Official Bottling, Limited Edition 1 2021 | 46.3% ABV

Award Season

It’s online whisky award time; OSWA season. To call it the Oscars of online whisky sounds a bit much, but to me, it’s a bit like that.

The 4th annual Online Scotch Whisky Awards are underway and the nominations for 2024 were shared a week or so ago. Everyone can vote and even if you don’t place a vote you can contribute towards the People’s Choice which builds a community choice Top 10 for each category.

Much of the initial reaction has been focused on the absence of certain fan favourite distilleries. Since this is Dramface, and without any wish to conflate the two initiatives, it makes sense to lean on our Top 40. This open-to-everyone Dramface poll is due for another release of details soon. Upon enquiring to our editorship, they’re waiting on a meaningful data point to be reached - 1,750 respondents. They’re close, but not there yet, so please consider heading over and spending a few moments to place your votes. It takes seconds and it’s every bit as easy as participating in the OSWAs. Please also consider logging in again if you’ve already done so, your priorities and favourites may have changed and it might justify an update!

Anyway, based on the current order it’s fair to say that Bruichladdich is our readers’ most favourite distillery to have missed out, including their Port Charlotte and Octomore branded expressions.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the distillery is much loved. Still, such is the abundance of options we have, the thin margins between the public’s most favourite whiskies, and probably a perfect storm of votes distribution, Bruichladdich has surprisingly missed out on all categories. The elegant unpredictability of the invisible hand in a democratic process is on full display, and we have to respect it.

Another distillery that I hoped to have made an appearance is 11th placed Deanston, a distillery that I will always have a soft spot for. When I first heard of the name Deanston, without a Glen or Ben prefix and seemingly without any Gaelic roots in the name, it didn’t sound like a Scotch distillery, instead it sounded more like the name of a corporation. 

Because it is, in its previous life, Deanston was a cotton mill from the late 1700s up to 1965, before it went out of business. Not before long, new owners came in and within a mere nine months, it was producing whisky.

My first encounter with Deanston was from a simple question, many years ago before I properly got into whisky. I curiously asked a whisky friend: what’s your favourite whisky? The answer came: Deanston Decennary, “because it’s simply the most balanced whisky”. That name lived in the back of my mind even before I embarked on my whisky journey, so naturally I made sure I had some Deanston in my initial stash. I think it’s not surprising to say that the distillery impressed me since.

Which is why when I visited Glasgow in 2023, it made so much sense to make a trip up to Deanston and see what that place is about, and to say it didn’t disappoint is a huge understatement. But first, the commute.

Where I come from, trains run so frequently that if we miss one, the next one is at most a three minute wait. Buses run less frequently, maybe around the order of 15-20 minutes, but bus routes overlap so much that for any given journey, there may be three or four buses that serve the same purpose, in practice this shortens the wait to 5-10 minutes. All is to say, I’m not used to reading time tables before hopping on a bus. This cannot be the case for my commute from Glasgow to Deanston.

I decided to go with a train ride from Glasgow to Stirling, and a bus ride from Stirling to the distillery. The train ride doesn’t bring about too much angst, with trains running every 20 minutes or so, I could live with waiting an extra 20 minutes if I had missed a train or waited on the wrong platform or something. I wasn’t too fussed about that leg of the journey. But the bus ride is a very different beast.

Firstly, a bus departs from Stirling every hour, if you miss it, that’s it, see you again in an hour. To be honest, my time on holiday isn’t too precious, I can read a book, listen to a podcast, or even just walk around the area, and an hour wait is something I can deal with, but the problem is that I have a distillery tour and warehouse tasting booked, if I had missed the bus, I could easily miss the tour, and I certainly wouldn’t want that.

To add a layer of anxiety, it was my first time hopping on a bus in Scotland. How can I be sure that I was waiting at the right bus stop? How do I signal to the driver that I want to get on? Can I pay by card? All of these uncertainties add to the anxiety. To make sure I don’t miss anything, I’ve decided to plan my trip with a two hour buffer, and in the end I arrived at the distillery at 12:30 for a 14:30 tour. Overkill? Sure.

Luckily there’s a nice cafe and a wee shop where I can hang about for two hours, plus the area surrounding the distillery is delightful. I just needed the peace of mind that I wouldn’t be late.

The tour was a pretty standard tour, the sort that would get non whisky drinkers curious, but wouldn’t necessarily inspire enthusiasts too much. They did, however, speak at length about how Deanston get their waxiness from, something to do with feints receiver, I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around that.

The highlight was the warehouse tasting, where a gentleman named Brian guided me (yes, the singular me, because I was the only one in the session) through the tasting of three drams drawn straight from the cask. Three drams in an hour may sound underwhelming, but such is the quality of the whisky, plus chatting with the knowledgeable Brian, sixty minutes was over before I knew it. Other than the whisky, the chat with Brian was equally fulfilling, he explained to me again how the setup regarding feints receiver works (as I said, I didn’t understand it still), he let me draw whisky from the cask with the valinch (which was much trickier than I expected), and we even discussed what whiskies he would drink at home when he wasn’t drinking Deanston.

Back to the whiskies, the standout was a Lepanto matured 11 year old, elegantly bright, my memory of the dram is so vivid that I can still taste the marmalade note after a year. In the end I shook Brian’s hand and thanked him for his time, in turn he thanked me for coming, and implored me to come back some day. Scotland is a far away place for me, and the trip to Deanston, while not the hardest, isn’t an easy one either. However, I still have a feeling that I’ll be back. Someday.

Review

Deanston Chronicles, official limited bottling, 2304 bottles, Edition 1, 2021 release, 46.3% ABV
£92 paid at auction (including fees)

I don’t usually use UK auction sites, for the simple reason that I’m not based in the UK, and spirit import taxes at home ridiculously dwarf any extra fees or shipping costs. But since I knew I was heading to the UK and could collect bottles in person, I began looking for the Decennary bottle, and while I couldn’t get hold of that specific one, I did manage to get my hands on something else, which on paper should be rather similar, the Deanston Chronicles Edition 1.

The Decennary was named such because it took whiskies from casks of four decades, including whiskies distilled in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, matured in ex-bourbon barrels, ex-port pipes, and PX sherry casks.

The Chronicles Edition 1 was similar in that it took casks from the 1970s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, a mix of the new and the old to hopefully create the balance that my friend alluded to in the Decennary. According to Whiskybase, the casks are as follows: 1977 refill, 1994 Madeira, 2004 Amontillado, 2011 Bourbon. Since the bottle count is only 2304, it seems that the whole vatting is just four casks. It’s curious to see that the oldest cask is a refill cask, and the youngest cask is ex-bourbon, so while it is certainly expected to be cask heavy, hopefully there is at least some spirit character left in the whisky.

Nose

Hmm... I did not expect this. I was expecting a powerful and full bodied nose, instead it’s coming across as rather subtle. Some sort of muscovado or brown sugar, fruit jam, lemon curd, warming ginger, a musty kind of perfumy, velvety candle wax element is present throughout the nose.

Palate

The Deanston waxiness is here, but not in full force. Similar to the nose, the palate is not as sweet as the casks suggest, prickly spices on arrival, which I think I would classify it as a ginger spice. A nice bitter citrus sourness lingers throughout the development, turning into a savoury, meaty sensation. Given a bit of time and a dash of water, a variety of melons are showing up, water melons, honeydew melons, etc., overripe apples and pears are also coming along. Interestingly more sweetness shows up in a lengthy finish, along with more of the citrus with a salted edge to it now.

The Dregs

Interesting whisky… Maybe I should not have looked into the casks before tasting this, the information knocked me off my bearings a bit.

I was glad to find some familiar notes from other Deanstons’ character that I recognise, namely the ginger and the perfume, but as expected, the cask took over, and unfortunately not in a way that particularly enhances the spirit, but rather dominates without really adding much to the experience.

From my notes, you may be imagining a complex and engaging whisky yet, while there is complexity, it isn’t really engaging. Instead, astringent would be a more suitable descriptor, and for all the complexity that’s in the whisky, I had to put in a lot of effort to find it. Deanston prides itself with cask experiments, and sometimes they pay off brilliantly, but I firmly believe that Deanston is able to showcase itself best through ex-bourbon cask maturation with a decent age statement.

Distillery visits have the potential to turn casual drinkers into genuine fans, if done right. In my case though, I visited the distillery because I was already a fan, the experience enhanced my appreciation for the place, partly due to the people, partly due to the location, and partly due to the whisky sipped on site.

Whiskies tried at the warehouse at Deanston are generally available for purchase at the shop, and I mentioned the 11-year-old whisky drawn from a Calvados cask that blew me away, so why did I not buy a full bottle? Because days before I visited Campbeltown and went a bit overboard with my purchases.

Do I regret not buying a bottle of the Calvados matured Deanston? Absolutely. Especially as we hear of continually creeping prices at distillery visitor centres. I hope Deanston hasn’t fallen in that direction. 

And I still wish to try that hyped up Deanston Decennary.

Score: 5/10

Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. MMc

Other opinions on this:

Whiskybase
Malt

Video Reviews:
WhiskyJason
The Whiskey Novice
The Whiskey Friend

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