AD/12:16 Nickolls & Perks | 58.8% ABV

Score: 8/10

**Something special.**
***TL;DR***
*An awful day made great by brilliant whisky.*

A tale of a burst tyre and the universe smiling

Dougie’s fun-ometer is scuffing the very bottom of the scale. Contrary to public opinion, I’m a fun guy but recent events have driven me over the edge; you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the general state of play right now that’s to blame.

The UK is going through the wringer at bit, headlined by persistent political turmoil; a turbulent landscape of never-before-seen mistrust in our leaders, the media and the rule of law. A cost of living crisis coupled with a (mercifully dissipating) energy crisis is forcing people to choose between eating and heating; the rasp of purse strings tightening can be heard the country over. We’re nothing but passengers as the pound plummets against the dollar (and many other currencies) to a value not seen since the 1970s, when the UK first switched to a new system of one pound equalling one hundred pence - Decimal Day they called it. There’s talk of a recession looming, a housing market crash and, in probably the most distressing news, Elon Musk is hellbent on introducing sentient androids into this fractured world. But it’s not any of that.

We all have bad days and good days, stressful days and easy days and, if we’re lucky, they’ll balance out on a week by week basis, or at worst, month by month. Good weeks and bad weeks. Sometimes you have a string of bad days that leads to a streak of bad weeks and soon you’re questioning what it’s all for. A bit dramatic, aye, but I get to be, because one day recently was a total stinker.

My day job and business is quite reactive to world events. Depending on what happens on any given day will influence whether or not people buy our wares, for we’re in the business of making non-essential products and selling them online. Our sales graph is even affected by the weather - a run of unbroken sunshine and sales evaporate quicker than the sweat from Prince Andrew’s brow - people shut computers down and position tinfoil underneath their chins instead. Well, you can imagine what effect all this turmoil (not to mention Her Majesty’s death) has created in the “non-essential” retail sector just now and no-one is immune; I’d hazard the whisky industry will be feeling it too.

I’ve also had a bit of an illness brewing that never seems to surface. Itchy throat, lethargy and days-end exhaustion seem to come and go in waves, never fully doing anything except loiter. Just when I think my body is going to shut down and deal with it, I wake up the next day feeling fit as a fiddle. It’s frustrating - I wish whatever it was would just wipe me out and be done with it so I could recover and get on with all the important stuff. It’s not Covid and it’s not laziness, just a strange lingering nothingness.

On the day in question, after finishing my working day in a blaze of mediocrity, I left the office and got a massive stone in my shoe. Getting in the car and turning to decant the boulder, my phone slipped from my pocket and shucked down the side of the chair; I spent ages fishing it out. Car finally engaged and, looking at the lateness this phone fishing caused, I made haste over to the junction at the main road. Once the traffic had abated, I slowly turned into the road and “BANG!”, a huge crack that sounded much like what hitting a large pothole at 50mph might sound like - the chassis shook. Within seconds the car bleeped and flashed tyre-shaped symbols at me, declaring that one of my tyres was now fully deflated and that I was to stop immediately. Stop I did, and the message updated to say that, if I had run-flat tyres fitted, I could carry on to a garage. Such modern conveniences were attached to my car, and so I travelled onwards, semi-grateful.

The tell-tale flattie rumble soon ramped into a full-blown racket of flapping run-flat excitement; rain started, which added to the tension. With my daughter to collect from childcare, my wife that was out of range on a business trip and a local garage closing for the evening, I was left with no choice but to limp home to switch over to my wife’s car and whizz back to collect my daughter. It was only later that I was able to properly assess the damage: A two-inch tear on the outer sidewall of the tyre was the culprit and the nicely uniformly round rims were now exhibiting a shocking dent. I’ve never seen anything like it in my 20 years of driving, not least because of the low-speed nature of it all, and the tyres weren’t exactly old. Needless to say the working day ended on an expensive bang.

“One of the things I fret about is not being able to try whisky that looks of interest, because I’m too slow, not in the know, or not paying enough attention. ”

— said Doog, and almost everyone

Barking at everyone who dared to appear before me, I made dinner before I sat down at the table with a withering sigh in front of the computer to order new tyres. I lifted the first spoonful of my charred dinner to my face and it plopped off the spoon before the journey was complete, skittering all the way down my cream-coloured jumper. I then dribbled my water over the computer as I bashed my card details into the website, grimacing at the cost.

“Of course you can’t just replace one tyre these days,” I muttered, realising cars are fitted with such high-performance tyres they need a balance of wear to be able to perform properly across the axle. So it very quickly became two tyres and oh my goodness I’m boring myself.

The girls started bickering, so I made a coffee and shuffled upstairs to try and bring my mood back from the brink with a bit of soulful guitar practice. If you could’ve heard me, you’d have wondered if my daughter had found a hammer because I was butchering that beautiful instrument beyond recognition. Easy chords were a struggle, with strings buzzing and fingers that felt like actual sausages. I sat cradling the guitar silently, staring blankly into space waiting for this rubbish day to flop over into the next. It was then that my phone pinged and my day of woe was redressed.

It was our man Gregor “Time For a Dram” McWee, and he’d sent me a picture.

Review

Ardnamurchan Single cask for Nickolls & Perks’ 225th anniversary , 58.8% ABV. Five years old (cask 1308)
Sold out

One of the things I fret about is not being able to try whisky that looks interesting because I’m too slow, not in the know, or not paying enough attention. Ardnamurchan is one I’ve recently decided to stop sweating over despite my love for it because it’s too disappointing to come up short time and again. The picture Gregor sent was of an order he’d just placed, which included a bottle of Ardnamurchan 07.21:05. However, a second glance showed this was a bundle deal and alongside that core range was a blue-painted bottle of single cask Ardnamurchan AD/12:16 CK.1308. I assumed it was a US release given Gregor’s location, but it was a special Nickolls & Perks 225th anniversary bottling. Surprised, given I’d looked at that very thing earlier in the month and registered it being sold out (obvs), I headed over to the website to discover there was indeed a bundle deal of the two bottles, and even more surprising, it was available.

Not realising the perilous position I now inhabited, I slowly perused the item, reading the description of this special bottling available initially only in-store and thus out of reach for many of us here in Scotland. I considered the cask type - 5 year old unpeated malt casked in first fill Spanish Oloroso - checking if this was similar to the previous blue bottled CK.339 I’d enjoyed. After zooming in and out on the nice label and messaging Gregor a few more times, I finally added the deal to the basket. There was £10 off the bundle too, so depending on your viewpoint it was either a £35 bottle of 07.21:05 (brilliant value), or it was an £80 bottle of single cask, which is slightly cheaper than previous blue “CK” bottlings. Either way it looked like a good deal, so I completed the check out process with a slight tinge of confusion. Why are these available now when before they weren’t? Or was this bundle always available and I just hadn’t seen it? Maybe Nickolls & Perks held some back to do this bundle deal? Is this single cask… crap? I didn’t realise my order was the last bundle available, because after I had checked out and had sent Gregor a wee message to say as such, I refreshed the website and they were gone.

Nickolls & Perks, for those unaware (like me), is a small independent wine and spirit merchants based in Stourbridge, just west of Birmingham, England. Looking on Google Street View, it’s almost like the town planners couldn’t decide what architectural style to follow for their wee shopping precinct, so they just built them all. There’s drooping Tudor facades opposite stately Georgian blocks, Art Deco concrete majesty beside Art Nouveau curved lead-framed windows. There’s a stunning Elizabethan stained-glass Hogwarts stand-in next door to an awful brick monstrosity. And, right in the middle of it all, there’s a built-by-numbers, nondescript modern Tesco Extra supermarket. Nickolls & Perks’ building is of a melting Tudor persuasion and to celebrate their 225th anniversary, they curated a number of special whisky bottlings from Bimber, Daftmill, some Gordon & MacPhail indies and this Ardnamurchan single cask. There’s mention of more things to come, too.

Two hundred and twenty five years! So, by my maths, Nickolls & Perks started operating when Britain was at war with France as the French Revolution was in full swing. The world was transitioning from manual labour to mechanisation as the Industrial Revolution picked up pace, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart popped his clogs at home aged 35, owing to suspected rheumatic fever. That’s like, proper ages ago.

It’s one of the many wonderful things about some new (and some older) distilleries, like Ardnamurchan, who open up their warehouses for places like Nickolls & Perks, Tyndrum Whisky, Abbey Whisky and many other specialist shops and whisky clubs, to bottle their own exclusive cask of whisky. It means we often get access to casks that might have gone into a vatting or kicked around in the warehouse unused for a while. It’s often a great chance to taste a purer strain of whisky from these distilleries; it's straight out the cask and into the bottle. The downside is that most of these special bottlings are only available in-shop initially, or put up online at random times and sell out in the blink of an eye. As such they’re highly sought after, and chased with dedication. I did so with the CK.339 and the 04.22 Paul Launois, and promised never to do it again, which is why this whole buying experience was extra strange.

A beautiful and rare case of the right place, right man, then. Thanks Gregor for inadvertently alerting me to the loophole in space-time, allowing me to nonchalantly take up, without frenzied, sweaty palmed keyboard bashing, a single cask bottling of Ardnamurchan. Things are looking up. So I guess after all that I need to open this single cask bottling and see what it’s all about? It better not be a stinker.

Nose

Oranges, peppery salad, Caramac pips. Luscious salted caramel. Fresh linen and some well-worn tote bags. Wet tarmac. Cognac-like. Wee bit of wood polish. Sherry bleeds through after the shoulder a lot quicker. Matchbox. Lime zest.

Palate

Oily oranges and light liquorice. Ginger snaps. Reminds me of cognac - or a vastly less sweet Grand Marnier. Wave of peppery heat, mineralic. Strawberries and cherry compote. Cherry lollipop, peppery spice and cheese and onion crisps. Subtle match strike. Finish is lovely, long and fruity.

The Dregs

It’s almost impossible for me not to swoon about Ardnamurchan because it just hits the feels every time. I’ve not tried a duffer since discovering them in 2021 with the 07.21:05 release and each time I’ve been apprehensive about what I’d find. You see, by putting this distillery on such a high pedestal means that one day they’ll fall. Ardnamurchan can do no wrong, it seems, and not just in the rapidly misting eyes of Dougie Crystal either - they’re held around the whisky community as the benchmark of transparency, innovation and value.

It’s been around seven weeks since I last bought a bottle of whisky, and in that time I’ve readdressed why and how I buy whisky. I’ve been that guy - casting a wide net and gathering it in with excitement, finding some big fat fish in there that get the motor going. Inevitably there’s also some wee fish caught that didn’t have much to offer. But the most disappointing byproduct of a widely cast net is that there’s also a few toilet seats and rusty pots in there too, and it’s those ones that have really upset me. Often we can only go by the tasting notes provided by the people with a vested interest in selling them - some websites operate a 35ml sample solution where you can get a wee taster before you opt for the big bottle, but they’re patchy and unreliable. So talk of gorgeous silky caramel and butterscotch nuances might actually resolve as weak sugar water for us: whisky is perpetually subjective. I say all that to say this: I’ve been extremely careful with how I’ve spent my whisky budget lately.

With this bottle I was apprehensive once more - an Instagram message to Connal Mackenzie (Supremo Sales Director for Adelphi) the night before it arrived had returned the opinion that, while it was tasty, it wasn’t as complex as the CK.339 that I’d enjoyed all too briefly. It too had been casked in first-fill Oloroso but had several more years maturation under its belt. There’s nothing worse than paying £80-90 for a whisky to find it’s a damp squib. Well, there is: you can pay £80-90 for a whisky then see it for sale elsewhere for £60 the following day, and then find out it’s a damp squib.

The Nickolls & Perks AD/12:16 CK.1308 is, obviously, delicious and once again right up my street. It’s a slightly different take on the base Ardnamurchan spirit than I’ve tried before, and brings to the table big orange, clove and zesty notes above that familiar salty, sweet caramel nectar. At first I found it quite surprising - I’d taken the neck pour in my bulbous “Perfect Measure” glass outside to kick the football around with Missy, and the nose gave quite a cognac-like first impression. But not long into the dram I find that it’s a bit more complex - it swings quite smoothly between the orange notes and Ardnamurchan’s beautiful salty sweet maritime vibe, with a thread of Christmas spices appearing now and then. I need to be careful, because this could be the quickest £90 whisky to disappear down my whisky pipe.

These blue bottles are like a loud reinforcement of an unquestioned acceptance. Ardnamurchan’s core expression is established now under their /AD moniker, and each new release harnesses the constantly maturing whisky inside Glenbeg’s hillside warehouses. Each new expression is as good, if not better, as the previous release and it’s becoming a bit of a given that we can buy Ardnamurchan knowing it’ll be great. It’s a reliably steady line on my oscilloscope of high quality whisky. When I get to try a blue bottle that line shoots upwards, before coming back to rest on a slightly higher steady line. It’s a reminder, unnecessary but warmly welcomed, that there’s yet more superb whisky waiting to be experienced from the warehouses of Glenbeg. £90 is a lot of money for a five year old whisky and, despite it not causing me to lie face down on the floor in deference to its mind-altering smell and taste, it’s certainly not outside the realms of bang for buck when whisky is as good as this. I’ve paid the same for older whisky that I’ve smelled, tasted and immediately regretted spending so much for. But is it worth that much?

When visiting the distillery in April there was a line of casks marked “Tequila” and our guide DJ had nonchalantly mentioned they’re filling more and more interesting casks under a “who knows how it’ll turn out” programme. Very soon Ardnamurchan will launch a limited release Madeira cask; if I’m lucky I might get a sample or two from the generous (and more dedicated than me) community, or win a ballot that I’ve automatically been entered into by snaffling the fleeting Tyndrum Exclusive AD/12:16 CK1302.

Whether I get a bottle of the Madeira expression or not, it’s fine - I’ve got so much incredible Ardnamurchan on my shelves that it seems almost selfish to buy more. Chasing woes aside, it’s undeniable that Ardnamurchan are leading the way in the new era of transparent, high quality Scottish whisky, and the price to experience the more potent single strains of their whisky is, in my eyes, well worth the increased outlay. We all have distilleries that resonate with us in ways no others do, and when we find them we’d do almost anything to try any morsel of whisky they care to throw our way, or we find when foraging for it. Ardnamurchan does that for me, so it’s a solid 8/10 on account of making the day from hell seem like a fair price to pay to experience whisky as resonant as this.

Score: 8/10

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

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