One Year in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society: A Review

 

I don't think my journey to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society ("SMWS") is all that unique. 

Like most single malt Scotch drinkers, I started with your basic blends as a teen or early twentysomething (I distinctly remember that it was Cutty Sark at a bonfire in my hometown of Damascus, Maryland, around 2001 or so).

Then I moved up to the entry level single malts (Glenmorangie, Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, and so on), then began experimenting more and more, partaking in liquor store tastings, meeting the reps, gradually expanding my palate and growing more and more curious about different styles, caskings, ages, regions, all of it. 

And, like many of us, I slowly discovered that I favored stronger, more flavorful whiskies - and that usually comes in single cask, natural strength presentation. I learned to dislike chill filtration and artificial color, as the devious marketing maneuvers they are. And I began exploring the world of independent bottlers.

Now, Washington DC is not the best city to live in if you are exploring independent bottlings of single malt scotch - if you are lucky you'll find a shop that features a few Signatory bottles, maybe a Cadenheads here or there, perhaps a rogue Gordon and MacPhail. But usually they are marked way up, and usually they feature lesser-known distilleries that I have no reference points for (Glenlossie! Glen Burgie! Braeval! ... more on this later). 

So after reading around for a while, I joined the SMWS in October of 2020. Like everyone else, I was pretty bored during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and drinking more than before... but also drinking more adventurously. SMWS offers very unique single cask bottlings, always at natural strength, with an interesting and creative naming system, for a pretty nominal yearly fee. 

I discovered many, many interesting bottlings through the SMWS that I could never have found elsewhere - Scotch that tasted exactly like oyster brine; tasted like pencil shavings; tasted like pressed flowers; tasted like petrichor; tasted like ancient funky rum; tasted like, tasted like, tasted like. Just a constellation of intriguing flavors, that rotated twice a month! And I learned to love all these weird little distilleries that usually just sell to blenders, but now and then release a nice single malt. In fact I became a big fan of a few: Dailuaine, Linkwood, Auchroisk, and especially Ardmore. 

According to my records, I've purchased and reviewed 62 bottles in the last year. Here are a few superlatives, in no particular order:

Favorite 5 Bottlings:

• Laphroaig 10 Year "Driftwood Barbecue" - definitive cask-strength powerhouse Islay, full of gigantic coastal peaty flavor that never stops being interesting to the nose or tongue.
• Highland Park 12 Year "Dining by the Harbor" - a wonderfully fragrant dram, full of coastal richness, subtle sweetness, and tons of complex seafood. 
• Inchmurrin 13 Year "Dark and Flaming" - an incredibly successful re-casking into "alligator" char casks, absolutely fascinating and decadent dark flavor explosion. 
• Craigellachie 12 Year "The Dram of the Falling Leaves" - perhaps the perfect Speyside expression. Apple, pear, vanilla bean ice cream, rich meaty sulfur notes that counterbalance the rest. Wonderful. 
• Glenturret 11 Year "Confessions of a Barbecue" - sure, BBQ sauce for miles... but also an incredible note of scorched pencil shavings, paired with subtle tropical fruit. 

Most Bizarre 5 Bottlings:

• Allt-a-Bhainne 7 Year "Nice to Meat You" - very seriously: breakfast sausage and latex gloves. I liked it, but you've been warned...
• Auchroisk 7 Year "Adventurous African Safari" - one of three bottles of Auchroisk I had that was re-casked into an ex-red wine barrique. This one had huge waves of strange flavor, especially red wine, funky rum, and shag tobacco. 
• Braeval 8 Year "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" - something like old cognac or old rum: very funky, with a million spices. I liked it, but not for everyone. 
• Laphroaig 9 Year "Fire Your Engines" - Persistent lemon Pledge cleaner note that I couldn't escape. Ruined the bottle for me. Chemical tasting. 
• Glen Scotia 8 Years "Pleasingly Idiosyncratic" - oil, fruit, furniture polish mix with oversweet antiseptic and gauze and coffee grounds and eggplant (!). 

My Least Favorite 5 Bottles:

• Balmenach 7 Year "Trekking in the Jungle" - I don't like sweet mint very much, and this reeked of it. 
• Old Pulteney 13 Year "North Meets South" - felt like a casking failure. Maybe just a bad run of spirit. The worst of both ex-bourbon and ex-sherry. 
• Glen Moray 12 Year "Traditional Butterscotch Fudge" - Rich, and interesting, but too one-note for me: endless butterscotch that never relented and let me enjoy the softer flavors. 
• Bunnahabhain 6 Year "Maritime Marshmallows" - I never got the marshmallows! 
• Glenrothes 7 Year "The Nutcracker" - Really, not that bad. Very very dry, which is perhaps not my favorite profile. I still enjoyed it, but less than other bottles. 

Five Distilleries I'm Looking Forward to Trying via SMWS:

• Bowmore
• Kilchoman (do they even sell casks to independent bottlers??)
• Ardnamurchan
• Springbank
• Edradour (if any exist)

I have been told that Ardbeg simply does not sell its casks off unless something goes drastically wrong; from what I understand, there have been ~135 casks of Ardbeg sold by the SMWS, but they were all before the time of my membership. Maybe I'll get lucky one day, but I'm not hopeful. 

Two Distilleries I've Seen Enough Of: 

• Caol Ila
• Bunnahabhain

There is simply no shortage of casks of Caol Ila or Bunnahabhain, apparently. 

Strangest Trend

There's really only one here: aggressive re-casking. I've lost count of all the bottles I've seen that have spent most of their (often short) lives in one type of cask, only to be finished in something else - often something dramatic - without any explanation why. Red wine finishes, rum finishes, IPA finishes, sometimes you even see sherry maturation with ex-bourbon finishes (!). Go figure. Honestly, I think the answer that makes the most sense is that the original spirit was lackluster in some specific way, and the new cask is meant to "rectify" the deficiency. 

With all that said, I decided to renew my membership for another year. Looking around online, the SMWS seems pretty divisive - some people simply cannot get past the expense - and honestly it's not cheap. Shipping hovers around $35 per shipment no matter how many bottles you order (so order more at a time if you can). Tax isn't cheap either. The average young bottle is between $90-120. The average middle-aged (or bigger named) bottle is probably $120-160. Old or rare bottles are in the mid- to high-hundreds. But it's supply and demand ... you pay for access to really unique and unusual Scotch. I'm OK with that; many are not, and that's fine. 

I'll keep reviewing lots of SMWS content here, but will begin to mix more official bottlings back into the rotation. I've been out of the mainstream market for too long; it's time to dig back in a little bit and see what I've missed.