North Star

Whisky #574: North Star Glenallachie 8 Year Old Single Malt

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North Star Glenallachie 8 Year Old Single Malt. ABV: 58.3%. Speyside, Scotland. Tasted at Whisky a Day HQ, $165 (bottle).

Colour: Orange gold, like a throat lozenge. Hmmm, whisky really is the ultimate golden throat charmer!

Nose: Melted sugar boiling on the stove top.

Palate: Sticky date pudding and pink candy (fairy) floss. Medium body with a creamy mouthfeel.

Finish: Honey and black pepper, with juicy glace cherries that you’ve picked out of your aunt’s fruit cake (or is that just what I did when I was a kid?).

Comments: This is dessert in a glass. Fantastic.

Whisky #560: North Star Glentauchers 11 Year Old Single Malt

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North Star Glentauchers 11 Year Old Single Malt. ABV: 58.9%. Speyside, Scotland. Tasted at Whisky a Day HQ, $167 (bottle).

It’s bottle kill week here at Whisky a Day! Do you find yourself hanging on to the last dram or two in a bottle you’ve really enjoyed, trying to stretch out the enjoyment? It’s a trap I sometimes fall into, though maybe there’s also an element of opening a bunch of new shinier whiskies and some bottles get a little lonely and forgotten at the back of the whisky shelf. 

With an impending move to a new house, it’s time to do some spring cleaning and polish off those pesky bottles with only a drop or two left. I’ll be killing off a different bottle every night this week!

Colour: Candlelight.

Nose: Soft hay, vanilla sponge cake and freshly cut juicy oranges. Though I’ve left this one on the shelf a little too long, the nose has started to lose some intensity compared to how I remember when I first cracked the bottle.

Palate: Toastier than a marshmallow. Honey on buttered toast, malty, roasted almonds.

Finish: A drying new oak finish with a slightly tannic aftertaste.

Comments: Bottled in 2018 and from a cask that yielded only 288 bottles, this North Star Glentauchers was from Series 005 of North Star’s stable of increasingly impressive releases. A good dram, but one in hindsight I’d finished off a little earlier rather than leaving it around on the shelf.

Whisky #497: North Star Ardmore 8 Year Old 2008 Single Cask

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FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby featherNorth Star Ardmore 8 Year Old 2008 Single Cask. Highlands, Scotland. ABV: 57.1%. Tasted at home, $215 (bottle).

What type of whisky soothes a broken heart? We’ve all been there – the breakups that leave you with an all-consuming sea of emotions. Emptiness, confusion, and a sadness that physically hurts and makes you feel ill.

But when your lover and best friend breaks up with you, what whisky do you turn to to numb the pain? To make you feel something, to distract you from the thousand questions and “what ifs” racing through your mind?

For me it has to be something robust – both in depth of flavour and with a high ABV. Something cask strength. Preferably a “single” cask (terrible pun; my sense of humour has really dried up).

A whisky that has plenty of character and isn’t too delicate – as the mind races in a thousand different directions thinking about the breakup, you want to enjoy the whisky without thinking about it too much. A whisky that doesn’t demand too much attention, yet with enough complexity so that you can take your mind off everything and just focus on the dram in front of you, if you so choose.

So I settled on the North Star Ardmore 8 Year Old 2008 Single Cask, which ticks all of those boxes perfectly.

Colour: Rich toffee.

Nose: Black jelly beans; a sniff of camp fire charcoal when you wake up the next morning and stick your head out of the tent.

Palate: Salty seaweed, char-grilled maple bacon, tart blueberries and sweet smoke.

Finish: Savoury and salty, soft smokey notes too. Like some caramelised onions cooked on a BBQ.

Comments: There’s no such thing as the perfect relationship, just as there’s no such thing as the perfect whisky. We shouldn’t be blinded by an endless search for perfection when there may be something amazing sitting right in front of you.

The North Star Ardmore 8 Year Old 2008 Single Cask isn’t the perfect whisky, but it’s pretty bloody amazing.