Barley Exploration Series 2023 | 50% ABV

Score: 7/10

**Very Good Indeed.**
***TL;DR***
*Great whisky. A Classic Laddie in transparent clothing?*

Efficiencies for Efficiency's sake? The stats don’t lie.

Before moving to an island we had an electric car, one manufactured and maintained by BMW subsidiary, MINI. It was a wee thing, capable of zipping about rapidly, enjoying all manners of comfort like heated seats, cruise control and satnav. It even had wheels that looked like UK plug sockets. Its downfall was what some like to call “a showstopper”. The range was 90 miles on a good day.

Given that the distance to our new pad was 220 miles, and that there wouldn't be much need to have two cars now that we’d both be working from home, the decision was made quickly to hand it back.

Not two months later and news stories broke of electric car owners suddenly facing huge increases on their car insurance, some quadrupling, some multiplying 10-fold. The realities of electric cars are starting to show - fragile batteries making recovery of accident-damaged cars incredibly risky and costly, with the required levels of fire-extinguishing and removal/storage quite alarming. I’d hazard that insurance companies are starting to see their profit margins plummet with all these volatile, accident and flood-damaged cars appearing on their chitties, hence the increase in premiums. A lucky escape for us - some were even denied insurance entirely .

We made the decision to run an electric car for, what we thought, noble reasons - reduction of fossil fuel use, complete removal of operational CO2 emissions, and the ability to charge from home giving us a month’s worth of travel for £5 worth of electricity. Efficient! Granted the creation of the batteries and car itself were massively polluting, and the lifespan of these cars being circa 8 years before things get dicey notwithstanding, it seemed like a good move. But the backlash on electrified vehicles seems to have started. Popularity for new electric cars is waning. The desire for private car owners to “save the planet” by opting for an EV hangs in the balance. It’s still too expensive, and the insurance woes of existing owners won’t do much to assuage doubts for those teetering on the edge.

Reducing your carbon footprint has been a buzz-term for decades now. The Crystals try where possible to do things as efficiently as possible, but me buying whisky every other week, one bottle at a time via courier services, doesn’t help the charter at all. It’s all about balance I guess, and our efforts in other areas does give us some semblance of balance between good and bad choices. Whisky itself is a hugely inefficient industry and in fact, some new distilleries are even promoting the fact that they’re aiming to be as inefficient as possible - “efficiency is the enemy of character”, says Angus MacRaild of Decadent Drinks fame, now Kythe Distillery Partner. Producing whisky means burning stuff - peat, gas, wood, whatever - so that the barley can be dried and the stills can be heated - burning stuff is deemed bad too.

Some distilleries like Ardnamurchan operate a cyclical system whereby they contain as much of the unwanted, polluting byproduct as possible, whether it be their woodchips being delivered to their bio-mass system from a neighbouring forestry or the electricity being sent from the hydro plant in the river that also delivers their water too. The draff is sent to fields for livestock, and is even included in their Maclean’s Nose labels as repurposed paper. Really impressive stuff.

Another place trying to balance things is Islay stalwart Bruichladdich. In 2021 they began investigating a new, cutting edge process they termed “HyLaddie”, combusting oxygen and hydrogen in a vacuum which would give them the heat required for their distillery and thus remove their emission of CO2 entirely. You can read about it here - the project is hoping to complete in 2025.

More recently however we saw a big announcement in the retirement of their secondary packaging - namely their metal tubes that every single bottle of Classic Laddie, Port Charlotte and Octomore were shipped and sold inside. Being a man whose sole objective with whisky is to drink the stuff, I’ve never ever seen a reason for cardboard tubes, metal tubes, fancy packaging or other such frivolities. It’s extraneous and worthless, to me. In fact it’s an active barrier - I can’t be arsed unpicking the metal cap with my fingernails every time I want a dram, so the first thing I do is chuck the tin in the recycling bin.

Bruichladdich finally saw sense and, with the retirement of their tins, so too did their bottle design fall under the efficiency spotlight. In mid-2023 the Classic Laddie bottle was redesigned, rebranded and remade, still in their inimitable aquamarine painted guise, but in a far more aesthetically interesting straight-sided bottle. I saw it. I fell in love with it. Captain Haddock would be proud to have this wee stubby bottle of sharp nautical lines rolling about his quarters. I already have an open bottle of very full Laddie in my garage and thus wasn’t keen on buying another backup just yet, meaning I didn’t get hands on with the redesign until I saw their latest Barley Exploration Series pop up on their Instahoot.

Clear glass instead of blue, with big labels and gorgeous refractions? Auld Doog’s eyebrows were excited. Having been stuck in an Ardnamurchan loop for a while, I thought now was the perfect time to embrace island life, and order a bottle of island whisky straight from the place it was made. It took a while to get here, mind you, with ferries, a quite long mainland stint and a bridge to another island to cross but it did arrive, one morning at 8am - the delivery driver had the chance to get ahead of his daily island curve and embraced it. Shipping materials were a small cardboard box and an expandy paper concertina cone that slid over the bottle - really smart, really recyclable and really simple.

In hand it’s even more impressive and I have to say, having spent some time around the garden snapping pictures, it’s becoming the hot favourite for my favourite bottle design ever - Aberlour’s jaiket is on a decidedly shoogly peg. There’s not a place where you stick this bottle that doesn't look fantastic.

Review

Islay Barley 2014 - 2023/09/21 - 50% ABV
£70 widely available

So what makes this bottle redesign so amazing, eh? Well children of the uisge, settle in. The design of the bottle is perfect in hand: perfect diameter and perfect long spout - no dribbling madness or shaky hands as you lose grip on the wide-boy frame of such bottles as The Hearach or Glenrothes. It’s short and dumpy - ideal for avoiding accidents and let’s be honest, the javelins of Glen Scotia and Spey are just plain ugly. Whisky should be able to sit for ages on a surface without getting disrupted by wayward hands or unstable tables.

Then there’s moving the bottles around the world. Big ol’ mass of glass and liquid that needs to be transported, in whatever physical guise it may take: thin and tall means more bottles fit on a pallet’s footprint, but less can be stacked high; short and fat means fewer bottles on a pallet’s footprint but more availability for stacked height. Square bottles are the most efficient - you can have them jammed together with less air in between because shipping air is hugely inefficient. Bruichladdich has tried to answer these logistical inefficiencies with a multi-headed approach.

The new bottle is already lighter from using a thinner walled construction and higher percentage of recycled glass (now 65%), giving them 19% more glass per pallet into the distillery and 60% more product leaving it. The stopper is made from something they call “bio-based polypropylene”, made from waste oils from either the forestry or food industries. I questioned the use of plastic, bio or no, over something more traditionally acceptable as eco-friendly like wood, but there wasn't a reason given for or against. I wonder how impactful the creation of wood stoppers would be vs this bio-based polyprop, but regardless the weight implication of this food-safe plastic contributes to the weight saving goals for Bruichladdich.

All in, this new bottle has reduced their CO2e (the more inclusive carbon-dioxide measurement versus plain CO2) by 65% versus their old blue bottling. Or the equivalent of taking 182 cars off the road on the Isle of Islay. That’s quite a stat right there, and a statistic that’s easily digestible for a laypleb like me. The whisky inside yon bottle is the biggest element of enjoyment for me, and it’s where I focus the majority of my effort, but the way it arrives is quite important to me personally too, and knowing that it arrives 65% more friendly to the earth is a big tick in my box. With thanks to Graeme at Bruichladdich for these figures.

Anyway, this bottle is their Islay Barley expression distilled in late 2014 and bottled in 2023, using 100% Islay grown barley, funnily enough. Let’s see what this means for this bright spirit, and how it compares to the Classic Laddie of old.

Nose

Very malty. Sour milk, fleeting. Savoury cereal notes, empty wine gum packet. Baby sick appears but not in a repulsive way funnily enough - souring and astringent. Pepper pot. Black and grey pepper and spices, and herbs too - rocket especially. Very fresh coast - wood, sandy beach. Weeds in summer. Fruit starts to appear - bright yellow and white. Physalis. Sherry appears now, an unripe banana with a hint of earthy farmyard. After the bottle is down past the label the sick notes disappear.

Palate

Oily. Salty. Malty. Banana. Quite bright. Sherry sweetness comes out - salted treacle toffee. Slight liquorice too. Toasted woods and even toast itself - bready and sweet. Some hints of bombay spice mix in there, which is exciting. Biscuits, the ones that have a slight salty edge - Hovis and those thick bois you get in a Christmas cracker pack. Sourdough toast - what a magnificent note that is. Some usuals - toffee, caramel, leafy earths.

The Dregs

Well first off, a disappointment. I spent 30 minutes rooting around inside my garage going through loads of boxes looking for my bottle of Classic Laddie, only to find out that I gave it to my pal in the purge before moving to Skye. So I had to go and buy another one from the co-op in Portree and, unluckily for me, it was in the new design - I wanted to measure the weight of the old vs the new bottles, but I can do that another time. Plus I’m a bit delighted to have a chance to photograph the new one!

First pop of the Islay Barley was a few days before buying the Classic Laddie, and as I wandered my way around the barren wastelands in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, I had to keep pausing it to write down all the notes I was finding - engaging and interesting. Over a few evenings I got stuck into the spirit of the Islay Barley through the copious amounts of earthy, wheaty notes flying about the place - not how I remember the Classic Laddie I reviewed in May 2022, which was all summer and sun cream surprisingly, or not.

Opening the Classic Laddie from the Co was interesting - the matte aquamarine bottle is lovely in hand but misses that medicinal bottle feeling of the Islay Barley. It’s its own thing I guess, but I think I prefer the transparent appearance of the new bottle. Or do I? It’s a supremely good bottle design regardless of what colour it's painted - and the aquamarine is delicious to look at and photograph. Into two separate copitas they go, and I leave for 30 minutes whilst I navigate a particularly tricky rock field in South Knot City.

When I return to the glasses there’s a striking resemblance to the Classic Laddie when trying the Islay Barley, so much so that it’s very, very difficult to tell which is which: both present the same notes almost in tandem. The Islay Barley might have a tad more toasted feel, and the Laddie a more citrus apple tinge, maybe even orange zest, but at this point I’m starting to question what it is I’m getting for £30 more.

A few more pours the same evening confirms my suspicions - there’s little to choose between them. A short trip back to the lowlands over the weekend gives me separation, enjoying a Bunnahabhain bottled by Chieftains in 2018 and seeing the bottle off as we watch the Springboks power to their 4th Rugby World Cup. Magnificent, on both fronts. Returning home after a six hour slog in the dark, I get some of both in glass and stick Death Stranding on to do some therapeutic walking and delivering.

I find that the Classic Laddie is still presenting very close to what the Islay Barley is giving. There might be fleeting notes here and there that separate them by the thinnest margins - a more robust malty note in the Islay Barley and then a more new-makey freshly zesty farmy note in the Laddie. But then all of two minutes later the Classic Laddie is going all robust and the Islay Barley zesty. I do feel like the Islay Barley is just that bit less farmy new-make in presentation, enough that it’s noticeable if you really, really look hard. I don’t know what to make of it.

Islay Barley is a Bruichladdich distilled spirit of age stated 8 years old, with maturation in bourbon casks, sherry butts and second-fill wine casks. The Classic Laddie is a Bruichladdich distilled spirit of minimum 8 years old, with maturation in casks of bourbon, Spanish sherry, Syrah, Madeira and Merlot casks. Looking at the breakdown using the code on the back of my Classic Laddie - 23/107 - I see that a big component of barley is, dun dun dun, Islay barley. Aye, there’s some barley from all over Scotland in the Laddie - Lothian, Aberdeenshire, Black Isle and “Scottish Mainland”, but I wonder…

I wonder what it is we’re getting here for over £30 more. The knowledge that ALL of the barley is from Islay, and that it’s great that local provenance is shining through in this Islay Barley 2014 iteration? Is that worth £30? I guess it’s like UK manufacture in a way - it comes down to people. You can get something manufactured for £1 in the Far East, and it’ll be as near as dammit as well made as something manufactured for £5 in the UK - the cost of hiring people to do the work is what elevates the cost of the thing. Machines are machines; code is code; finishing is finishing. Wages are the differentiator and it’s more expensive to have something made locally than it is remotely - a fact of the “modern” world right there.

The knowledge that the barley is grown, harvested, processed and used to make this rather wonderful Islay whisky, with local hands, knowledge, spirit and community is a lot more resonant, romantic even, than the concept that ingredients are shipped in en-masse from around the land and pummelled through an industrial process before being whizzed out the other side for supermarkets to slash prices for Clubcard holders. Whisky is a craft and Bruichladdich crafts it more visually appealing than most. I want to cycle in the Bruichladdich cycling shirt, even if I’d look like a sweaty shrink-wrapped bag of potatoes, because the brand looks fantastic.

I have enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy my time with Bruichladdich Islay Barley, and their Classic Laddie too. Where before I was indifferent, having spent very little time after review with the Classic Laddie and even donating a nearly full bottle to my pal, this experience has reconnected me to this Islay distillery. I’m keen to try more now, and I am all over the Bruichladdich eco-drive of excellence. My eyes are swivelling. If you are considering buying the Islay Barley 2014 and have a recent iteration of the Classic Laddie, you might not find much difference in the two. Knowing that, I don’t grudge the extra £30 premium I paid because I have formed a new connection. You might already have a connection to this place and feel begrudged that it’s the Classic Laddie in a clear bottle. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Score: 7/10

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

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