2008 vintage vs 2014 | 43% & 46% ABV

New Picks Up Where Old Left Off

The passage of time. One of the true constants in the universe and yet is something that can either crawl or enter lightspeed.

Time’s been whipping by for me and I imagine it’s the same for many of us with young children. My five year old and two year old are quite active, more so than many of our friends. We’ve got soccer (football for European folks) twice a week, of which yours truly is the head wrangler of eight eager and practically vibrating children, teaching them far more advanced tactics than other coaches who are still stuck doing “what time is it Mr. Wolf”, “dinosaur hunts”, and many other mind numbing children's games.

We of course have loads of fun, but you can’t replace give-and-go type drills with duck-duck-goose nonsense. And winning is almost always fun as well, and our undefeated record ensures the kids leave the field in high spirits. I played competitive sports for nearly 15 years, and my co-coach played university basketball in the US as well, so you could say we are a tad eager (competitive).

Then we’ve got baseball twice a week, and swimming at least once per week. Plus my wife rides horses and usually is gone twice a week in the evenings as well, building up the skills and muscles of her four year old Dutch warmblood jumper. When we aren’t doing organised activities, we’re often found walking our two pups, taking the kids bicycling, or playing soccer, American football, basketball, or flailing in the large ball pit in our basement, conveniently located next to my home office, aka the home bar. More than once has an errant ball threatened to knock my monitors from their perch, and I’ve had to extract a Nerf dart from within my whisky shelves on many occasions.

Suffice to say, all of these busy activities ensure that my wife’s excellent calendar skills are constantly put to the test, and more than once do I glance at it only to find a week left in a month that I could have sworn just started. While our complex hydromechanical and electrochemical selves appear to be susceptible to this time warp factor, whisky appears to be relatively immune. Immune to the weather outside, diseases, geopolitical shit shows, and all manner of craziness that seems to move the passage of time along in a hurried manner.

So isn’t it great when we can stop, pop the cork, and relive a moment from the past? Whisky enables that recollection for some of us, reconnecting us to any manner of emotive events that have been ingrained into our complex neural circuitry.

Whisky is bottled history, yes, but it is also a gateway drug into our memories. I could tell you what I did in 2008 and 2014 that was memorable and I imagine you could too. So let’s take a look at these glass encapsulated historians and see how they’ve managed the passage of time. One is bottled in 2014 and the other is distilled in 2014, yet they’ve lived different lives. Are they in any way the same? Let’s find out.

Review 1/2

Benromach Organic 2008, bottled 2014, 43% ABV
CAD$80 paid (£46) paid. Secondary only

Found collecting a mild amount of dust in a local brick-and-mortar, it just had to come home with me! The alignment of the bottling and distillation year with the current iteration was just pure luck.

Score: 6/10

**Good stuff.**
***TL;DR***
*Creamy banana custard*

Nose

Vanilla, creamy custard, banana loaf, toffee drizzle. Simple, warm, and inviting.

Palate

Soft, sweet, and warming entry, with building pepperiness. Toffee and vanilla are at the forefront, with ripe banana undertones. A mix of black pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg anchor the experience. The finish is objectively quite long for a 6 yo and 43% whisky. Delicious.

Score: 6/10

Review 2/2

Benromach Contrasts, Organic 2014, bottled 2023, 46% ABV
CAD$80 paid (£46) paid. Still some availability

Score: 5/10

**Average. In a good way.**
***TL;DR***
*Pesky pepper bomb*

Nose

Mushy bananas with nutmeg and cinnamon. There’s a mildly bitter and “cool” smelling aspect to this that is very evident compared to the older release, much like a damp cool morning breeze downstream of a silage pit. It’s not the most expressive nose.

Palate

Now there’s the vanilla, it was nonexistent on the nose. There’s a good peppery bite to it as well. Dark bananas, dark chocolate covered coffee beans (that’s the bitter from the nose now), creamy custard. Undertones of dark toffee.

With water, the toffee notes are more prominent and the black pepper notes are amped up and take over the latter half of the palate. Rather distracting, especially compared to the older (and younger) release.

Score 5/10

The Dregs

The DNA between these two is amazing. And so much for batch variation! You could easily see where the 2008 left off and the 2014 begins. Amazing stuff Benromach! While my tasting notes do indicate that these whiskies have differences, they are really only evident when side-by-side. There’s significant commonality between these two and the Benromach spirit and virgin oak interaction is consistent. I’ve got a future review coming up featuring two different distillery’s take on virgin oak and they could not be further apart from each other, much less these Benromachs. I would say that if you don’t fancy a virgin oak malt whisky, it’s very likely that you just haven’t found the one that speaks to you.

I personally rank the older release higher due to its very pleasant flavours, easy-sipping nature, and the emotive warm feelings it brings up. I found the modern incarnation too distracting with the pepper that nibbles away at my facehole. Just something about the comforting warmth of the older release that relaxes me, forcing me out of the lightspeed ebb of time and slows me down, forcing me to enjoy the current moment.

So there ya have it, the older release is the Interdictor to lightspeed, yanking me out of the stream of time and allowing me to see the forest from the trees. The scores could very easily be reversed between these two depending on your preferences of course.

Tried these? Share your thoughts in the comments below. BB

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