And finally, as a last hurrah for the Glengoyne Discovery Gift Taste Sampler Set Collection we come to the traditional BattleScotch!, to be observed WITH the camelcase AND the punctuation as spelling. Because we’re from the goddamned future! ONWARD TO WAR, TINY BOTTLES! You have only one thing left to teach us – who is […]
I know, I know. It’s 4/20. It’s the first 4/20 since legalization. I was in a band with a song called four20. Where is the weed whisky or ihash.ca or whisky barrel aged weed (patent pending), right? This site is about subjective reviews of intoxicating substances, exclusively. Weed is in the same family as hops, […]
Our second swing at the Glengoyne Gift Collection is the 15y. Glengoyne suggest a rather elaborate range of flavours are present in this dram, I’m not so sure. The label details are also quite different and list different woods between the bottle and the website; is this marketing drift? Or distilling? Who knows! Summary: they […]
Glengoyne! A highland Single Malt Scotch that we’ve only seen a little of before. A quirk of geography puts the Glengoyne stills in the Highlands while the maturing happens all the way (across the street) in the Lowlands. Silly things happen when people draw lines on maps. Aged in sherry and bourbon casks, the 12 […]
Every year like clockwork March stumbles in from the cold and delivers Irish Stereotype Reinforcement Day to warm the cockles of your projectile vomiting heart. St Paddy’s Day in North America has as much to do with Ireland as Chinese food in North America has to do with China – as in maybe a immigrant […]
Another holiday bottle where you pay more for extra packaging! It’s okay – I’m using it as a riser for my scotch display back row now. Sleeman Sparkling Ale was released to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the brewery. That’s all the website has to say, aside form calling it “brilliantly filtered” and I don’t […]
Aviation Gin, The American Gin Owned By A Canadian. So says the video spot starring & voiced by the professionally handsome recent gin brand purchaser, Ryan Reynolds: It works because really, all any of us want is to be purchased by a celebrity. Especially a Canadian celebrity who would send us on very polite maple […]
Most completistisming going one here. We had the VP01. So therefore we must have Innis & Gunn’s Vanishing Point VP02 or how will we know.. anything? How will we know we even exist unless we experience two similar things and observe their subjective differences over linear time? I ASK YOU. Last year’s beer was only […]
Beer from Belgium! I thought they were supposed to be good at this? Rodenbach is a brewery in Roeselare, a city in West Flanders, and we all know what Homer said about Flanders in… uh, the Odyssey, I think. The Vintage 2015 is a Flemish red-brown ale, in this case sour and aged in oak […]
Odd Society Wallflower Oaken Gin. 100% British Columbian grown gin, aged in oak barrels. A pretty interesting idea. One issue we see a lot with craft gins is the mash/swamp factor. That same sort of distillate distaste you get with tequila, moonshine and young whisky, and what is likely one of the reasons we age […]
This one’s going to be a little messy. Steph, Dan & I reviewed the Founder’s Original – Dan discovered he does not like Old Fashioneds and bowed out of the Barchef review – fair dinkum. Steph suggested we have some people by – these things are made for parties. So we invited some interesting Ottawa […]
Another big bottled, high abv, milestone-celebrating weird beer here, with a twist – it’s actually good! A lot of times these large format beers can be.. um.. challenging. A lot of hops to make big flavour can make something undrinkable or a lot of yeast to kick up the alcohol content can make things a […]
Man, am I a sucker for packaging. I think it stems from being a deeply superficial person, pun intended superficially. I will 100% cop to the gold label grabbing me on this one(*) – it hit the same button as those foil-wrapped “collector’s” cards when we were kids. If they ever put a hologram on […]
BAM. Perfect timing. Because the key to a good whiskey review is all in your calendar alignments. Paddy Old Irish Whiskey, ON St Paddy’s Day. Could you ask for anything more? Ever? No I think not. …This review was maybe done in November. Here are some “fun” facts: Paddy’s is in the Pernod Ricard stable […]
Spending 36 on the beach with the dog. Steph kindly handed me this bottle on my way west and I’ve had a fair portion watching the dog chase beach rabbits. Customary back story which i really should have written yesterday: Dun Bheagan is a bottler, not a distiller, so there’s not too much available on […]
Here we have McClelland’s Speyside, brother from another region to their Islay bottling. McClelland’s range is pretty reasonably priced, so it’s not too much of a hardship to give it a go. It’s not amazing spirits, but they tend to be decent examples of the region they’re taken from, this one obviously meant to showcase […]
Awesome! Surprise scotch! One of Steph’s friends picked this up in the home country and brought it back for us. Arran is one of the islands off western Scotland, in the same neighbor hood as Skye (Talisker), Islay and Jura, but closer to shore. I don’t know if it was psychosomatic but knowing that made […]
Part 3 of 3! Yay, finishing something! Take THAT, high school guidance counselor! Anyway, we’re wrapping up An Evening Beyond The Pale with, well, the whole point of this exercise. I mean we’ve saved the best for last! I wanted to taste and review the cask aged beers because I tend to love cask aged […]
If you’re going to taste a couple of beers, and then taste those same beers after they’ve been aged in Maker’s Mark bourbon barrels, it makes a little sense to, y’know… maybe see what the interim step tastes like too, because hey – life is short and then the space monsters get you. Here’s something […]
Okay, so this review is actually three reviews. Or five. Or one review interrupted part-way through with another review. It’ll all make sense as you read it. Beyond the Pale is an Ottawa-local brewer, sitting in the quickly-gentrifying Hintonburg neighborhood and selling their wares out of their store front (LCBO/Beer Store being a royal pain […]
I think I know what both my readers are thinking to themselves. They’re thinking “pretty sure I’m at iSCOTCH, pretty sure I type that in/clicked that bookmark. so what the hell, guy, why am I reading about gin?” We’ve reviewed a gin before, The Botanist, specifically because it is made by Bruichladdich, in Scotland. We’ve […]
