Malt Fascination

Hadn’t gotten around to this post once again, and once again I almost forgot to write it at all. Luckily I thought of it just before I started typing tasting notes to a Lagavulin I recently emtied.

I didn’t have many new brews last month and of the new brews I had not many were incredibly good. Lots were okay, and lots were my own stuff, but I won’t post those again. For that, go see my Untappd page.

Underdog Atlantic Lager – Flying Dog
While not something I will remember the rest of my life, I do recall I really enjoyed this one, and it got me over my hangover after the blog’s 2nd anniversary. A very, very tasty lager. Maybe the best I can recall.

Puurzaam Oogst 2010 – Gulpener
A harvest season ale from Gulpener. Usually a fairly mainstream brewery that has been dabbling in small batch and organic beers for a bit. It pays off.

Stout + Moedig and Wijs + Neuzig
See my post on De 7 Deugden and its beers.

IJ.P.A. – Brouwerij ‘t IJ
The IPA from one of Amsterdam’s craft breweries. I picked it up for the awesome label, but it does taste pretty damn good too. American style IPA, which I really like.

After last week’s post on brewing at De 7 Deugden, I still owed the post about their beers. Usually at the end of the month or just in the new month I do a post on the best beers I had during the last couple of weeks, but that has to wait until tomorrow or so.

At De 7 Deugden we had the choice to do a small or a large tasting, but since two of our group had to be driving we did the small one. Wouldn’t want to sit their waiting for people getting drunk while I had to remain reasonably sober. What we tasted were five of the seven regular beers and one seasonal release (these are usually one time only).

Ruw + Bolster
A light witbier (wheat beer/white beer) with a hint of cilantro/coriander. Very gentle, very fresh. Nicely flavoured but I would have gone with way more cilantro and/or more hops.

Scherp + Zinnig
A rather regular brown ale with a fairly light flavour profile. There is some pepper in it to spice things up, but as with the Ruw + Bolster, I would have gone more overboard with the spices. More cayenne pepper. Now it’s only present in the nose and finish, but I would have loved it to be a really spicy beer instead of spiced beer.

Arm + Zalig
An ale with 5 kinds of malt in it. This one I really liked since it was packed with flavour. A very malty beer and even with only 5% of alcohol it was very, very flavourful.

Zomer + Hooi
A very summery pilsner style ale. My least favourite since apart from quality brewing and quality ingredients, it was ‘just’ a lager style beer. Didn’t do much for me. Typically, the other group named this one as their favourite.

Scheepsrecht
According to the label this was a Tripel style ale with cloves added to it. A lot of cloves. The usually rather bitter style of tripels was obliterated by the amount of sweetness the cloves added. Not sure if I think that’s a good idea or not, but it’s a delicious beer nonetheless.

Stout + Moedig
The Stout. Usually one of my favourite kinds of beer. Same here. The hint of coffee with the slight carbonation works very well. It’s not too thick but from my point of view, this calls for a wood aged version! The malt flavours are good, the coffee is really recognizable and it has quite some body to it. My personal favourite of the day.

My general conclusion of the 7 Deugden beers is that I think the brewer is a bit too careful. The ideas behind each brew are very well thought out, but in most cases I would try to get more flavour in there. Now all beers are rather gentle which is nice to get to know other or new kinds of beers, but I wouldn’t go back to them very quickly. I’d add way more pepper to the Scherp + Zinnig, more cilantro to the Ruw + Bolster and I would experiment with more hops in general. But, each their own. It’s a great little brewery and I hope to visit there again soon to stock up on some beers!

I tasted two extra brews from them during the last week. I had to buy some in the shop after our workshop after all!

Wijs + Neuzig
An amber style ale with kardamom in it. Although very light in profile, an absolte dream of a beer. If this would be available from a company like Fentiman’s (which means it’s a soda) I’d be drinking this way more often. Sweet, exciting and delicious!

Toffe Peer
A pear ale. I usually am NOT a fan of fruit infused ales and this one isn’t going to change that. Again, very properly brewed but with the pear infusion it tastes a bit like someone spilled a big dollop of apple sauce in my glass before pouring a beer into it.

I’ve decided I should take a more thorough approach to which bottles I have and want to keep in my collection so I decided to sell some of them. This has several reasons, but the main trigger for updating this now was that there is an upcoming release from the Usquebaugh Society, a BenRiach 1976, that I want.

For that reason and in following of the ‘less is more’ principle I have decided to update my list of bottles that I am willing to part with. Some pictures:

De 7 Deugden is a very small brewery on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Technically it’s not much more than a large garage with a tasting room and a little shop. Thanks to Groupon I was able to procure a Brewing Workshop for 5 people for about € 100, instead of over double that.

The brewery, although a very small one, is one that I really like. I only tasted two beers from their selection before. While they were interesting enough, I mostly like them for what they are instead of what they produce. The place is run by a brewer and some loosely associated people that usually have trouble finding a job otherwise. Think of people with autism and other inhibiting factors on the job market. Also, apart from the power bill and quite a bit of water, they try hard to lower their carbon footprint by reusing all waters, giving the draff to a local farm and such.

The workshop was, unfortunately, not only for us five. There also was a second group of 10 (!). 16 people in total to do a one man job seemed like a bit much, but fortunately for us, the other group was kind of weird and apart from one or two guys they couldn’t care less about craft beer or brewing itself. They were more the Heineken kind of people.

Still, 600% job coverage is quite much and during large parts of the day there was enough time for chats with the brewer and just hanging around, since the brewing process consists mostly of waiting. Waiting for the waters to warm up, waiting for the steeping, the boiling, the cooling.

De 7 Deugden, which means The 7 Virtues, is named so since they have seven staple beers in production (wit, dubbel, trippel, stout, peppered ale, brown ale and a kardamom spiced ale). We brewed the cilantro/koriander infused white beer.

The brewing

When we arrived when the brewer, Garmt Haakma, was crushing the barley and wheat and after a short introduction we spent some time putting the grains in the boiling pot and cleaning up after it to get most of the dust and grains away. Mice are plentiful in such a rural area.

After that the pot was programmed for extracting as much sugar as possible at set temperatures and our job was to keep stirring when necessary. The pot had it’s own stirring system, but that doesn’t touch the outsides enough and doesn’t spread the temperature evenly.

After that everything was pumped to the second pot for filtration and we cleaned the first pot. The next step to get everything back in the first pot and start the boil for about 75 minutes. Cleaning the second pot. After boiling back to the second pot to filter out the hops and koriander seeds, and cleaning the first. The cooling and to the fermenter. Especially the filtering process took very long since that can not be pumped and is done by gravity alone. One bucket at a time.

After that we had, of course, a wee tasting. An especially wee tasting for me, since I was driving us back home. More on that in the next post!

Just a quick update on the Special Releases from Diageo for this autumn. It seems I have to sell another kidney to get a sip of all of them. Bottle-Share anyone? I can try to get them all if enough people are willing to cough up the cash…

Thanks to Loch Fyne Whiskies.

The PBSD, as I’ve just named it, is a drink that does hommage to the paxerette sherry casks of the 1960’s and 70’s. What is paxerette, I hear you ask. In short it’s a sherry reduction smeared on the inside of casks before they were put under pressure to force it into the wood. There’s a lot more info in certain magazines and books, but that is what it comes down to, if I’m not mistaken.

It was forbidden by the SWA a while ago and since then, it has become even more difficult to source ‘sherry’ casks. They said it wasn’t traditional and in some ways an addition to the finished product. The years that it was used in the whisky industry have produced stunning sherry matured whisky though. Interesting…

This drink is a barley spirit drink, with ‘a whole lot of it tipped in‘. What that means to me is that it’s a whisky with paxerette in it. They did mention on Twitter that ‘by God it’s not whisky’, but I found that statement so overly clear that it’s almost sarcastic. I approached it as a whisky with paxerette in it.

Sniff:
Red fruits, strawberry and ruby port. Thick, greasy sherry with all bells and whistles. Fruit, wood, nuts, Christmas cake and spices. I also got some of those cinnamon coffee liquers, with coffee and loads of milk and sugar. After a while though, it does smell like it’s breaking apart a little bit.

Sip:
Pretty sharp (I didn’t look at the ABV before trying this) with a very thin feeling on my tongue, but a very thick feeling on the inside of my cheeks. Weird… Sharp fruitiness with light spices. Peaches, pineapple, melon maybe. Some orange definetly. Full and greasy as you let it swim for a bit. Beefy with sweet pot roast and a dutch staple thing called ‘peperkoek’.

Swallow:
The finish goes back to the red fruits immediately. Some balsamic vinegar as well and it’s heavy. Thick, cloying but not too long though. Brown sugar in the end.

Well, it might be whisky with paxerette tipped into it. It might not. I like it, but it does feel like a load of trickery and it sure doesn’t hold itself well when nosed and tasted extensively. Some to try and have fun with, before moving on. But still, a very, very tasty drink. Just not whisky.

Proprietary Barley Spirit Drink, Master of Malt, 54.55%, € 63.13 at Master of Malt, samples available too.

Ah, Glenturret. Home of The Famous Grouse and its experience. I don’t know all that much about this distillery apart from the fact that it’s a small one in the Scottish Highlands. There isn’t much info on the website about the single malt and everything is redirected to the Famous Grouse website (which is hugely annoying, with it’s animated stuff and sounds).

Master of Malt bottled this baby recently and it’s one the many bottlings they do over the year. Always affordable and most of the time of excellent quality. Let’s see what this one does for us!

Sniff:
Very aromatic with lemondrops and barley sugar. A little hint of milky acidity maybe. Slightly roasted grains, some wood, ginger, lemoncurd. Quite a lot of wood spices after a while and even later I get hints of balsamic vinegar.

Sip:
A little sharp at first, then gentle, then sharp again. Very interesting! A long and deep flavour of soft and somewhat sweet wood spices. Some wood, cinnamon, nutmeg and maybe some star anise. A slight hint of fruit behind it all, but nothing too tropical.

Swallow:
A very full finish that encompasses the flavours encountered before, but also adds a layer of cherries and chocolate. The balsamic notes are back too. I also get a more prominent hint of walnuts now.

This is a very, very good whisky. And very affordable too! At € 107 (at the moment of writing) it’s still affordable even with the bad exchange rate. I couldn’t say what kind of cask this was, but it definetly was a good one.

I tasted another 1977 Glenturret in Limburg, but that was one by Malts of Scotland. More lemon and more milky acidity which made it a very good but very strange dram. This is in the same league and a little more ‘normal’.

Glenturret 1977, Master of Malt, 47.9%, € 107.27 at Master of Malt.

Not the distillery but the whisky itself. Usually I have some more information in the title, like age and bottler. None of that is available here. Today’s whisky is the regular € 25 bottle of Tamdhu, no age, distillery bottling.

There’s not much to tell which hasn’t been told before. Mothballed in 2010, sold by Edrington to Ian Macleod in 2011. Quite some independent bottlings released around the date of sale of which several were very good.

Sniff:

Image from WhiskyBase

Dusty barley, raisin. Soft wholemeal bread, white pepper but very very thin. Some cotton pillow cases like those you find in a hotel (the stiff ones). The young age becomes more apparent if you smell it for a while with a spirity and cleaning product-like scent.

Sip:
Peppery at first and there’s some bite at least. Chaff from barley and wheat, soft cereal. Some anise and less thin than expected.

Swallow:
This is the point that this young dram starts to break apart. There’s a weird sharpness to it that’s not very nice and the finish is almost gone instantly after that. There is some barley but that’s about it.

At first I thought this was going somewhere, but the further you got along, the quicker it started to fall apart. The age of the whisky is not too apparent at first (probably some sherry casks giving some wood and fruity flavours) but after that it’s all down hill.

Luckily it’s cheap and still a step up from the cheaper bulk blends. A good introductory whisky into the single malt world, but not one I’d quickly recommend anyone. Even at this price there is better whisky to be found, like Glenfiddich 12.

Tamdhu, OB, 40%, about € 25.

As far as I know Sestante is a bottler of old. When you hear the name it usually together with a certain amount of reverence and awe. Not strange, if you look at the average scores on WhiskyBase.com or the prices indexed at Whisky Wardrobe. High scoring, high priced bottled from before I was of legal drinking age.

Dalwhinnie is one of Diageo’s malts that you don’t come across all that much. There is a regular bottling and a Distiller’s Edition every now and then, but I can’t remember trying an indie version from the Highland distillery.

Sniff:

Image from WhiskyBase

Lots of cereal and barley, with even more sweet fruits mixed in. Tropical and juicy with peach, pineapple and rock melon. European oak, pepper and some wood spices too. Ginger and tree bark.

Sip:
A little bit thin, but again with the load of sweet tropical fruits. Mostly the peach and pineapple again. An old style nonetheless with full sherry and it does remind me of old (Golden Promise era) Macallan and Karuizawa. Quite some wood influence, but not in a bad way.

Swallow:
The finish is the let down here. Very short and a bit too gentle I think. Fruity with orange and peach.

I think this bottle should have been bottled at a higher ABV, or drunk earlier. It might be because of the ancientness of the bottle that it went down in impact and power a bit, or just that it is filtered, and watered down decades ago. But honestly, that’s the only thing I can think of and the flavours and smells are very good, you just have to work a bit harder to get them all. A bit of work never hurt anybody, right?

Dalwhinnie 16, Sestante, 43%, approximatly € 250 now.

Balmenach is a very unknown and unexplored distillery for me. There are almost no official bottlings, apart from some very old ones and a Flora & Fauna edition from 2010. My first one was a Blackadder bottling that I tasted (and a friend of mine bought) some years ago at De Whiskykoning (it’s still available!). Some sherry monster that was!

I can’t really say much about it, apart that it used to be a Diageo distillery (hence the Flora & Fauna edition) and it’s now in hands of Inver House. I’m still hoping they bought some stocks and there will be a Twitter tasting soon. Lukasz?

At the time of drinking this I had absolutely no idea which distillery, age or cask type.

Nose:

Image from Scotchwhisky.net

Very old fashioned with old apples and a bakery floor. Old crushed grains, flour and dust. Some cinnamon and sugar bread (a Dutch sweet bread with lumps of molten and set sugar in it). Doughnut, pisang goreng and rosemary.

Taste:
Very gentle which indicates there isn’t that much alcohol left in it. Sweet orchard fruits like ripe pears and soft apples. It does build some strength for a few seconds but never overpowers the pear and apple flavours. Some tropical fruits pop-up and some spices too. Cinnamon, treacle, pancake batter and beer wort.

Finish:
A pretty long finish but not as special as I expected. Mostly grains and flour. Some bundt cake and a hint of tropical fruit again.

Another unexpected bourbon cask that works its magic on me. The flavour profile of these older hogsheads and barrels is getting more and more appealing over the last year or two. I notice that I’ve been moving away from the really heavily sherried bottles.

A lovely dram, with some really nice flavours on the palate, a pretty awesome nose but the finish isn’t too terrific. Good, but not great.

Balmenach 22, 1988, SMWS, ‘Dried roses and honey on floorboards’, refill ex-bourbon hogshead, 49.3%, no longer available.