2011 Single Cask vs XL Fermentation DE3 Comparison | 54.9% ABV

Score: 8/10

**Something Special.**
***TL;DR***
*Engaging and interesting - this demands your full attention.*

We are the music-makers . . . and we are the dreamers of dreams. Come along, come along.

The embers are fading on a weekend carved from a solid block of oak. My second ever whisky festival concluded with a firm place in the top five whisky experiences of my short whisky life. But it wasn’t over yet. No Sir.

The day after the Glasgow Whisky Festival I headed to the Aqvavitae Blind Challenge event at a local casino, where sixty whisky exciters would test their smell and taste skills in a blind flight of whiskies designed to surprise.

Not going to lie, I wasn’t in peak performance when I awoke with a withering groan on Sunday. Feeling like I’d spent all night sucking on a bag of flour, my body was throbbing along to my heartbeat and, after a rubbish sleep, my head was soon starting to throb too. Taking big draughts of water helped, but what really made headway through the mind mist was a brisk walk in the chilly autumnal air, through the cinematically orange and yellow leaf-lined park leading to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, via Tesco for some medicinal assistance. Arriving at the gallery at exactly 11am, opening time, afforded a unique experience of finding a completely isolated neuk inside the beautiful, vast stone building, and tucking myself in there for an hour to process what transpired the day before.

Whisky festivals are a non-stop scrolling screen of vibrant colour, and it’s often difficult to recall specific moments unless you have the mental bandwidth to log it in the brain or, like me, you have a camera. Sitting upstairs in the museum, listening to the soft murmur of morning chatter as the waft of ground coffee rose into the lofty cloisters, I was remembering all the peripheral moments leading up to each picture downloading onto my phone, like it was playing out all over again. It’s a great memory jogger, a camera, and as I approached the photographs of the Loch Lomond table I was remembering the quite remarkable things we tried there.

A quick pour of the Limousin finished 14yo got the facehole in the Loch Lomond game before a small, clear bottle with a white label was revealed from behind the table, and offered up to us to try. The first was a one year old single grain spirit from a mash of 70% malted barley and 30% naked oats fermented for 96 hours, with a combination of distillers M & MX yeasts distilled in Loch Lomond’s copper continuous column still with spirit taken off the still at ~80% ABV. Currently maturing in second fill bourbon, it blew our minds. Next we tried a two year old single grain spirit from a mash of 70% malted barley and 30% unmalted barley fermented for the same time as the 1yo, with the same yeasts, same still and same spirit ABV. That one is currently maturing in third fill toasted American oak hogsheads. It blew our minds.

The man pouring the drams, Master Blender for Loch Lomond Group Michael Henry, smiled a soft smile and was genuinely pleased that we were all barking into each other’s faces about both of them. This was whisky maturing now that would be released way, way down the line, but it was a clear example of what unique stuff Loch Lomond are working on, and found interesting enough to bring to a festival. That 1yo barley/oats mix was incredible and I remembered the Englishman and Irishman (of our EIS bottle split) continuing to talk over each other as we walked away, about how interesting the things coming from Loch Lomond are.

I was equally taken with the wee model of their strange looking still on the display stand, showing a bulbous pot still bottom but with a vertical cylinder sticking out the top - very odd looking compared to the more elegant necks of more traditional pot stills. I took a mental note to Google Michael Henry and those stills when I had some free time, but the next dram was calling - a Meikle Tòir of unremarkable comparison.

Back in the gallery sitting in the glow of the morning sunshine, I was already getting sleepy so made my way back to the hotel for a lie down before heading back out for the afternoon event. Auld Doog. Lying down for a wee rest. Gah, I’m getting old, but tell you what, it worked wonders!

Walking along to the event, via another Tesco to get some food into my rumbling belly, I felt pretty good, but the prospect of drinking more whisky felt pretty bad. Into the casino I went, up into the main betting floor, past the racket of Mahjong players and into the private suite to see the team captains standing ready with armbands on, among them; Michael Henry.

Soon it was time to get going and the waiting horde of dedicated whisky folk were invited to come into the room where Seve was waiting with a tombola. Small paper slips with names of the teams were inside, as well as some prize tickets for some sample bottles. The teams were all named for their captains and I picked out a slip with the words ‘The Lomonds’ - Michael’s team. ‘Oh you beauty!’, I thought, knowing I had so many questions to ask - poor Michael didn’t know what was coming. I walked over, Michael stood up and introduced himself in his polite way, and we started chatting about this and that - how the evening session went, if he managed to get to any other stalls, and where he lives (not like that).

Off we went with our flight of five drams, and before long everyone at our table was none the wiser; not knowing what was in the glasses and what it all meant, we had fantastic fun talking about it all with some lovely people - I enjoyed chatting to Ellen from Nepal who announced off the bat that she would be the weak link in our team - little did she know that Auld Doog’s middle name is ‘Achilles’. I kept joking that we didn’t have to worry because we had The Michael Henry to lead us to victory.

In the end we came joint 4th - I squeezed out a 1/10 while Ellen got 4/10. Michael got 3/10. How amazing to have a legendary figure in the whisky industry find that they too struggle to place blind drams, whilst a self-professed amateur got the best marks of all of us. It was reassuring.

The table chat inevitably turned to Loch Lomond and one of us asked why Loch Lomond didn’t have a visitor centre or tours available. It’s all a matter of layout and HSE, Michael began.

You see, the distillery has always been used for high capacity whisky production. Where distilleries centred around visitor experiences, like Kingsbarns say or Lindores, their outputs are 400,000 - 600,000 litres of pure alcohol per annum with off-site maturation; Loch Lomond outputs 13 million lpa across all their stills and matures on-site. That huge output requires some pretty big, pretty fast moving objects daily - casks - so that they can get them filled, logged and over to the warehouse for maturation.

So what? Macallan outputs 15 million and has arguably the most visitor friendly distillery. Well it’s a matter of layout (and the unwillingness to spend £140m on a purpose built one). Far better to concentrate funds on making whisky than on upturned horns filled with funny smells.

Loch Lomond distillery is geared towards making whisky as efficiently as possible inside industrial buildings that were established long before whisky became popular like it is today - just check out Google Maps for evidence enough of why this isn’t really a touristy type place; more farmyard grain store than whisky distillery, with strange retail complex next door. This means that there’s few safe routes, places or areas for visitors to go, and Loch Lomond mustn’t be keen to adapt the site to make one available.

There’s also a very important link between Loch Lomond and now non-existent Littlemill: the chap that owned Littlemill in the 1950s. Duncan Thomas, seeing a boom in the demand for malt whisky for blending, decided to create a unique still that could produce the various profiles he needed from the one still - the triple distilled style of Littlemill and the heavier double distilled style for blending. This still took on the shape of a pot still base but with a straight neck, a bit of a pioneering design and the only one of its type in Scotland at that time. Thomas then decided to create a sister distillery to Littlemill using a nearby defunct dye works, installing a carbon copy of the Littlemill straight-necked still and calling it Loch Lomond Distillery. The importance is in the philosophy that he brought to Loch Lomond - it was a distillery focused on using distillation to shape and create flavour. If it wasn’t for the foundation laid by Thomas, Loch Lomond would not be creating the whisky they are today.

Fair play, we all say. Food arrived and most of our table peeled off to get some. I took my opportunity to ask Michael, trying to get much needed sustenance into his body, some questions about his trajectory, and how he sees Loch Lomond in the modern exciter age of whisky. My first question out the gate was asking what catastrophic event occurred to make Loch Lomond a whisky that no-one enjoyed until very recently. He wasn’t phased. It was down to cask management - and perhaps a lack of interest in what was being bottled by the management at the time. Loch Lomond was creating 12 million litres of blending fodder during the 90s and 00s, meaning that when it came to single malts - things a lot of people didn’t show much interest in at the time - the management just stuck any old stuff into standard shaped bottles at 40% and called it a day. It’s why apparently a lot of the mid-2000’s bottlings of Loch Lomond, Glen Scotia and Inchmurrin are a bit strange, and inconsistent.

2014 saw a sea-change in attitude, swinging over to single malt production with a focus on creating a more consistent, definitive character of Loch Lomond Whisky. There was also an internal shift to support this goal with teams assembled to make sure that the casks laid down and maturing are of high quality, consistent character, and also developing strategies for the future of Loch Lomond releases. The connection to the end user has also been bumped up the priority list and is why we’re starting to see some enthusiast leaning products arriving on the market - building that relationship and setting up a standard in this exciter bracket is really important to the future of Loch Lomond.

I ask Michael what makes him such a maverick, especially when it comes to the yeast-heavy releases and Extra Long Fermentation experiments? What made him decide back in 2014 to use these yeasts or ferment for so long - things that a lot of places are now starting to do in 2023? “Good beer makes great whisky.” I never thought about it like that, how similar whisky and beer is to make - probably because I don’t drink any beer and never have. Funny story, even a small amount of beer gives me a stoater of a headache.

“The previous incumbent, John Peterson, came from the beer industry and brought with him the knowledge of making great beer - long fermentation goes hand in hand with beer and the pioneering use of interesting yeasts likewise.” Michael was lucky enough to be positioned to take over from John and develop his work at the point at which Loch Lomond pivoted to focusing on single malts. Cut to 2023 and, as punters start to converge on these interesting yeast experiments and celebrate the flavour journey in quality whisky made for quality’s sake, Loch Lomond are automatically positioned to lead the charge because of both the pioneering design of the straight neck still by Duncan Thomas, thus creating a legacy of distillates that focused on flavour, and also John Peterson pioneering the use of wine yeasts and long fermentation in Scotch.

I asked if he’s going to be releasing more interesting things, if he’s sitting on some fantastic casks and is just biding his time? Well, it turns out there’s still apprehension about releasing really ‘out there’ whisky. Loch Lomond might well be on the cutting edge of the whisky that’s getting a lot of people hot under the collar, but the alienation of their core audience, the risks to the long-establishing reputation for consistency and quality, and not diverting too much attention away from their biggest output - blends - means that a lot of the casks Michael has identified as fascinating and set aside for closer monitoring, might never see the light of day.

Michael’s Casks. Can you imagine having casks of whisky that are blowing minds, but might never be shared? Well, he’s sharing some of them now, and it’s one of Michael’s casks that set off Roy Duff, Aqvavitae himself. Roy’s interest in Loch Lomond ignited when he discovered one of their golf-branded “Open Special Edition” bottlings. Covid laid waste to many things, but The Open Championship being postponed in 2020 meant that the typically middle-of-the-road commemorative bottling that would have been released, was instead replaced by something a bit more…interesting: one of their wine yeast fermentations that Michael aimed at the more excitable whisky drinkers among us. Funnily enough and entirely unrelated, you can read Wally’s take on three of them here…

Anyway, that set Roy off on a path to discover more wine yeast experiments and it just so happened that Michael had such a cask marked out as exceptional. I remember Roy speaking so excitedly about it, and that it was nothing like anything he’d had from Loch Lomond before, or since. With a bit of luck Michael was willing to let loose that cask of whisky under a partnership with Aqvavitae for his Barflies - a 10 year old single cask of whisky, distilled in 2011 using chardonnay yeast and matured in a single first fill bourbon cask. I saw it. I read about it. I wanted it. I had the chance to buy one, two or maybe even three at the death. I didn’t buy any of it, because I was in the middle of other things taking up all my buying power. And that was that, gone forever.

Fife Whisky Festival arrived in February 2023 and with it the ecstatic punters charged to ultra, some attending their first festival after Covid, and some (like me) attending their first festival full stop. I met oor Clyde for the first time at Fife Whisky Festival, chatting to him about the Glen Garioch AD/Venturers bottling that was setting me alight at the time. He asked if I’d tried any Loch Lomond - we were standing at the SMWS table and the whisky in glass had reminded him of Loch Lomond. I said I had, but it was a middling palate calibrator type dram, he asked if I’d tried a sample of Roy’s bottling, I said no, he said a sweary word and then said he had a spare bottle that he’d give me at Glasgow Whisky Festival. I said no, he didn’t care.

Sure enough, at the Akbar’s curry empire phase of our day Clyde appeared with said bottle in hand. I forced him to take an Ardnamurchan Supersmash in return, that I concocted from the bank of Ardnamurchan whisky at my disposal - a 1-of-1 bottling just for him.

Review 1/2

Loch Lomond 10yo “Aqvavitae” Single Cask, 54.2% ABV
£75 - Sold Out

In between then and now I moved 220 miles north-west to an island, and before I departed the Lowlands I had a message from a supporter of Dramface and all-round nice guy Drew, saying that he wanted to send me “a little something” as a housewarming gift. I again protested but he too was having none of it. A week later a bottle of Loch Lomond arrived in the post, the Extra Long Fermentation 10 year old - a little something. An astonishing one-two of generosity that honestly makes me a bit uncomfortable, because it introduces a few awkwardnesses.

First, how do I repay such generosity when it’s denied point blank? I want to repay in samples or bottles of whisky they’ve not tried, but I’m not allowed, or in the case of Drew from Arizona, unable due to customs. So I must find a way to repay that generosity. One way is by using the only place they have no say, and also part of the reason for the generosity in the first place (they claim it was as thanks for what my waffling words on Dramface give them - hives probably). The second awkwardness is how I offset the shouts of “conflict of interest” when reviewing two bottles of whisky that were given to me, albeit from unassociated folk, with one of them being released maybe by someone maybe connected to Dramface, maybe? A conundrum.

The answer is what drives through the core of Dramface and everything we do here - honesty and integrity. I’ve told Roy that if I think it’s not up to snuff, or I don’t like it, or it’s hyped or influencer’d or FOMO’d to death, I’ll say as such. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. However what I will say is that, at the mere hint of me saying I had one of Roy’s bottles unopened ready to go, the shouts of ‘I’ll take it off ye’ were loud and many, with increasing evidence of people nursing their bottles, desperate for another. It’s proper FOMO stuff.

Nose

Chlorine swimming pool. Some woods, savoury bread sticks and an off note - maybe decaying fruit in the butterfly farm - quite sharp but sweet at the same time? Bell peppers and frying onions. Leafy - cauliflower. Yeasty in a buttery, malty way - almost too savoury. A chalky, dry rock. Cement or mortar maybe. It’s not brick paints but something dusty - maybe an unprepped canvas? Definitely something salty in there, might even be as much as a green olive, but very subtle. Pear skin.

Digestive biscuits. Cheese rind and metal pencils. Almost savoury beer - hops.

Marzipan. Coffee and walnut cake.

Palate

Woosh! What incredible flavour. It’s huge. Bright yellow and green. Tropical juice. Big wood, little wood, big pepper, little pepper. It’s a swingy one. Delicious sweet toffee on the tongue but it’s ripped away into tropical happy land quite quickly, offering a smorgasbord of pears and vanilla ice cream, little apple slices with sugary shortcrust crumbs. There’s no hint of that savoury swimming pool in the palate, it’s all just magical white fruits and sauce. A bit acidic at points, maybe the ABV.

Water brings everything down. The sharpness is gone. The sweetness is increased. I far prefer to sip at cask strength for this one.

Score: 8/10

Review 2/2

Loch Lomond Distillery Edition 3 - Extra Long Fermentation | 57.2%
£65 - Sold Out

Score: 8/10

**Something Special.**
**TL;DR**
*Orchard fruits in abundance. Yeasty. Zesty. Yesty!*

Nose

Woody. Damp bookshelf. Pencil shaving. Spices of cinnamon and turmeric. The sweets arrive in boiled visage. Mint humbug. Pear drop. Chocolate limes even. It’s big and fruity and malty and a wee bit yeasty - packet of dried yeast. It’s savoury and sweet at the same time. It’s big block oak and cedar, sawn under your nose. A metallic thing - metal pencil sharpener? Toffee, but really light coloured toffee, not treacle. A salt flake inside a victoria sponge.

Palate

Orchard fruits! Massive pears and apples and lemons. Coffee teetering over to cough syrup. Woodiness. Raspberry fudge. Porridge oats! A sharpness is prevalent and comes and goes in waves between sweeter notes of sugary lemon French Fancies and jammy sponge cake. It’s peppery and tropical, zesty and sugary. Malted breads, pastries and cake shop delicacies. Salted caramel anyone? Banoffee doughnut. Magnificently bright and fresh, but also toffee and woody too.

The Dregs

You might be wondering how I happen to know so much about Loch Lomond? Surely one evening of whisky-fuelled questioning inside a room filled with shouting faceholes doesn’t offer such clarity of mind, nor Google with its confusing information blast? You’d be right. After the event, having opened the XL Fermentation and the Single Cask bottles and considering what I’d heard Michael talk about, I was really keen to know more about the things we talked about in that casino room, and maybe pose some more questions after the fact. Wouldn’t it be great if I could ask the man himself?

I did ask, and he did reply. Having suffered through my 8-point, 1,200 word email with questions, Michael responded a few weeks later with an email of such depth and consideration of reply that I am genuinely thrilled and energised about it. We seem to be in an ever increasing age of transparency and connection to the folk making this beautiful spirit, and much like the bods at Glenbeg bringing wonderful west coast whisky to market, we have Michael bringing the behemoth highland Loch Lomond into the exciter fray and is willing to connect with us too.

Getting past the quite staggering boo-boo of calling his stills “Lomond Stills” and being thoroughly telt-aff about it, his responses to my email confirmed most of what I recalled during the Sunday event. We spoke about a lot more (how he is able to nose 100 casks a day amongst other things) and will come back to it in another review, but for a Master Blender whose signature is emblazoned upon every bottle of Loch Lomond whisky, to reply in such a robust way, is astonishing. I can’t thank him enough for taking the time to reply to me at length. I’ll try to do all of the people in this review justice with my wibbling words.

The whiskies. Oh! The whiskies. I’ve heard folk talk about ‘orchard fruits’ in whisky and I always wondered what that meant - a pear mingled with an orange mingled with a lime mingled with an apple all at once? Even Compass Box’s ‘Orchard House’ plays on this character too - one of Clyde’s enjoyed bottlings and it won last year in the OSWAs for Best Blended Malt Whisky 2022. The first sip of the XL Fermentation blew my balding dome clean off. It was all at once bright, bright green and yellow, and malted breads and baked goods and salted caramel and raspberry fudge and malty seeds and porridge oats. In a word: remarkable. It forced a remark, and that remark was unprintable (or unable to get past the scrupulous editors). I’ve been on such a flavour chase of farmy new-make and an ever increasingly dark red colour dram, that this was like a lightning bolt straight out of Zeus’ trident and into Auld Doog’s lower release valve. Supersonic Orchard Fruits.

Several weeks later the Single Cask was opened and sampled alongside the XL, and at first I was amazed at how similar they are - again all bright green and juicy yellow. However, for the first few drams I was struggling to get around the nose - it’s very odd to me. At once it’s swimming pools and cleaning chemicals. A bit of time in glass and it swings over to more engaging, more inviting notes - lemons and zest. I’ve been going back to it relentlessly over the past 4 weeks, each time spending the first few moments with the eyebrows in maximum extension, but soon the whisky hits stride and delivers a remarkable experience.

When we talk about engaging whiskies here on Dramface, I often wonder what everyone else means when they say it. Even by looking down at a glass of whisky you are engaging with it, but I think what I mean when I use the term is that I lose everything else around me and I’m totally focussed on the whisky. I often watch a film whilst nosing and tasting whiskies, and it’s a mark of an engaging whisky when the film ends and I’ve no idea what happened: all my attention has been on what’s in the glass. That’s engaging to me, and these two whiskies caused many films to be missed.

I’ve spent a bit of time considering what to mark these. These are not endearingly decadent like the North British 29yo is, or darkly alluring like a Glenrothes sherry monster, or generic enough to see a film through to the end with, like Maker’s Mark. These are challenging whiskies that demand attention, and from the very first sip I was blown away by how different they are to anything I’m drinking right now, and how engaging they are as a twofer. You can see why Loch Lomond is becoming the focus of a lot of whisky exciters out there, and I’m so, so grateful to have been able to try these two belters at the gift of two lovely people, as well as have a very detailed discussion with the figure behind why these whiskies have made it into my hands in the first place. In between me starting this piece and now, Michael has released another of his cask experiments - the Distillery Edition 4 Single Grain 7yo. I’ve not tried it, and I failed to get it in time before the labelling boo-boo caused them all to be removed from the website.

When they come back online you better believe I’ll be first in line to get one.

Score: 8/10

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

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