Bowmore stands as Islay’s most ancient licensed distillery, sparking my initial interest for whisky some two decades ago with their 15-year-old expression. Back then, I was slim and still had some hair on my head. My, how time flies. Twenty years later, a visit to the distillery in July 2023 proved an exhilarating experience. Our guide’s warmth and knowledge captivated us, the other guests and me, allowing us to savour a unique moment of bottling a small cask sample straight from the cask in one of their warehouses. Then, our tasting session revealed a trove of delicious whiskies, awaiting my eventual review. But today, we explore three indy Bowmore expressions from three independent bottlers: The Whisky Agency, Svenska Eldvatten, and Malts of Scotland.
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Bowmore 25-year-old (2021)
We’ve tried a couple of Bowmore already on More Drams, and they were stunning, but they were both from independent bottlers, and at cask strength. One was a single cask that came from La Maison Du Whisky in its Artist series, and the other was a small batch from the SMWS. But obviously, the central Islay based distillery has an official range. And, poor me, the only sample I have from the high-end part of the range, thanks to my friend Aurélien, and Bowmore‘s French ambassador Antoine. So thanks to them, let’s review this Bowmore 25-year-old.
Read moreSMWS Whisky Festival 2022
A few weeks months ago (I’m late again to publish an article, what a surprise!), the Scotch Malt Whisky Society released a few single malts not as single casks, for once, but as small batches, small vattings of a few casks, for the different whisky festivals of the first half of 2022. For each region of Scotland, in a whisky sense, they released one or several bottlings, all of course with a higher outturn than usual. I ordered a tasting pack containing five out of the six releases, and I also bought a bottle of the sixth one, a Bowmore, so now, let’s review them all. And whilst previously it was Ainulindale reviewing SMWS bottlings, this time it’s my turn!
Bowmore 2001 Artist #7 part 2 LMDW
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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