Last week I blogged about Ardbeg and spontaneously comparing it to my ‘accidental blend’. This blending happening deserves a post of its own, which also is a bit of a ‘look at me fucking up’ post… I’ve embarrassed myself in a new way, so to say.

In the run up to our recent Scotland trip I got a lot of requests from people asking me to bring them bottles. For a lot of them I said no, since I was planning on doing some buying myself. Also, my friends wanted stuff for their collections and I had some requests from family members already.

Also, I’m not overly comfortable bringing bottles for random people that I don’t know very well, or in which case I’ve not covered the risks properly (breakage, customs, you know). Lastly “bring me a bottle of something good from Bowmore” is a bit too arbitrary an order for my liking.

However, after all was said and done, I brought bottles for some people, and quite some bottles for bottle sharing. There was overlap in this, and that’s where things went wrong.

One specific case with bottles from Cadenhead’s AND a loose order resulted in:

• Half a bottle of 1993 Glenlossie for FV, who I was at Cadenhead’s with
• Half a bottle of 1993 Glenlossie for my father in law
• 20cl for myself
• 50cl of this for bottle sharing

In that bottle share was a bottle of 2001 Glen Scotia from a rather ‘dirty’ sherry cask, but with the exact same colour as the 1994 Glenlossie.

After splitting the bottle and doing the share everything was actually fine. Everything was divided, everything was poured. I could sit back and relax. However, my sense of warped customer service kicked in, because the half bottle I had taken out of the original bottle was sitting in a random empty bottle of something I had emptied the week before (and cleaned, obviously).

I thought it would be nice for my father in law to have the original bottle, which I had sitting with 20cl in it.

What happened next was that I grabbed what *I thought* was the 20cl of Glenlossie, but turned out to be the 20cl of Glen Scotia. I poured 30cl of the Glenlossie into the Glen Scotia.

I then continued to start drinking the remaining 20cl of Glenlossie, because that was my share.

It wasn’t until a week later, with the bottles still sitting ready for dispatch, I suddenly glimpsed the label saying ‘Glen Scotia’. I did a double take, and panicked a bit, because it hit me right away what I had done. By this time, the remaining 20cl of Glenlossie had almost gone, and I had only some random blend left.

A blend of 20cl of Glen Scotia and 30cl of Glenlossie. My evil side popped up with thoughts like “since nobody tasted it before, I could get away with it”, which I probably could, but I didn’t want to be such a dick.

The drawback was, obviously, that this blended variant of what I actually purchased was less good than both the original parts. The fun fact was that it still was quite a ways better than the Ardbeg Grooves Committee Release.

It is actually quite interesting to taste something like this, because it turned out okay-ish. Neither of the whiskies really overpowered the other, although the dirtiness of the Glen Scotia (which I really liked) was toned down a bit. Maybe that was a good thing?

Edit: As it turns out, I’m still confused since I got Glenlossie/Glen Scotia wrong. That’s fixed now.