Last Friday, I finally went to pick up the Mackinlay’s Highland Malt bottles for the Teeny-tiny Bottle-Share. For those bottles, I drove to Bergen op Zoom to see what the DH17 liquor store was all about, since I had never been there before.

I met up with Elise, the owner, and we had a cup of coffee and talked about the whisky business for and hour and a half. About new releases, planning of those releases, importers missing opportunities and about DH17 becoming a new Ardbeg Embassy. I really had a good time! I got to taste the new Arran Sleeping Warrior, which is a very nice Arran bottling, with a sweet edge because of the wine finish.

The shop itself must be the most spacious liquor store I have even been to. Its very ‘freshly’ decorated with more than enough room to wander around and a good eye for the feel of the shop. Not cramming everything in there that you can get hands on but a good selection of everything they sell. No beers though, with a very clear reasoning behind it: “I want to be a specialty shop, and since I barely know anything about beer, I can’t give specialty advice on it. Therefore, I don’t sell beer”. Sounds solid to me.

The whisky selection had another angle than I am used to as well. You can’t find a bottle of every brand or distillery you’ve heard of at DH17. But what they do sell is a massive selection of regular and rare bottles of the brands they love. Ardbeg, Arran, Tullibardine, Benromach, The Ultimate, Douglas of Drumlanrig and a rather large supply of ‘off the beaten path’ bourbons.

They even had a Benromach from 1981, of which I might just be tracking down a sample to see whether I want the whole bottle for my birthday 😉

I might just be finding myself on their website a tad more often than I used to! A bit of feeling with a shop is very important, to me at least. I prefer to know who I’m buying from and like the people. In this case, there is another shop added to my list of ‘whisky favorites’.