Glengoyne distillery is one of my favourites, since the distillery is as pretty as the whisky is wonderful.
It just earned a permanent place in my heart thanks to its brilliant new Malt Master experience, where you get to blend your very own Glengoyne single malt expression!
I went with a whisky club I help run and we had an absolute blast:
I'm sitting at the head of the table in the grey shirt. Right motley bunch, ain't they?
The tour has you go round the distillery to see how Glengoyne make their whisky and our guides throughout the experience were fantastic, including singing to scare off ghosts!
The real focus of the Malt Master experience is on how wood influences the juice during the maturation process. We got to see the changes between European and American oak, how sherry or bourbon influences flavour, and just what a difference refill (when you use the cask for Scotch a second or third time) makes:
From left "window" to right: American and European Refill; American bourbon; American sherry; and European sherry. The European oak sherry casks looked almost opaque, the colour was so rich and deep!
The chance to play with 16 or 17 year old cask-strength Glengoynes from a variety of casks was the highlight of the day, and I'm not ashamed to say I was giddy at the thought!
That's a whole lotta whisky. We had the choice of: refill mixed oak; 1st fill American oak bourbon; 1st fill American oak sherry; and two 1st fill European oak sherry casks. The refill on its own was sublime and the American oak sherry cask had phenomenal spice to it, but you'd never spit any of them out!
Technically, master blenders probably shouldn't drink their samples as they go, relying instead on their finely honed sense of smell. We embraced our amateur status and made sure our creations tasted as good as they looked and smelled!
Hand and whisky are blogger's own; everything else is Glengoyne. In case you're wondering, that sample did not last 5 minutes from this photo being taken.
We all made very different single malts, and obviously all thought ours was the best. I'm sure some are long gone while others, like mine, are jealously guarded for some impossible "perfect moment".
I like to think my own creation could hold a candle to this beauty on display in the shop. Self-delusion is a powerful tool!
