Glen Garioch 17yo
Renaissance Chapter 3 Official Release | 50.8% ABV
First forays are always fun
Dougie, Hamish, and Ogilvie made me do it. Again.
Taking the advice of others is fickle, unless you get to know the person. It’s something that we intuitively know and it’s not entirely unique to whisky. Your local cheese monger will get to know your favourites, much like my wife and I getting into some unique double cream blue cheeses from Saint Agur, some Tomme aux Chevre, Brie de Meaux, le Blackburn, and others that routinely fill our faceholes every month on our now recurring “snack suppers”. You’ve got local butchers, local apiaries, bakeries/patisseries, and many others.
Heck, the parallels between local coffee roasters and whisky are impossible to ignore. Locales around the world producing unique regional varieties, and farm to farm nuances directly evident despite all being made from the same “bean”. Sounds very much like local barley type of products doesn’t it?
Our rebel splinter cell, which recently went public in our Baker’s bourbon extravaganza, has had a distinct coffee slant to our chat group recently. Local small batch beans, sourced direct from farmers, has been flowing back and forth between our two different hemispheres. It almost makes me want to get back into the coffee game. Maybe my resolution will waver, but today is not the day, and I shall resist the pull going down the coffee detour again. Regardless, if I do give in to temptation, I’ve got a great short-list of trusted coffee aficionados to source my beans.
So I took the advice of Dougie, Hamish, and Ogilvie. I dove into Glen Garioch. Head first. I snagged this Renaissance Chapter 3 release, their official Virgin Oak Batch 2, and an indie. The official bottlings were purchased at deep discount from RRP, while the SMOS indie was brought in to provide some counterbalance in my exploration into the Geery.
Doing a little bit of research on the quaternary chapter series is well, frustrating and fruitless.
First off, on Glen Garioch’s website, there is a distinct lack of a search bar. Who in the dastardly disdaining distinction would design a website without a search function? In this day and age. Heck, if I try Google’s attempt at an official search bar, the Renaissance series is completely blank and not returning much from Glen Garioch’s official site.
Secondly, the website ribbon rolls over from the core range including the well-scoring Founder’s Reserve and 12yo, to a wide range of distillation year vintages (like Ogilvie’s 1999) before settling on a “15 Year Renaissance” and the Virgin Oak release (spoiler alert, review forthcoming) at the end of the horizontal menu. So the 15 Year Renaissance is labelled as Chapter 1 on their website. My Chapter 3 is 17 years old, and the Chapter 4, which just hit my local market, is 18. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what Glen Garioch did here. Four releases across 4 years, and objectively in today’s market, are relatively well-priced.
My 17yo Ch. 3 had a local RRP of around $170 (£98), and the “new” 18yo Ch. 4 is sitting around the $200 (£115) mark (although one retailer has this curiously sitting at 50% off at $100 (£58), ooh I’m tempted. I must not buy more whisky. I must not buy more whisky. I must not buy more whisky…).
If we compare to my local (Canadian) prices of a $180 Glenlivet 18 (40%), $340 Highland Park 18 (43%), $180 Deveron 18 (40%), $150 Arran 18 (46%), $140 Acnoc 18 (46%), and $205 Glen Scotia 18 (46%), the RRP pricing is in line with the market, if a bit cheeky and erring towards the upper end of the spectrum, aiming at the more lucrative and posh end. Hold up… if we picture the fanciest core range or even small batch whiskies in our mind, are we really conjuring anything from Beam Suntory? I’m not.
After all, we don’t know the number of bottles in this release, do we? It could very well be ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand bottles and in line with the batch-variation susceptible, and thankful for it, Arran 18 yo, and is therefore not that “special”. You hear that Beam Suntory? Communication is key.
The general public will never peruse your website, even though it is absolutely piss poor. However, the enthusiasts will. So please design and update your website with the intent on satisfying those who will come digging.
So what’s in Beam Suntory, who owns the Geery? Laphroaig has held onto #12, Glen Garioch has held onto #28, and Bowmore at #38 in our recent update to the crowd-sourced Dramface Top 40. Across those three, I would very much wager that the public-facing aspects and enthusiast-angle of Beam Suntory is lacking. Glen Garioch’s aggressively priced core range notwithstanding, I’m struggling to see the connection. I wish I held onto the box now. At least it might have held some precious information. But given their digital presence, perhaps I shouldn’t hold my breath that the box contained anything of note anyways.
As an aside, I’ve noticed a very curious “declining” %abv across all four Renaissance releases. Ch. 1 at 51.9%, Ch. 2 at 51.4%, Ch. 3 at 50.8%, Ch. 4 at 50.2%. A very curiously consistent 0.6% decline in strength across every year. Rather manufactured if you ask me. Coupled with the lack of cask strength, batch strength, or other descriptors indicate that these are rather purposely designed releases. So if they’re designed, perhaps they should be the most optimal and flavourful drams possible by the distillery?
Rant over, back to whisky. So we’ve got a 17 year old bourbon & sherry, un-chill filtered Glen Garioch. No mention of cask strength. No mention of natural colour.
Review
Glen Garioch 17yo, The Renaissance Chapter 3, 50.8% ABV
CAS$ 100 (£58) paid on discount
Nose
Dark, thick honey. Nondescript redness (I see why Dougie uses red/purple for Geery, the notes are so muddled and smeared together). Cinnamon apple danish. The nose belies the %ABV. The nose is nice, if a bit boring.
Palate
Fruit and spice, tingling the tip of my tongue and inside lip. Under this quite evident spice is some orange oil, toffee, and vanilla. There’s a slight, and quite unexpected, salty tinge to the entry as well, very similar to a sweet dessert sprinkled with a light touch of flaky salt, that reveals itself after returning to this whisky after a sip of water.
The finish is a rye toast with orange marmalade spread with fresh cracked black pepper, followed by a touch of hot chocolate powder, before degrading further into a sherry sweetness and black pepper bite. My inner cheeks get a decent tannin thrashing too. The mouthfeel is thinner than I was thinking it would be, also evident based on the way it sloshes around the glass. Interesting.
With water, this beast changes its colours, except the spice. The persistent spice remains. It’s a vanilla confetti cake smothered in toffee caramel, with a declining orange and hot chocolate powder finish with that fresh cracked black pepper bite on the second half of the experience.
The Dregs
I know I finished off with the palate notes with an “interesting”.
It’s ‘interesting’ in that it is all over the place. It’s spicy, then sweet, then back to spicy, before a dash of salty savouriness, then finishing on spices.
This being my first introduction to Glen Garioch and all, perhaps the spicy components are a core backbone. The official tasting notes do not shy away from mentioning spicy, nor does our Dougie neglect mentioning the persistent spice notes. So if you’re adverse to spice, then perhaps Glen Garioch isn’t your dram. Personally, I don’t shy away from spice. In my opinion, it is necessary to balance sweet sherry-laden whiskies with some spice or other flavours (peat!) and this Geery is definitely not short of the black pepper spice.
For the deep discount that I enjoyed in purchasing my first foray in Geery land, this is a 5/10 because I’m not adverse to peppery bite, however this is not for the faint hearted or chasers of the “smooth” or “refined” whiskies which might be predicted from the age statement and the price point.
It’s got a lot going on but unfortunately it doesn't come across as purposely crafted. For the $170-185 RRP, I’d very likely give this a 4/10 seeing how fickle the palate experience is with the significant pepper bite. There ya have it folks, never pay RRP. It’s practically a universal rule in this day and age.
I will say that the Glen Garioch spirit has some significant grip and strength to it and therefore not likely easily susceptible to over-casking.
Onto further Geery exploration then… Dougie, Hamish, and Ogilvie haven’t led me astray yet.
Score: 5/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. BB