Craigellachie 14yo Old Malt Cask
2008 vintage | 50% ABV
Fake it ‘til you make it?
Fifty months strong. What’s this?
Every month, our friends’ whisky group gets together on the fourth Tuesday of the month to hang out and catch up. Not everyone makes it every month; given kids, work trips, vacations, and all manner of normal life. But we still keep doing it, even if it’s just two people, it will happen. Sometimes it’s 10-12 of us sitting around a fire in someone’s backyard, and other times it's carpooling to a pub in -40ºC in February.
At the last July get together, where I was blown away by the fact that it’s been fifty straight months of getting together, I had this particular bottle thrust in my hands.
“I want you to review this. I don’t like it. And I want to know why.”
-CW from the Sherrygeddon marathon
Three friends made a pilgrimage to Scotland for whisky and general Scottish tourism. Upon gearing up to leave via Glasgow, CW made this purchase knowing he likes Craigellachie and sherry. Cracking it a few months later and struggling with it, and even after multiple attempts over successive months, it just didn’t connect and now it’s my time to take a swing at it.
But what makes me the right person to assess a whisky? For that matter, what makes anyone the right person to assess a whisky? Is it a hyperactive olfactory system or a proclivity to taste nuances? Is it based on mileage and how much whisky you’ve drank or the number of different iterations you’ve tried? Is it the ability to translate organoleptic synaptic triggers into verbal or written words for someone else to understand what a particular whisky might be like? When does someone transition from imposter syndrome or “fake it until you make it” to someone that’s trustworthy and consistent?
I was pleasantly surprised to be given this responsibility but should I be trusted? I still don’t think I’m a hot shot, given I’ve got 1.33 working nostrils for smelling (lefty is brilliant, righty is a blunt instrument), obviously limited in the many whiskies I’ve yet to try, and I’ve only been reviewing whiskies since my Millstone debut here in August 2022. Sure I’d enjoyed whisky before then but it’s one thing to enjoy whisky and another to be descriptive and objective. And it's even more challenging to be descriptive and objective on something that is inherently variable and personal. It’s hard to be black and white when everything is shades of grey.
Well I shoved off the digital shores on my pseudonym ship named Broddy Balfour and I guess it’s just time to let it ride the currents and hope I don’t make a fool of myself along the way.
Review
Craigellachie 14yo, Old Malt Cask, Distilled April 2008, Bottled October 2022, Sherry Butt, Cask HL19718, 50% ABV
£140 and still available
Nose
Pastry fruit filling (cooked apples and cinnamon primarily), weak hot chocolate much like someone didn’t add enough powder, light caramel sauce, and riding right underneath these sweet notes is a strong green tea herbal note. The green tea herbal note rides counter to the sweets, coming across as astringent. It’s a dichotic albeit different nose than most sherried whiskies. Not bad but not what many would expect given the cask.
Palate
Here’s where the train leaves the tracks as they say. While the nose was nice and interesting, the palate is a different beast. Red and green apples, a good dose of cinnamon, a pinch of ginger, some syrupy sweetness (simple syrup-like) then that green tea thing rides in on its steed and tramples the experience. To check my taste buds, I poured 100ºC boiling water over some loose leaf green tea and let it steep for 10 minutes, both of those are no-no’s in tea making BTW. And you know what, that astringent, acrid, and bitter over-extracted and ‘burnt’ green tea was dang close to the palate experience here. After the green tea mid-palate, the cinnamon and ginger return to nibble away before a long and dry finish with diminishing spices and red and green apple sauce.
Every so often when I’m not thinking about this whisky but I’ve had a nip, I pick out a distinctive struck match sulphur undertone towards the trailing end.
With water there are no changes to report, just less intensity from each note.
The Dregs
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across a Laing bottling and come up confused. I was blindsided by a Douglas Laing Old Particular North British grain whisky in sherry in which a herculean effort was made by others in the whisky community to suss out if I was broken or massively inexperienced (aka imposter syndrome) or the whisky was truly just that ‘challenging’. Turns out others in the community also have similar observations, some of which have even commented here on Dramface.
Now this Old Malt Cask release comes from the Hunter Laing side of the divorced family business. Fred and Stewart Laing “demerged” the company in 2013, with Fred keeping the The Douglas Laing & Co. business and Stewart forming the Hunter Laing brand, including a split of the inventory of casks. Stewart Laing has also gone on to form the Ardnahoe distillery on Islay, with their 5 yo Inaugural Release hitting the market this year. So this whisky could presumably come from the same stocks or cask management scheme of the old Douglas Laing group (distilled in 2008 after all).
The fact that I’ve found some ‘interesting’ maturation aspects to sherry butts coming out of the Laing stables is perhaps just pure coincidence, but like the old saying goes: fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you.
If there’s anything to provide a counter to this downtrodden feeling, the notes listed on both bottles were atypical compared to the distillate or the casking, so perhaps the official notes are somewhat correct thereby indicating the flavours contained within are not what you should expect, however downplayed they might actually be relative to the experience. You live and learn I guess.
This get’s a 5/10 because of the objectively ‘nice’ nose and a palate that is different but not objectively bad, if you’re into the flavours I’ve described here.
Score: 5/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. BB