Coldorak's whisky blog.
Despite being a very small and young distillery, founded in 2009 by Pär Caldenby, a lawyer also whisky fan and author of the book Enjoying Malt Whisky, Smögen starts to be quite known in the whisky enthusiast world. My 7th dram from my whisky calendar is a Smögen 2011 Single Cask Edition No. 5, so let’s quickly introduce Smögen, that I must admit I don’t know a lot about, before reviewing my first Smögen ever.
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After a couple days in Tasmania and a quick trip to Japan (yesterday’s dram was a Nikka Taketsuru 21, already reviewed by your servitor last year), we’re back to Islay but this time from the eastern shores of Loch Indaal, above the hands of the witch. I’ll just do a brief introduction about Bowmore since with (almost) a review a day, I cannot take the time to cover the story of the distillery with its two and a half centuries of existence. And after that, I’ll review the Bowmore 2011 Artist #7 part 2 LMDW.
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We’re still in Tasmania this evening for our fourth dram from the advent calendar, and still at Hellyers Road. But we go a bit older and unpeated this time, so it will be interesting to see what’s different (to the one in the back saying “This one is not peated”, thank you, I’ve already said it, please listen next time) compared to the 2004 Peated from yesterday. As I said yesterday, Hellyers Road sits near Burning, in Tasmania, and was founded in 1999. Australian whisky, including Tasmanian, has really exploded since the beginning of the 21st century. Before the year 2000, there were only four distilleries in Australia, of which three of them were in Tasmania. Lark, founded in 1992, Sullivans Cove, founded in 1994 and Hellyers Road saw the light of day and the spirit flow in Tasmania. The fourth one is Bakery Hill, founded in 1998 in Victoria. And what about now? Well, now there are more than 70 distilleries running or about to, including the very well-known Starward founded in 2004. The exponential rate at which distilleries pop of the ground with whisky flowing soon after is mind-boggling. However, many of those distilleries are not widely distributed yet and I may not have the chance to try what they do. But today I’m back at Hellyers Road, and I’m very happy about that.
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Hellyers Road is one of the largest whisky distilleries in Australia, with a capacity of 120.000 litres of pure alcohol per annum. Located near the town of Burnie, in Tasmania, it was founded by dairy farmers in 1999, and is named after Henry Hellyer, an explorer and cartographer who carved a bushy trail into a road in 1827. The distillery features a 60.000 litres wash still and a 20.000 litres capacity spirit still, and I must admit their capacity compared to the global capacity of production of the distillery eludes me. But I couldn’t find a lot of information on this distillery. Anyway. Dram 3 of my whisky calendar is a Hellyers Road 2004 that is 16 years old and peated, so let’s try that!
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Today we open the second sample from my advent calendar. After a new riddle that didn’t help my hair grow back, my friends and I finally guessed it was a Port Charlotte 2003 bottled by Hidden Spirits. You probably know that already, dear reader, but Port Charlotte was an Islay distillery. It was founded in 1829 by Colin Campbell on the north-west bank of Loch Indaal and was also known as Rhins Distillery and Lochindaal Distillery. It ran for a hundred years between 1829 and 1929, changing hands several times during that period. In the mid-1880s, Alfred Barnard reported Lochindaal was producing 128.000 gallons of spirit per annum, to compare with Lagavulin’s 75.000 gallons and Ardbeg’s 250.000 gallons at the time. Back in 1920, JF Sherriff & Co, then the owner of Lochindaal, was bought by Benmore Distilleries. Nine years later in 1929, Distillers Company Limited (DCL) purchased Benmore and closed down immediately Lochindaal. Then, in 2000, the nearby distillery Bruichladdich was acquired by the independent bottlers Murray McDavid, who wanted to revive the Lochindaal distillery by creating a new distillery in which to produce heavily-peated whisky, but the plans never saw the light of day, and since Bruichladdich’s acquisition by French company Rémy Cointreau in 2012, it seems highly unlikely that distilling will return to the Port Charlotte village.
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We’re the first of December! While December means cold, wet or snowy weather depending on where you live, it also has more festive connotations with Christmas or other end-of-year festive events, and for many people from the 1st to the 24th of December: advent calendars! As the few years before, I’m doing a whisky advent calendar. This year again I couldn’t get a Boutique-y Whisky Advent Calendar (I reviewed one with Ainulindale in 2019) or another one from Drinks by the Dram, but Benjamin, a member of a French Whisky Discord server I’m a member of, and who spends probably way more than me on whisky, offered to do for a few of us our very own ultra limited whisky advent calendar. Five of us members ordered him one, gladly paid 300€ for 25 samples (yep, we have an extra one for Christmas!), and all we know is that the bottles used for the samples go from 150€ to 800€ a bottle… All the samples are just labelled with a number, and each day Benjamin gives us a hint or two in order for us to guess what it is. But first, where do advent calendars come from?
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