Bruichladdich Distillery, Scotland     founded: 1881 | active
For more detailed mapping of the distilleries in the area from our whisky map page, use this link.

Holy moly! This was widely regarded as the weirdest whisky we've ever sampled. The nose offers a myriad of 'delights': cheese left in an old boot, a distillation fart and a vacant junk yard. You'd think we were back to sanity with a waft of fruitcake, but this is fruitcake hastily retrieved after having been dropped into some unspecified muck in a field.. and what's that to go with it? A copper-bottomed shit? It's foosty and totally unusual. White spirit is about as close as it gets to 'normal' and 'a hatred of mediocrity' is probably its ethos.

Well, let's start with the summary: madness. This went both ways for people: some hated it, some liked it a lot and some thought it was cracking fun. But it tasted like everything on a farmyard blended together, some moist sawdust and cherried bog water. And when 'cherried bog water' is the most encouraging taste, you know you're dealing with an oddball - a slightly sweet oddball. It had a sense of someone expressing themselves who shouldn't, but some felt it was a surprisingly good version of how it smells. Nicely described as 'love at first sight that quickly soured'.

On the finish, I think we were mostly too in shock to think straight, but it was summed up with tangsanity and fruity doom. And if that's not a fitting finale to a mad episode, then "AVENNNNNGE ME!" surely is. Goodbye and goodnight, freaky one.

The main part of this 'bring out your dead' night was a blind tasting of some of our dusty, forgotten bottles. In the tasting were::

1) Mac "sweet nothing" Duff (14yo 1997 Signatory)
2) Glen "the finish is a distant bee" fiddich (standard issue)
3) Bruich "what did they put it in, a cow?" laddich (The Organic Multi Vintage)

We ordered them by preference as follows (first is best):

Ali: 3, 2, 1
Jamie: 3, 1, 2
Liz: 3, 2, 1
Phil: 1, 2, 3
Russell: 3, 1, 2
Shelley: 3, 1, 2

~£40 (70cl)

The Whisky Exchange: Bruichladdich The Organic   |   http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/P-13380.aspx

We've always scored out of 10 in our group (see number in red box, below), with scores regularly given across that spectrum. The value out of 100 below is adjusted to the scale most commonly used for whisky reviews, to allow for better comparison.

71 / 100