Yesterday after 11 years the Teaninich hadn’t spent much of that time maturing. Moving on to the 5th day and hopefully there has been some activity in over two decades. Blair Athol is a distillery which I have had a decent amount of success with. There is hope then that this will be another of the good ones.

The Distillery

The Blair Athol distillery is commonly associated with the Bells blended whisky brand. In fact the distillery reputation I would say is hampered by the Bells visitor experience when you visit the distillery. While apparently the main single malt component may or may not be from this distillery, make no mistake that there is good well made whisky here. You just have to know where to find it.

The distillery was founded in 1798 but was closed soon after. The distillery was opened and closed many times over the years by quite a handful of different owners but the current version of the distillery in Pitlochry was rebuilt in 1949 by Arther Bell and Sons where the current number of four stills was added.

The Dram

Like so many of these drams from the Boutique-y whisky advent calendar this release is no longer available. It is an obvious problem of course being small batch or single cask that they will move fast with only a few hundred units in each batch. With this being batch 5 there has been a few opportunities from Boutique-y to get some at least and this one was a healthy 51.5% ABV.

As usual you can expect natural colour and presentation with a refill cask in operation as well I would suggest.

Tasting Notes

Colour – straw yellow

Nose – hay and cloves to start us off with Highland toffee giving a dairy sweet note. There is a sharp acidic spirit note as well though.

Palate – The texture is thick and waxy though with orange tang. The underlying spirit is still very prominent even after 21 years. It is citric with cooking apples, lemon rinds and breakfast grapefruits.

Finish – Orange and clementines. The finish is long though with a hint of dried fruits. It is bitter and drying but balanced by boiled fruit sweets and Appletizer

Final Thoughts

I wonder how many people were tempted by the age statement when giving an opinion of this. It is yet another spirit led whisky of which we seem to be having quite an extended stretch. This time at least though there has been some interaction with the cask and its previous contents and its certainly by no means as extreame as yesterday. Not something I will be sad to have missed out on though.