North British Distillery, Scotland     founded: 1885 | active
For more detailed mapping of the distilleries in the area from our whisky map page, use this link.

I'm not sure quite what happened but this nose got rather abstract: angry ants and wasps, all the way to a hippy putting a flower in a gun barrel then being gunned down. A flower a butterfly would like, an unused portaloo and a lawnmower both left out in the sun. An empty shoe, p(l)ain and a silent assassin. It was also felt to be watery, an orange calypso cup, irn bru bars, petrol and having little fruity depth.

Well, it was a wasp in the nose but it's a bumblebee in the mouth! The little critter pops in there and delivers some atomic fireballs, a few cola cubes steamed in tobasco sauce, aniseed and muscovado sugar. Things then got a bit out of hand as Ali tried to summarise the feelings of the group: "Imagine you've successfully crossed a bee with a dragon and this creature produces large quantities of honey and also breathes fire. Any given day you have a 50:50 probability of being burnt or grabbing some of the honey he's produced (like when something hasn't happened yet and just has a pure probability of happening and exists in both states at once). This is the day when you have both states of probability at once of the honey gathering / burning by a dragon." To cap things off, we felt it was a bit dominated by sweetness with not a lot there, but with the feeling of eating a fresh chili.

The finish reminded 'Team Finish' of disappointment, with a disappointing taste. It went from a bright flame to a slowly dieing ember, like and e to the minus x curve. Orange pith was a warmly received suggestion of flavour, and not really added to. It was like a rapidly receding tide that drags an anchor with it (down your throat). Finally, it was like "WOOF!" then "khhhhhhh".
 
 

~£55 (70cl)

SMWS: G1.9 - The palate gets a ping!   |   http://www.smws.co.uk/whisky/G1.9_The_palate_

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.

70 / 100