It had been a while since I hosted a tasting for people I didn’t know. Before this blog there was a different site at www.maltfascination.nl through which a friend and I hosted whisky tastings. We hadn’t received any requests for months until we redirected the homepage to my blog and then, all of a sudden, the requests came in. The sub pages were still available in Google, apparently.

The theme was to taste a few differences in the main characteristics of Scotch whisky: Age, casks and peat. Usually, there is a ‘tour of Scotland’ for first-timers, but with there being more exceptions to ‘regional tastes’ every month, I decided that wouldn’t be as much fun.

The whiskies I planned at first were a little different than the ones I ended up with, since the group of people in the tasting kept growing and there wasn’t enough in some of my bottles… In the end, the whiskies tasted were:

• Age: Glenfarclas 8 and Glenfarclas 25
• Casks: Tamdhu OB and Tamdhu 6 Sherry cask by The Ultimate
• Peat: Caol Ila Unpeated 10 and The Ileach Cask Strength

None of the guys present knew much about whisky and I got good questions about whisky, the production process, distilleries, and all kinds of related items.

The Tamdhu Sherry Cask and Glenfarclas 25 were the most popular drams by far and I guess I could have emptied the bottles right then and there, but I did want to go home at 11 PM, still had an hour and a half of driving to do.

It was good fun to do a tasting again like this. I just might have to get back into that.

I did put together a small presentation which showed the production process and some nice pictures. But when I took the beamer out of the case, the power cord wasn’t there, so that didn’t really work out. Bummer.