1/3
1 Year of Service
Meh. The alcohol level doesn't mean a lot about whether it's worth drinking. Distilleries use a variety of different rules when they make their whiskys. Though not entirely accurate, imagine 1000 gallons of whisky in a still. The whisky at the top is the best, and the stuff at the bottom is the worst. Some distilleries use the top 90%. Others use the top 70%. Both send the unused portion back through the process, but the distillery that uses only the top 70% has less of the nasty stuff.
Then the distillery puts the part they save into casks. Whisky often gets aged in casks that were already used to age another alcohol. They can leave it in the cask for only a short time (3-9 years), so it has little of the flavor of the cask. While others leave it in the cask so it picks up a lot of the flavor. New oak casks have a strong oak flavor. I don't like that personally. The already used casks, primarily sherry, impart a muted oak flavor while infusing a mild flavor of whatever was aged in it previously.
The younger the whisky, the milder the flavor other than oak. When hunting for a "good" whisky, one has to understand what they personally feel is "good." My preferred flavor is sherry, and knowing that, I poked around at what there was, and found the Joseph Magnus. But maybe you like some other quality. The type of grain and the way it is dried also plays a huge factor. For example, I hate petey flavor that many scotch whiskys have.
Sorry. More than you asked. But this is something I have been doing a lot to learn about. My favorite is MacAllan scotch whisky. I have a dozen different types of that on the shelf, each for a specific mood. Including a couple bottles of this...
yeah, agree on the alcohol percentage. I tend to water down the stronger single malt scotch whiskys to ~40-45% abv. Stronger than that feels like it actually makes it harder to feel nuances in taste imho.
I bought an Indian whisky once, Amrut, mainly for the novelty. From what they claimed, they actually couldn't mature it for more than I think seven years or something, due to the local climate in Bangalore. The 'Angel's Share' simply became too much and the whisky to weak, they said. I remember the taste as light, maybe a bit grassy in a nice way. Would not hesitate to drink it again if offered, but not worth the premium price to buy. I'd rather go for Japanese in that case.
The Swedes at Mackmyra has made quite a few variant of their whisky, sadly they went into bankrupcy recently but rumour is that some company will or already have bought them up and will continue to produce. I read up on their whiskys a few years ago, and the opinion then was that many of the bottlings were not really that interesting, good but not very good. But some were highly recommended so I bought one of them, and it was nice, though a bit expensive for what it was.
Also tasted a Finnish one (Teerenpeli), again fun but probably not one I will buy again. While a Welsh one (one of the Penderyn Gold ones, maybe the madeira cask?) was excellent and definitely on my list.
I used to have a whisky selection of 25+ bottles, but that was about ten years ago...