Due to knowing some members of the inner circle at Whiskybase, I sometimes have the chance to taste Archives releases that are not meant for The Netherlands. This 29 year old Glen Keith was sent straight to Taiwan to be a single cask release there.

Glen Keith is a Speyside distillery that was closed for a couple of years some time ago, but before that, they churned out a lot of bourbon cask matured whisky, of which quite a lot has been bottled. What I generally associate their early nineties whisky with is a lot of cake like sweetness and heaps of vanilla. If you’re a regular reader of this here blog, you might know I’m not a huge fan of that style, so this kind of Glen Keith has not often found its way into my collection. Let’s see where this one ends up!

Sniff:
I expected some vanilla and it shows up right away. Very typical for Glen Keith. Also, I expected this to be a rather sweet whisky, and that is not the case. It’s quite dry, with a lot of chaff and straw. Some dried apples, and an fruity bitter note too. Green banana skins, grape seed.

Sip:
The palate has similar notes to the palate, but adds quite some black pepper, as wel as chili pepper. Some apple cores, straw and chaff. It’s very dry, and a bit sharper than I expected.

Swallow:
The finish loses the sharpness, but is still very dry. More focused on barley, chaff, straw, and oak shavings. Not a very long finish either.

Not entirely unexpected, but it’s a rather straight forward whisky. The type of whisky is rather tasty, but there’s not a lot of complexity, and if you’ve ever had Glen Keith from the early nineties, there’s not too much to be surprised about either.

Yes, it’s a bit less sweet and a bit more dry, but it’s all within the bandwidth of what you know to expect. Having said that, it’s still a pretty tasty dram. It’s just not one that I freak out about. Apparently, I’m rather alone in that, based on the scores on Whiskybase.

88/100