One of the two that I mentioned there, the Laphroiag Quarter Cask, is, in my opinion, the best bang-for-your-buck whisky on the market these days. It's super peaty. It's apparently now about €35 (for better or worse, whisky has become more trendy, and there's been a sharp uptick in the prices -- 3-4 years ago you could get said bottle for €22). It's seriously better than a lot of whiskies that go for twice that price. Basically, in a hackery-way -- they exploited that smaller barrels (with higher wood-to-liquid ratios) age whisky faster. That means they can produce better stuff on the cheap.
Another old standard of mine is the Talisker 10 year old. It's about the same price. It's not very complex, but has a powerful single taste. (When booze tasters say "complex", what they mean is that the taste changes over time from the moment it hits your tongue to the last bit of aftertaste. Something that "only has one note" isn't complex -- it means that it tastes the same in the aftertaste as it did the first moment. But "complex" isn't a euphemism for "good" -- it just means "changing".)
If you want to splurge a bit, two whiskies at about double that price are:
- Ardbeg Corryvreckan: in my not-so-humble opinion, better than Uigedail (that exelius remommends below; I have open bottles of both). It's so packed with flavor that it's a bit overwhelming. Also bottled at cask strength.
- Ben Riach 17: Not from the islands, like most peated whiskies, but has a mix of tastes of Speyside and Islay. Sadly, looking now, this has also recently gotten a lot more expensive. A couple years ago it was about €55, now it's €95.
Fun Talisker story. I'm at a nice underground (literally) bar here in Melbourne, Australia, with an excellent selection of whisky.
A young-ish but well dressed lad next to me was eyeing off the selection. Clearly wanted "a whisky" but had no idea what.
"Talisker is an excellent choice", I said, knowing that some of the heavier stuff – I go for a Lagavulin – would probably be a bit too much for his uninitiated palate.
He looked at the bottle. He realised it was "only" ten years old. And he said "no, I need something older".
I let the foolish young chap make his own decision.
(Oh, and curse you Americans for your ludicrous booze prices. A bottle of Lagavulin 16 here is $75.)
To amplify that -- often whisky doesn't get better with age, or at least, not significantly enough to justify the price hike. I've tried (at the local whisky festival) most of the Talisker range, including distiller's editions, up to the 25 year old. The 10 year old is their stand-up whisky.
But beyond that, Scotch ages particularly slowly, because it, by law, can only be aged in reused barrels. A 10 year old bourbon is as old as the stones, because the barrels are, unsurprisingly, most reactive before being soaked with spirits for several years. Scotch, uniquely, mandates that the barrels cannot be first-use -- they have to be reused barrels from something else, which necessitates the very long aging times.
Many of the peat phenols (or is it esthers?) tend to break down over time in the cask, so peaty/smokey scotches actually can lose flavor over time — though with a good cask they can pick up woody complexity. Younger islas tend to be more vigorous!
Edit: I don’t believe there is a requirement in the law to only use previously used barrels. They are just cheaper (boubon IS by law required to use only new casks, which results in a lot of availability), and aren’t quite as active, allowing for more gentle maturation.
I think this depends on your preferences. I like the Balvenie range, and that is easily available in 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 25, & 30 year old varieties.
For sure the 30 year old bottle is €300 compared to €30 for the 8 year old, and it is hard to rationally say that it is ten times better, but it is _different_ and it tastes great.
I'd never pick a bottle based purely on the age, but there are differences and I personally tend to gravitate to the 18+ ages when I'm picking my single-malts.
It doesn't even help to live near the brewery. I drive through Tennessee and Kentucky frequently, and bourbon is more expensive than gasoline. The price is mostly taxes, regulatory compliance, trademark, and water rights.
If you're willing to scoff at the law, you can get something that tastes similar to a well-aged bourbon from an unlicensed distiller at a very low (relative) price, and any time you might have to wait for it is mostly because their trustworthy high-volume purchasers can jump ahead of you in line at any time. The moonshiners use tricks to flavor their product that are prohibited by law to anyone that wants to sell "bourbon" or "Tennessee whiskey", but since they're already outlaw, it doesn't cost them anything extra to put charred wood splints in a vat instead of using whole wood barrels, and forcibly cycle temperature and pressure to simulate the barrel-aging processes.
This area is just swimming in cheap grains, especially feed corn (aka maize), soft red winter wheat, barley, rice, rye, and sorghum. You can make beer out of any of it, and distill any beer into hard liquor. If you strip it down to pure azeotropic grain alcohol, you can dilute it back to 80 proof and add whatever flavors you want.
Some of the old-school outlaws have "gone legit" and sell their stuff (largely outsourced to one big industrial distillery, with one tiny local distillery kept mostly for show) as "flavored vodka" now. But that's just as expensive as anything else, because now they pay their taxes and comply with the laws and regulations.
It really is ludicrous. It is so cheap to make liquor here.
I don't doubt there's plenty of illegal stuff but it's not illegal to sell whiskey like that, as long as you don't call it bourbon. Calling it whiskey is fine (though I don't know if there's a law on "Tennessee whiskey"). Legitimate craft distillers make all sorts of weird whiskeys.
Thanks! I like Laphroaig, and Ardbeg has been one of my favorites too. I haven't tried the Quarter Cask yet, I'll add it to my BevMo shopping list.
What do you think about Bruichladdich (sp?) ? Edit: I see /u/YeGoblynQueenne just suggested the Port Charlotte; that's the only one I've tried.
Actually, I now remember, I once saw Laphroaig's "Black Adder". It was so peaty, that they actually had pieces of charcoal in it! Didn't get a chance to try it though.
Bruichladdich octomore series is so gloriously peaty, but its expensive. $200/bottle approx. port charlotte was boring in comparison. some friends who like peat say the octomore is too much.
Bruichladdich is good stuff, but for the stuff I've tasted, it's never been best-of-class. They've been great with marketing, and helped expand the market for Scotch, but at least, of the stuff I've tasted (I've had a couple bottles), they've been good, but not great for their price class. Taste-wise, I'd put them pretty close to the less hyped Bowmore.
(If anyone saw an earlier version of this comment, I'd written it about Bunnahabhain, another Islay whisky, and one of my favorites.)
I'm just getting started with scotch. At first I tried Lagavulin, and the long iodine finish really put me off. Then I got a Highland Park Valkyrie and loved it. The other day I cautiously tried a bit of the Lagavulin again and liked it better; I'm not sure if whether it's from my tastebuds being different, three months of oxidation, or just not drinking much of it.
What would you recommend for smoky scotches that don't have much iodine? (Talisker is on my short list right now.)
Laguvulin is honestly kind of middle of the pack for "iodine-ish" (like the original poster, I can relate to some skepticism with these labels) smokey whiskies. If that put you off, and you like Highland Park, I'd say that you'd probably be better off focusing on lighter, subtler whiskies.
The cheaper versions of that would be, for example, a Redbreast 12 (Irish) or a Glenmorangie 10. The only Highland Park that I have sitting around is an 18 year old, and I just compared them to that (again, the nice thing about whiskies is that you can put a few drops in a glass for comparison), and while they both have a little less to them than the 18 year old, they're also less than half the price. If you're feeling like branching over to the fruitier side, something like a Glendrodach 15 would be worth trying. It's not soo far off from the others, but tastes a bit sweeter and is a bit more complex.
If you're committed to smokey, non-iodine-y whiskies, Talisker is good, as noted. Maybe a Bowmore 12 (a little sweeter), or, if you find it, Ardmore or a Ben Riach. But again, it sounds more like your tastes go away from the smokey stuff to subtler whiskies.
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A thing I'll note for the uninitiated here is that another nice feature of whisky is that there are literally only dozens of distilleries. There are something like 80 in Scotland. For a whisky nerd it's entirely possible to have a good 1/2 to 1/3 of them on a reasonably sized shelf. And since bottles take several years to go off, you really can have a huge percentage of the total range represented in a moderate whisky nerd's collection.
I expected the iodine to be a subtle taste note. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with an intense iodine aftertaste that made me feel like I was in the hospital.
However, I love wood smoke, so I'm intrigued enough to keep at it. I'm trying out some non-smokey whiskies too; I had a glass of Macallan 12 that I enjoyed quite a bit.
You can also put marbles into them to restore the volume, but I don't bother. I've only once had a bottle that went far off (meaning too much of the alcohol evaporated out), and I'd kept it with only 2-ish shots in it for probably a year and a half. So normally after I get down to about the last quarter bottle, I try to finish them within a couple months, and that's done me well.
For me, Laphroaig Quarter Cask was also the first Whisky I bought. I kept it around for a long time (maybe 2 years) because I did not want to "waste" it too quickly.
The last few glasses I drank were really disappointing compared to the initial fanstastic glasses. I can't describe the tastes, but it was simply not good anymore. When too much air gets into the bottle, the Whisky can oxidize, changing its taste (usually for the worse).
From what I've seen, most people using preservation techniques aren't worried so much about alcohol loss as various other molecules getting oxidized, changing the flavor profiles they spent a lot of money for. (I don't have enough experience to say how valid that is, but it's certainly a problem for wine.)
> I'm just getting started with scotch. At first I tried Lagavulin, and the long iodine finish really put me off. Then I got a Highland Park Valkyrie and loved it. The other day I cautiously tried a bit of the Lagavulin again and liked it better; I'm not sure if whether it's from my tastebuds being different, three months of oxidation, or just not drinking much of it.
I haven't attempted whisky much yet, but I believe that you trained your taste to appreciate the domain and recognize the subtleties within that domain enough to appreciate something you didn't immediately.
I say this as someone who's gotten into music genres I hated 10 years ago, forced myself to try cilantro, olives, more pickled food, and regional cuisines to a point where I appreciate all of it, and can tell well from poorly executed within those areas. I'm not sure we can force ourselves to like everything, but I'm living proof that we (sample size of one) can force ourselves to recognize quality in every domain.
I would be keen on whisky if it wasn't for the fact that I rarely drink to begin with, and the price is non-negligible.
I started trying out whisky when I realized that for the amount I drink, the price even of fairly expensive whiskies didn't add up to all that much each month.
> I started trying out whisky when I realized that for the amount I drink, the price even of fairly expensive whiskies didn't add up to all that much each month.
So you're in the same situation as me, yet arrived at the opposite conclusion, and I think you're probably right. :)
I'll reconsider my stance and will pick up a couple of bottles and dip my toe.
I’d recommend you just keep drinking Lagavulin until you enjoy it. ;-)
But seriously. My Irish mate started me on it and I really didn’t enjoy it at the start. But he kept buying it for me. And I kept drinking it. And now I love it more than words.
Not op, but I am a budget peaty whiskey drinker :)
This is very controversial, but have a go at Black Label. In my opinion, it is one of the heavily undervalued whiskeys. Otherwise, I found Scotch to be expensive in the US, but I got a bottle of Monkey Shoulder for around 30 bucks which did Okay. Not very peaty, but it does the job on a budget.
If you don’t mind going a little higher, Laphroaig, Caol Ila, Lagavulin, Talisker are the usual suspects. On a budget I would say don’t worry about age too much. 10y Laphroaig is fine! Age is easily overvalued (because it markets easily with people who are afraid to admit they don’t know), as is single
malt. Not saying it doesn’t matter; I just find it hard to justify the price hike, sometimes. Although for peat, single malts do tend to be better, unfortunately. :)
There's really no reason to ever buy anything from Johnie Walker. If you want to drink whisky on a budget in the US, don't buy Scotch.
You'll do much better in the US with a Rittenhouse Rye, or Buffalo Trace bourbon. Hell, even a basic Jameson is better than Johnie Walker Black.
The Johnie Walker Green is a respectable whisky, but like so many high-brand respectable whiskies, it can't punch its weight with other things in its price range. (I've never tried the Blue, admittedly.) That's the same issue with e.g. the Jack Daniels range. It's not that it's bad for mixed drinks, but you can get some genuinely good stuff for cheaper -- stuff that'd so good you'll feel bad about pouring it into a cocktail.
I've tried the Blue a few times. It regrettably tastes the same as everything else from Johnny Walker - that signature JW flavour profile, but otherwise uninteresting and (extremely, given the price) rough. Very little holdover flavours or rolloffs.
Connemara Irish whiskey is also peated. It's also a respectable whiskey, but I think you can do better for cheaper with Scotch island whiskies.
For all-out smokey power, the (Texas-made) Balcones Brimstone is a bit of a mind-fuck. It's dried with mesquite wood fire (i.e. the thing used for good bbq). It's not their best whiskey, and it's not well balanced by any means, but it is unique and very, very smokey.
Edit (after walking through the kitchen): Nikka (Japan) and Kavalan (Taiwan) also produce excellent peated whiskies, genuinely competitive with great Scottish whiskies (unlike Connemara, in my opinion), but they wouldn't be any cheaper than Scottish whiskies in the US.
As wheels suggests, try the Talisker, but go for Dark Storm. I think it's a bit of an attempt to take over Laphroaig's market. It was recommended to me by a scottish lassie :)
How "cheap" is the cheap end? If you're fine with about 100 quid, have a look at the Bruichladich distillery. They have three whiskies; the Bruichladich is unpeated (and quite good); the Port Charlotte is sold as "heavily peated" and the Octomore as "super heavily peated". I expect the latter will probably be to your liking - yours for just £125 a bottle.
Octomore is amazingly peaty, unfortunately that price..... $200 isn't wallet friendly. On the plus side the bottle will last a while since you won't be drinking it in quantity. I haven't found anything comparable peat wise.
I didnt find port charlotte very peaty at all, but its been a while.
Agreed, Talisker Storm is interesting for the price(~$50). (is there a dark storm & storm? i've only seen storm in the usa).
Also, if you ever find yourself in Portland, ME the Liquid Riot single malt is excellent. They ship it to some other places in New England, but it is pretty hard to find outside of Maine.
I like really peaty, smoky whiskies. What would you recommend on the cheap end?