The Whiskey Reviewer A World of Whiskey, Poured Every Weekday

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Every year since 2014, that fabled and peaty Scottish island of Islay has seen Ardbeg Day sometime at the end of May or beginning of June. Usually a festival held at the distillery, this year it was a virtual celebration due to the pandemic. However, Ardbeg Day was still marked by the release of The ...

Cask 88, the independent bottler, has made their third release in the Scottish Folklore series with a bottling of 19 year old Laphroaig. Dubbed “Queen of Winter,” this single cask, middle aged Islay malt is bottled at cask strength, and in a limited run of approximately 250 bottles. The release follows previous bottlings of a 22 year old Arran and ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Back when croaking “craft whiskey sucks” was a thing in blogs and forums, I often found myself occupying a space between said croakers and the sometimes too-superlative coverage got in the major media. The latter often misunderstood who they were writing about and what made them special; the former regularly confused “different” or “not famous” ...

By Douglas Fraser Grade: C- In the mountains of Vermont lies the town of Jeffersonville, home of the Smugglers Notch Distillery. Named after the famous passage through the Appalachian mountain range, Smugglers Notch was part of a number of routes used to smuggle goods, including alcohol, from Canada into the United States during a trade embargo in the early 1800s. ...

By Paer Johansson Rating: B+ All right, so we have all heard of and experienced that different factors affect the taste of whisky such as the fermentation time, the type of yeast used, the length of the middle-cut and of course the cask the whisky is matured in. We also know that different casks can attribute different flavors to the ...