.
So, here we go - the list of things in my stash, in alphabetical order, that I’ll be going into over the coming months:
2021 Aberlour Cask Annamh Batch #0001 - won at auction for cheap and stashed because I thought it would take off like A’Bunadh did at auction. It didn’t.
2022 Ardnamurchan Sherry Cask Release - no explanation necessary
2023 Ardnamurchan Arisaig Games 2023 - bought two because of time and place
2024 Ardnamurchan AD/Venturers Sauternes - saving for a rainy day. Which is every day now.
2021 Arran 10 - bought in bulk for my best friend’s wedding to share amongst the guests.
2021 Caol Ila Signatory 43% - cheap as chips and bought alongside the Auchroisk because they were beside each other in the shop
2021 Cotswolds Odyssey Barley - I have two of these unopened as gifts from English friends
2022 Glen Scotia Seasonal Release 2022 12yo Amontillado Sherry Casks - bought two because I thought they’d go up in value when Glen Scotia became the next Springbank!
2021 Glen Scotia 15yo - bought many because Ralfy said it was great. It is.
2022 Glen Scotia 8yo Campbeltown Festival - bought a second because the first was great.
2021 Glenrothes Infrequent Flyers - bought two because dang son, it’s like treacle.
2023 Kingsbarns Balcomie - received instead of the Cask Strength and told to keep it.
2022 Linkwood James Eadie - bought multiples because the Ben Nevis was so good.
2023 Maclean’s Nose - at £35 why not.
2021 Springbank 10 - bought in 2021 in the peak of Springer 10 wildness. Was astonished to find one online so bought it. Kept it ever since. Actually I had two but gave one to my brother in law.
Review
Aberlour Cask Annamh, Batch #0001, NAS, Non Chill-Filtered, European Oak, American Oak two-ways (3 Oloroso casks types), 48% ABV
£57 Auction (Batch 0009 available now)
To kick things off I’m going to open one of the very first bottles I won at auction, soon after I first discovered whisky. It started with a Glengoyne 18yo (back when it was £80/bottle and not yet part of the premiumisation of Glengoyne these days), and I went searching for what might be like that style.
A Glenfarclas 15 (again when it was cheaper) and an Aberlour A’Bunadh was next, followed swiftly by the less expensive Casg Annamh. I bought two batch 5’s and then found that auctions quite often allow access to discontinued bottles for under RRP. I won this bottle on the 5th July 2021 for £57.
As you’ll read from the list above, this was stashed because I thought it might catch the collector winds and be worth more than what I won it for. Looking on the auction site now I see with wonder that a bottle of Batch #0003 Casg Annamh went for £255 in December 2020. Covid madness. The next most valuable hammer bid was a bottle of #0001, like this one, that went for £185 in 2018, long before I got my grubby hands on it. Then the #0001 batches fall rapidly from £70 all the way down to £35. Think of that. Someone paid £185 for a bottle of whisky that someone else, a year later in 2019, won for £35. And they say whisky prospecting isn’t playing with fire…
I paid £57, so pretty much RRP for these boys, and I feel genuinely silly to have thought it might be a good “investment”. Naivety in 2021 was big, but now I see that my journey in whisky involves zero prospecting. I’m not here to enrich my purse. I’m here to enrich my life, and so, to the grey wax seal strip of joy I turn, only to find that it has been lost to the wax gods. I picked up a knife instead.
Score: 6/10
Good Stuff.
TL;DR
A decent opening gambit in the batch series
Nose
Plastic tubs. Cream soda. Watery redness. Toasted sugars. Bit of raisin fudge. Sugary sweet pastries.
Palate
Wave of warm caramel sauce. Date sponge. Cinnamon stick. Coconut sugar. Cherry sweeties. Synthetic a wee bit. Red, dull red.
The Dregs
This is really quite tasty whisky. It’s sugary and raisins and porridgy and runny caramel. There’s a thought experiment that says distilleries will put out their best whisky in what will become a batch series knowing, rightly or wrongly, that they will subsequently put out more generic stuff under that batch. They’ve already hooked them in, and now they can taper down the quality stuff, in favour of lesser whisky.
I don’t generally subscribe to such tin-foil fringework, but I have to say that my memories of Casg Annamh were quite different to what this Batch #0001 from 2018 is offering. If I look back at my notes from 2021 when I opened the Batch #0005, I see that I wrote:
Nose: Not as strong as the A’Bunadh but resembles it. Great colour too - honey! Brandy soaked sponge. Saltiness. Marzipan cake. - 10 minutes later salted caramel and spice.
Palate: Salty start! Powerful sherry fruitiness. Tarte fruit. Salted caramel! Fudgey holy s***. The more this opens up the more beautiful it gets. Butterscotch.
Finish: Long and satisfying.
“Long and satisfying”...
The colour of this whisky looks less Irn Bru than Batch #0005, and looking at my review of the A’Bunadh batch 068, I wrote that the Cash Annamh in April 2023 was letting me down. It wasn’t the revelation it was when I was getting into whisky. I guess that makes absolute sense though - the Casg Annamh is more aligned to casual whisky drinkers, even if its exciter presentation with 48% ABV and non chill-filtered presentation places it on our radars.
Oor Ogilvie reviewed Batch #0007 of Casg Annamh in 2023 and placed it above the A’Bunadh for drinking experience. The heavy sherry whack of the A’Bunadh was too singular an experience versus the gently stroking of the Casg Annamh, allowing more exploration without the fiddling nature of cask strength whisky. And this is where I find myself now. The Casg Annamh Batch #0001, the thing that started the series off, is really good.
I find it really engaging and approachable. It’s got depth of flavour, richness in abundance, and feels way more repeatably engaging than my previous bottles of Casg Annamh. Whether this is my palate being more receptive to flavours, or whether Batch #0001 had more “quality” stock in the blend, or whether it’s just all nonsense and emotions are winning the day, I don’t know. But I think this is a good whisky, and for £57 I reckon it was worth that outlay, even back in 2021 when prices were on the up.
These days Casg Annamh is on Batch #0009, by the looks of it, and through Google searching I can see that, even in the photos from various suppliers, the colour of the whisky in Batch #0001 is decidedly less Irn Bru than the Batch #0009. All of the Casg Annamh whiskies are coloured, but I do wonder if Batch #0001 relied less on the e150a than the rest. All conjecture obvs. Would I pay £57 for it now? Knowing that it didn’t wow me in later batches I think I’d pass. But for the whisky that started the series off, and with a nod to the fact that it’s not available outside of auctions, this Batch #0001 is worth your time and energy if you are so inclined, and I really enjoyed my time sipping it.
Onto the next one in the stash!
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC
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