Epic Epicurious

I just got home from what has been the most exciting pubrounds this summer. To start with, I got to visit the newly opened and absolutely outstanding pub “The Queen’s Head”, which I’ve been longing to visit long before it opened. It has a library(!), an absolutely superb Whisky collection of around 150 malts, 40+ beers on tap along with many very nice beers on bottle – all served in a cozy environment with comfy sofas on the floor, dim lights from the walls and harmonica blues from the speakers.

But more importantly, I got to try two malts that I’ve been excited to try out for a long while.

The first was Kilchoman.

A couple of years ago, a man named Anthony Wills decided to build a brand new distillery on an isle where no one has ever thought of building a new distillery since 1881. I’m talking of course about the perhaps most distinguished of all whisky regions – Islay. First, it surprised me that he’d fancy building a new one rather than resurrecting an old one (such as Port Ellen), but I soon realized, in accordance with a recent interview in the Swedish whisky magazine “Allt om Whisky” (All about Whisky in English), that Kilchoman is all about bringing new fresh ideas and drams to this otherwise quite conservative, though diversive, region. And Anthony Wills is far from conservative.

Or perhaps he is, though, for it is only his distillery, together with the second distillery that has been on my wish-list for the last few months – Bruichladdich, that are not primarily concerned with profit and production, but rather with doing what they believe to be right – making good and interesting whiskies. And as far as my nose and tongue could tell, they absolutely are.

If I’d been served Kilchoman at our first pub without knowing anything about it, I’d never had guessed that it was an infant of only three years of age. Most infants of this age cry their eyes out; they shreik with a bitter punch of alcohol and pure spirit, they fart out odours of plastic and rubber and they never seem to behave, no matter how many times you hit them with water (*cough* Glen Grant *cough*). But this baby was different. It was intelligent, quiet, smooth and wonderfully cute. It lacked the oakey complexity compared to older malts, but what it lacked in age it gave in heart. This is as true an Islay whisky as Islay whiskies get. There was peat and smoke, but not too much. There was smoothness, but nothing dull. There was a tangible sweetness, but no caramel feast. And last but not least, there was a great deal of heart in it.

Releasing a whisky with full confidence when its this young is a very daring thing to do, and this just shows how much heart and effort Mills and his team have put into doing something new and good, while still not experimenting away and spinning out of control. Just tasting this makes me want to be a part of this project. It makes me want to go there, buy them a few pints and wish them all the good fortune and luck in the world. No, it’s far from my favourite whisky with regard to excecuted perfection, complexity or aroma, but it is the only whisky that has left me with the feeling that in a few years when Kilchoman starts to be a name to be reckoned with, I’ll be proud of saying that I tasted one of the first-ever bottlings of it.

If you’re arguing that this is only because this is the only whisky I’ve tasted that comes from a newly founded distillery, you’d be wrong. I’ve tasted almost every single bottling of the Swedish distillery Mackmyra, and it didn’t impress me nearly as much as this little newcomer.

And Kilchoman is only going to get better. Soon, their fist bottlings will be released with their own floor-malted barley and older casks of their now aging Port Ellen-malts. And frankly, I can’t wait to see the result.

With the former master blender at Bowmore, Jim McEwan, now running Bruichladdich, one could expect new great things to come from this distillilery. Jim McEwan has never been one who simply does what he’s told – he’s a tempered scotsman in its’ true and proper sense, and it is therefore not surprising that he has recently made a whisky smoked all the way up to the unimaginable level of 150 ppm while happily asking anyone who questions this maneauver of near-crazy behavior to kindly fuck off. In other words, he does his own thing at Bruichladdich, fueled not by money or corporate dictations, but of passion and perhaps a bit of craze and megalomania. I’ve been dying to try out one of his many interesting bottlings for a long time because of this.

This time, I got to try the standard “Peat” bottling, among the other famous “Waves” and “Rocks” bottlings. This was precisely what I’d expect from someone previosuly in charge of Bowmore’s malts now gone rogue. It is softly peated, albeit a tad smokier than Bowmore – perhaps at around 25-30 ppm give or take. It has a mineral watery-freshness to it aswell, and the caramel tones that are otherwise pretty distinguishable in Bowmore’s whiskies are nowhere to be seen. It is also the only whisky so far where the peat actually has tasted like peat. There’s a somewhat odd aroma of mud and organic gases there, too. To me, this boosts my impression of this whisky as something natural and down-to-earth, something that should taste the way the grass on Islay smells like after a rainy day. Promoting naturality has always been a quite unorthodox philosophy when it comes to whisky, but then again, McEwan loves to tell old values to fuck off.

All-in-all, these two are without a shred of a doubt two of the most exciting distilleries today, and if you’re into Islay whiskies, be sure to check these out the next time you’re in a pub with a thorough whisky assortment.