Glen Scotia 15 Year

Tasting Notes

Evan's Tasting Note

Nose: Unctuous and coastal. Soy sauce, iron filings, graham crackers, dried cranberries, banana flambé with chocolate sauce, café mocha and Caramilk Bars.

Palate: Espresso coffee, Ocean Spray Cranberry Cocktail Juice, pineapple slices, dried mangoes, hoisin sauce, heavily steeped Earl Grey tea, chocolate-covered blueberries, shredded coconut and a touch of coastal salinity.

Finish: Soft and smooth with decadent fruit, milk chocolate and just a hint of peat and menthol.

Comment: What a piece of craftsmanship this whisky is! Such balance, yet such flavour. The more I taste of Glen Scotia's official bottles, the more I am impressed.

Andrew's Tasting Note

Nose: savoury with surprisingly some firm smoke a bit mechanical; creamy vanilla, mango, melon and pineapple; both juice ripe orange and candied peels with dried cranberry and a hint of soy sauce.

Palate: still creamy, earthy and spicy with soft but muddy smoke; it is is a bit steely, with some sea salt and caramel; more engine oil and metal shavings; pineapple and mango emerge with time. 

Finish: medium-long, fruity, spicy and coating with clean smoke.

Producer Tasting Note

Nose: Citrus peels, ginger snap biscuits, and baked fruits.

Taste: Plump fruits with a surprising dry finish, apricots, fruit salad, caramelised sugar and oak.

Finish: Warm spicy, honey smoothness, oak and a dry finish.

Distillery

Originally posted on our blog by Evan for KWM's 2019 and 2020 Whisky Calendars.

Glen Scotia is easily one of the top three operating distilleries in Campbeltown. When it comes to The Wee Toon, it is typically Springbank Distillery that gets all of the love from whisky aficionados. It is easy to see why – Springbank is a grungy Victorian throwback in look and feel. It is an anachronism – a distillery out of time and out of step with modern life – just as some say Campbeltown itself is. Springbank is rustic, dilapidated, inconsistent, and often impossible to find bottles from nowadays. And it is all the more loved because of that.

It should not be forgotten that Campbeltown is home to three distilleries: Springbank, Glengyle (bottled as Kilkerran), and Glen Scotia. Like it's Wee Toon’ cohort Springbank, the Glen Scotia Distillery itself is chock-full of grimy, victorian, and industrial character in all of the right ways. Also like both Springbank and Kilkerran, Glen Scotia Distillery lies within the town itself.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, back when Campbeltown was a more industry-driven place and with a more bustling fishing port, Glen Scotia had neighbouring distilleries on the other sides of the walls that encase its lot. At this time, the story goes, the town had more distilleries than churches which themselves numbered more than thirty. Boom times eventually went bust, and for quite a while only two distilleries remained in the town, though that could have been considered one and a half for how little Glen Scotia operated in the early 2000s.

Andrew tells stories of visiting the distillery more than a decade ago, when it was only sporadically in operation, and very uncared for. Much of the distillery equipment was falling apart. When Andrew and I visited in October of 2019, times had obviously changed. We had a great tour through Glen Scotia’s operations, led by Distillery Manager Iain McAlister and saw that everything was in operation, the stillhouse had thick coats of paint over nearly every surface possible, and the stills were polished and running.

Glen Scotia Distillery just so happens to be owned the Loch Lomond Group, which we have seen three times already in this year’s calendar with the Inchmurrin 18 Year, the Inchmoan 12 Year, and the Loch Lomond 18 Year. Glen Scotia itself has a fairly robust lineup of five core releases at the moment, including the Double Cask, Victoriana, 15-Year-Old, 18-Year-Old, and 25 Year Old. There has even been a release of a 45-Year-Old, though this is a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive to come by.