The quietude at the end of the year is a good time to take stock of my whisky collection and see where I want to go with it next. One of the biggest issues I have at the moment is the number of open bottles. By my calculations [and whiskybase tracking], it’s approaching 60. That’s not good! I must get rid of some of them. As a result, in the last few months, I found myself ignoring the better [still closed] bottles, and slowly drinking the ones I’ve been avoiding for some time [that’s why they’re still half-full]. This seems a bit contradictory to the path I want to follow in enjoying all of the great single malts of Scotland! Why am I forcing myself to consume them? So I decided to combine a few of those bottles to create a custom blend, where the sum exceeds the individual parts. I then split the final product into smaller 100ml bottles and gifted them to my colleagues for the holidays [whisky, after all, is better enjoyed with friends], leaving 150ml for myself to enjoy, and 100ml to stash away in the archive. This entry is the log of my approach to picking the whiskies I’ve selected for this Bespoke Holiday Blend. I hope you enjoy the journey! But first, we need music! Now playing: just the good ol’ Spotify Release Radar.

The first bottle I pulled off my shelf was the Amrut Peated Indian single malt. I actually really enjoyed this whisky, which is why there was about 150ml left in it. I decided to start with it and make the first sacrifice to the #bottlekill gods. Interestingly enough, it actually set the scene for the subsequent choices I made. I decided to keep the blend somewhere between 43% and 45% ABV, with a good balance of ex-bourbon, ex-sherried, and peated malts [nothing too smoky – my colleagues wouldn’t appreciate it]. So the entire 150ml of this went into my blending bottle. It’s a non-age single malt, so next, I decided to bump up the alcohol and the age, so that it’s not just a composition of younger, easy drinkers. For this, I reached out for a single cask bottling by the Berry Bros & Rudd from an Undisclosed Speyside Distillery. This was a 30-year-old single malt, bottled in 1990 at 48.9%. I wasn’t going to be stringy! So I poured another 150ml of this into my blend, bringing up the alcohol levels and balancing the age. I then decided to drop something in the middle, and grabbed a bottle of the trustworthy Balvenie DoubleWood 12-year-old, which is only bottled at 40%, and poured 150ml into the blend. This really balanced out the flavours and diluted the alcohol content. We now had a little bit of everything in there. I rounded this off with 150ml of another blend from Berry Bros & Rudd (The Perspective Series No. 1), which was 21 years of age and bottled at 43% ABV. Who said you couldn’t blend two different blends? Finally, I wanted to give this whisky just a bit of oomph, and so I poured 150ml of 5-year-old Caol Ila bottled at 46% ABV by Hunter Laing for Fortnum & Mason’s. Using my trustworthy ABV calculator, the overall alcohol by volume of this concoction turned out to be 44.8%. Perfect!

I’ve left all this to marinade and settle for a day before the final taste, and, honestly, you know something? It was pretty damn good! And yes, I can still taste a bit of everything in there! I think that the Balvenie and the Caol Ila definitely stood out as the more prominent notes. But, as I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t that peaty at all and had a nice balance of ex-sherried and ex-bourbon casks. I really do believe that each whisky in here benefited from being blended with the rest. In the case of the Balvenie, the higher ABV malts lifted up its flavours, and in the case of older, slightly tired malts, the younger ones have given them that zesty vibrance they much needed! The final result was indeed impressive, and I gave myself a virtual pat on the back for properly appropriating the whiskies, turning them into something altogether better, and of course, sharing the final product with my friends!