Talisker

An Internet search for Dark Storm will eventually bring you to Talisker, but not before drawing your attention to a straight-to-TV movie starring Stephen Baldwin. It's certainly an evocative name. Originally a travel retail offering designed to highlight the effect of heavily charred casks Dark Storm aims to portray '.. the wild, untamed spirit of a full-blown storm at sea.' Let's see....

You can’t have it both ways. Folks regularly bemoan distillery-only bottlings – an unfair limitation on their god given rights to obtain whisky. All the whisky. A slap in the face for an increasingly FOMO obsessed fan base. “Can’t I just order it online and have it delivered?” And yet, distillery exclusives are still one of the first things which enthusiasts enquire about when visiting distilleries “what have you got which I can’t get anywhere else?”. There’s double-standards at play when it comes to distillery exclusives - they’re only loved when they’ve already been acquired.

‘Select’ *and* ‘Reserve’ in a single bottle title? The Diageo marketing team clearly took a long lunch that day. However, despite the uninspiring name, this is a new composition from the series and not drawn from Talisker’s existing line-up of bottlings. The pairing of the distillery with the worshippers of the Drowned God feels quite a natural match, but there’s been a few standout OB Talisker’s (especially last year’s 8 year old Special Edition), so this’ll be going some in my book to stand out.

Talisker 8 year old is the second appearance for Talisker in the Diageo Special Release lineup – but it’s remarkably different to 2014’s 30 year old. It has been designed to reflect the style of whisky the distillery produced in the 1970s - around the time that the maltings closed and barley was imported from over 100 miles away at Glen Ord.

Being disappointed comes part and parcel with being a whisky explorer. Indeed, the longer in tooth you are, the more likely it is that the let downs will start to outnumber the epiphanies. Whilst the journey always matters, it is invariably our earliest steps that offer us the broadest horizons. And there comes a point where true inspiration and fulfilment are simply far harder to unearth. But in most instances these anticlimactic moments are not based on any inherent faults or technical deficiencies with the liquid itself – they’re built on a foundation of expectations, past experiences (which may or may not be related to expectations) and taste biases.

Talisker is one of those unusual distilleries that possesses an odd number of stills – two wash and three spirit. Diageo’s whisky historians believe this may have derived from the use of triple distillation which operated at the distillery until 1928. Talisker is also one of only a handful of Scottish distilleries which still utilise worm tubs – a coiled pipe submerged in a bath of cool water – as a method of condensing the distilled spirit back into liquid form. The distillation process does not include a high degree of copper contact which many attribute to the highly peppery character of Talisker’s whiskies.

Not all that long ago I had a conversation about Talisker 25 year old. Specifically its comparison to the much loved 10. It went something like this “Tali 10 year old is one of my all-time favourites, but I’ve not tried the 25 year old yet, and I’d be really excited to give it a go.” No problems, I pull down the bottle from the bar, pour a dram and advise that as an older whisky that it might need a little time in the glass to relax.

Alternative names for distilleries are fairly commonplace. There’ a raft of substitutes for Glenfarclas - Blairfindy, Probably Speyside’s Finest and Ballindalloch (though this will no doubt be utilised less seeing as there’s now another distillery of the same name). Many others exist across the Scottish distilleries - denoting teaspooned malts (such as Wardhead and Westport etc), resulting from industry chatter (Beast of Dufftown) or often because the distillery in question wants to protect their brand name for their OBs alone. This is not a new practice and has resulted in independent bottlers having to create new and sometimes less than vague monikers for their single malts and blends. Possibly my favourite comes courtesy of Douglas Laing in the form of ‘Director’s Tactical Selection’ – not the hardest to guess, especially when bottles come specifying ‘distilled on Skye’.