Glen Scotia Double Cask Single Malt Scotch Whisky
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Amber. Very sweet. Initially it is all creme caramel, caramelized fruit sugars, wood sugar, toffee and fudge before some apple and peach come through. In time a charred note of bourbon with a pleasing dusty dryness. Has some power. Sweet start and quite fat and though the alcohol gives a little tongue-tingling buzz the result is a good mid-palate weight. The dry distillery character is there still, but there is now depth to counter. Water slightly dismantles the different elements, but adds some dried mint. The finish is deep and dark.
Whisky making on the Campbeltown peninsula dates back to 1636 when a farm at Crosshill made a return for 6 quarts of Aqua Vitae payable to the town of Lochhead, the former name for Campbeltown. With the ready availability of local barley ‘bere’, peat for drying the malted barley and fresh water, the area became a rich bed of illicit whisky production through the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century.
The final key element was the Armour family, a firm of local plumbers and coppersmiths, who arrived in Campbeltown in 1798. Robert Armour’s coppersmith business, set up in 1811, was the perfect cover for the manufacture of 4 part illicit stills made up of ‘The Vessel’, typically less than 40 gallons, ‘head, arm and the worm’. Robert Armour kept detailed records in his Still Book up until 1817.
Campbeltown was reportedly the ancient seat of the Scottish Parliament set up by King Fergus in 503AD. Indeed the site of the Glen Scotia distillery is built near to Campbeltown’s ancient parliament square. It is suggested that the Stone of Destiny, on which all Scottish monarchs were crowned, came from here.
Towards the southern end of the Mull of Kintyre, Campbeltown is an isolated, distinctive place. The whisky produced here is special too - so much so that it’s classified as a separate region, quite apart from the Highland, Speyside, Lowland and Islay whiskies which are perhaps better known today.
With an excellent water supply, easy access to peat and grain and a growing market in Victorian Britain and beyond, little Campbeltown had 28 distilleries by 1851, and proudly proclaimed itself ‘the whisky capital of the world’. Today only three distilleries remain, of which, Glen Scotia, is one of the finest in Scotland.