SMWS The Vaults New List Steak & Chips Tasting

03/02/2015

On the 3rd of February I had the pleasure of attending one of my first bought and paid for SMWS events. I had previously been lucky enough to be asked along to the November pre-release tasting at SMWS Queen Street, however I was looking for an excuse to explore the SMWS Vaults venue down in Leith and could think of nothing better than a slap up meal of Steak & chips washed down with a dram or 5!

The event was hosted by Ryan McCafferty, who had selected 5 very special drams from the upcoming February outturn for us. This was a blind tasting event – which is always great fun as the guesses and tasting notes start wild and get wilder! Tasting whisky without being fettered down with preconceptions based on distillery, bottler, cask type, age, etc. can be quite good fun so long as you’re not the sort of person who always has to be right!

To begin with we were confronted with our first 3 drams (L-R) – as you can see there is not a huge range of colour difference between them so nosing was the best way. This comparative nosing is also quite helpful as you’ll go on to see each of these was quite different! They were later revealed as the following:

#1 G3.8 Eccentric and exotic ~ 53.9% (SMWS)

A 35 year old single grain sample from the closed Caledonian distillery

#2 35.121 ‘You make me feel (mighty real)’ ~ 57.9% (SMWS)

A 12 year old zesty and fruity bourbon-cask matured Speysider from Glen Moray

#3 44.63 Zesty, zingy and alive ~ 55.4% (SMWS)

A 15 year old Craigellachie matured in a refill sherry butt

After a quick repast

we were treated to two further expressions:

#4 4.202 Salt and pepper ~ 45.1% (SMWS)

A 27 year old Highland Park – meatier & juicier than the steak we had just consumed

and finally

#5 127.42 Peat freak heaven ~ 63% (SMWS)

A serious amount of peat in this 12 year old Port Charlotte expression.

The final line-up – with just enough left for me to re-sample and cross-compare before rushing off to buy my maximum allocation of 2 bottles of 127.42 for use in the WOLS tasting we held here:

Water Of Life Society Tasting 15/6 For Peat’s Sake Tasting! 19/02/2015

And off home I went, well fed and watered and all for ~£30!