Review: Buffalo Trace Giant French Oak Barrels Experiments Bourbons
With all the hubbub over small whiskey barrels going on, it almost went unnoticed that Buffalo Trace released a whiskey that went the opposite direction: Aged in oversized French oak barrels for a long, long time. To be sure, the 135-gallon barrel (likely a “puncheon” as terminology goes) is not the largest wooden barrel out…
Review: The Arran Malt Devil’s Punch Bowl
Best whisky name ever now goes The Arran Malt, whose new Devil’s Punch Bowl single malt is seductive and devilish — and comes with packaging to match. Named for a glacial hollow called Coire na Ciche on the Isle of Arran, the boggy hill sits in the distillery’s backyard. The whisky inside is drawn from…
Review: Cu Dhub Black Whisky
How do you turn Scotch whisky black as stout? Well, the secret isn’t as fantastical as you might have hoped: Cu Dhub is colored (heavily) with black caramel. Cu Dhub, pronounced “kaddoo,” is actually a very loose recreation of a whisky called Loch Dhu, which was bottled for only a few years in the ’90s…
Review: White Lion VSOA
Billed as the “world’s oldest naturally fermented, single ingredient spirit,” VSOA is a beverage that defies description or easy categorization. VSOA is part of a group of spirits called arrack, which can can be made from just about anything (the better-known Batavia Arrack is made from sugarcane, like rum). This version (VSOA stands for Very…
Review: Mariposa Agave Nectar Liqueur
Let’s start with the natural first question: Mariposa’s not tequila. Tequila is made from roasted agave hearts which are juiced and fermented. Mariposa is made from agave nectar — a natural sweetener that’s frequently used in margaritas and other applications — plus enough vodka and tequila to bring it up to 60 proof. Rose and…
Review: Dancing Pines Chai Liqueur
Believe it or not, Dancing Pines is not the first chai tea liqueur we’ve reviewed. That honor goes to Voyant, a cream-based liqueur so nice we named it our favorite liqueur of 2010. Dancing Pines is not cream-inclusive — it’s a straight, syrupy, brownish liqueur — and that alone is a curiosity. Chai — as…
Review: White Mule Farms Spodee — “Wine with a Kick”
According to White Mule Farms, the company behind the oddball Spodee, this, er, drinkable was a Depression-era concoction of wine mixed with herbs, spices, and moonshine. Sort of a ghetto version of Port, perhaps, from the sound of it. Spodee today seems to be perhaps a simpler product: Wine fortified with white whiskey, with chocolate…
Review: Ardbeg Galileo 1999
This Ardbeg bottling carries with it a story unique in my years of writing about whisky. I’ll let Ardbeg tell you about it in their own words. The whisky, named after Galileo, the father of modern astronomy, celebrates the first ever experiment undertaken by Ardbeg Distillery (or any other distillery for that matter) when Ardbeg…
