What are your most memorable times when you've had scotch?

You paint a pretty picture of domesticity. It's beautiful.

Winter is a great time for scotch drinking. Cold nights and a fire, even if it's only a NG space heater, a friend or a few, and wide ranging conversation feature in many of my fond memories.

I especially like tastings, whether they are formal or informal. Sometimes the only way to find a whisky's best qualities is by comparison with others. I've attended formal tastings sponsored by drinks companies, retailers, bars, and (once) a wine club, but it's equally pleasant (maybe more so) to share a few different bottles among friends.

When Longrow was first available locally, I and my old friend Edd each got some from the first case to hit town. Then we did a Campbelton evening. He had a Springbank 100 open, and I brought a Glen Scotia. We opened a Longrow. It was a cold night, we had the fire going. Edd's dog Freya curled across my feet keeping them warm. That night I thought Longrow was as perfect as a scotch could be. I couldn't tell you what we talked about now, but I'm sure we solved all the world's problems before midnight.

Bart

Jimmy--you are a thread-beast!

I could write forever about this one. Luckily for all of you, I don't have forever. So I will have to take one memory at a time. Actually, I will bust a couple right here.

My Great-aunt Grace, who never married and was a schoolteacher in Memphis liked scotch. The rest of the family found this curious, but served her scotch when she came to visit. In the kitchen when we were serving it up, my parents said that Scotch tasted like "burnt tires." This was a very vivid image for a 10-year-old. Especially thewhole mystique about her unique preference--compared to my Grandfather only drank bourbon Old Fashioneds.

About 1970 I was a high school sophomore spending a summer as a hanger-on with the Marquette University summer program in Germany. The first day we arrived (flying Icelandair into Luxemburg) we got to Trier, and though I was

When I went to college there was a dorm-mate who was a touch on the sophisticated side, who loved Cutty Sark. So I tried some. It was very nice.

When I moved to Scotland in 1979, we would go to the Red Beastie in Forres. People there drank their scotch neat. I started doing that too. But one day at the Culbin Sands near Findhorn village, they had a couple of single malts. The Macallan tasted so incredibly rich. The Talisker tasted too strange. After that, though, it was single malts whenever I could afford it. When I couldn't, it was the Famous Grouse.

A couple of times we would head over to the "big city" of Elgin, where there was the Gordon & McPhail retail shop, with shelf after shelf of malt. Totally droolworthy, totally beyond my price range. But a pub down the street had a bottle of Linkwood open. That was a pretty little dram!

Before taking an overnight train to London, I stopped at a local shop to buy a miniature. They had a Macallan 43%, and a Macallan 56%. I asked the shopkeeper which one to get. He said that both were good, but with a wink suggested that I should get the 56% if I wanted just a bit more moxie.

I'll never forget my first Springbank, either. I had it in Oban, just as we were leaving Scotland for good in 1981, after two years there. This was a pretty, almost birch-woody dram--truly enchanting.

I would say that 99.99946% of the single malt I have had in my life, I have had since that time.

Ardbeggeddon 1, Ardbeggeddon 2, Ardbeggeddon 3, Ardbeggeddon 4, soon, Ardbeggeddon 5, and any other gathering of the PLOWED boys and girls

Mark K

approaching

: What are your memorable moments with scotch? Please share them. : Maybe you can give some of the rest of us ideas that we can try.

I fell asleep yesterday evening while relaxing and drinking a dram of Laphroaig, and as a result spilled it all over my shirt. That was pretty memorable.

But really...

Sitting outside on my parents' porch with my father, in the late summer nights, drinking a couple of drams of Lagavulin. The quiet, the nighttime, the company...the best.

Justin

Please detail!

Everytime I took a sip of my Talisker 1955 (cask strength 53,6%, bottled

Martijn.

Probably drinking a large Ardbeg with a plate of oysters at the Port Charlotte Hotel on Islay - pure heaven! Apart from that, any dram taken at the distillery of its birth.

Paul>

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Next weekend, a group of whisky afficionados grouped round the whisky.pl website are going to hold a whisky meeting. This time, we are going to do some Campbeltown stuff, namely Longrow 13yo sherry cask OB, cask strength, Sprinbank 15yo OB, Glen Scotia 14yo OB. To that, we added Arran unchilfiltered no age OB, as some of us have never had it before, and after all Arran is not that far from Campbeltown (geographically). Any comments on any of these whiskies, please?

Cheers, Rajmund

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Three occasions come to mind, all of them took place in Scotland in the summer of 2000.

One. A friend of mine and myself had just visited Ardbeg distillery, were actually staying the night there, it was late in the evening, the weather was gorgeous, we were sitting on the little cliff overlooking the ocean (there's this fantastic little rock shelf on which you can sit and which protects you from the wind), two lighthouses were blinking towards us - one from Ireland and one from Kintyre - and we were having Ardbeg TEN for the first time in our lives. It had just been released at that time. During the day we'd had quite a few Ardbegs, including the fabulous 1976 Ardbeg Committee limited edition, but I think the TEN which we had at night on the cliff was most memorable.

Two. We were travelling north, along the west coast of Scotland, along the A832, somewhere between Poolewe and Ullapool, and we stopped for a rest by the Dundonnell River. I was a bit tired, having spent a few hours driving along the winding roads, the sun was shining, I sat on the grass by the water (I remember there was a small waterfall nearby) and took a mini of Laphroaig 10yo out of my luggage - the only Scotch I had at that time. I added a few drops of the peaty, brownish water from the stream... and felt I was in heaven. Never before had whisky tasted so great. I sat there, busking in the sun, sipping my whisky, and felt I didn't want to go any further, do anything, just stretch the moment into infinity... And absolutely nothing can compare with the next stage of our journey - from that spot by the river, up to Baemore Forest, along the A835 along Loch Broom to Ullapool - with Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother playing on the car's stereo at high volume, and us admiring the views of the Scottish Highlands and the west coast, with the Laphroaig in my bloodstream. Talking of highs, Jimmy? Try that for a change. But use the passenger's seat for the occasion ;-)

Three. A few days after the memorable Laphroaig + Pink Floyd + the road to Ullapool, we reached Dunnet Head, the northernmost bit of the Scottish mainland. Earlier, while in Ullapool, we'd bought a bottle of Glen Moray

Cheers, Rajmund

The Glen Scotia is a very nice whisky, with the same sort of "sea-coast" qualities that sometimes show up in Springbank. But it's not as big or as deep as a Springer. Compared to the other Campbelton whiskies it seems light and thin, but it's not without its own charms. I would serve it early in the lineup so it could compare to the Arran rather than the Longrow, for example.

Glen Scotia is one of those distilleries that barely survivved the 1980's; it was opened and shut down several times, and has been sold and resold a few times in the last twenty five years. I don't have any special info about their stocks in cask, but it's a good guess that they're a bit of a mess with years of no production and what production there was for different owners.

So far I haven't seen a sherried Glen Scotia. I don't know if that's because I just haven't found one or if most of their production went into plain wood. Some sherry would probably fill out the flavor profile very nicely.

That Longrow has not shown up on local shelves. Springbank and Preiss may have chosen not to import it to the USA, or maybe it's still on it's way. The new Sherrywood 12yo has just recently arrived - haven't tried it yet. Or the new 15yo which was`here first. I did recently have an old bottling of the 15yo - a very well behaved version of Springbank with no sherry at all that I could tell in that vatting.

Hope you'll share your impressions with us after your tasting. I'd like to hear about the new 15yo.

Bart

Only quick comment is that adding a single sherry cask Arran would make a great complement to the line up. A really nice treat too IMO.

Johanna

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Thank you Johanna and Bart for your comments. The tasting is to take place the day after tomorrow (Saturday), and the impressions will be posted here.

As to complementing this lineup, it's not an easy task when you live in a country (Poland) with absolutely no single malt distribution. All the stuff we use for our tastings always comes from online retailers, friendly shops in Scotland or Germany, or from online auctions, like eBay. And it's rather difficult to find exactly what you want, you have to select from what happens to be available instead of dreaming up your lineups :-(

Cheers, Rajmund

Drinking Scotch with my best friend visiting from out of state in my brand new apartment's kitchen in Wisconsin while smoking cherry cigars.

Memorable since it sorta "christened" the apartment.