BELTRAMO’S
1540 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, Ca. 94025
Phone (650) 325-2806, (888) 710-9463, Fax (650) 323-8450
Store Hours: Mon-Fri 10 to 7:30 Sat 9:30 to 7:30 Sun 10 to 6:30
NEXT WEEK’S EVENTS
Mother’s Day Brunch > The Vaults, Leith – Sun 15 Mar
Complimentary dram for Mothers who order brunch!
Free Live Music > The Vaults, Leith – Wed 18 Mar
Being the day after St. Patrick’s, we’ve invited back Gillywolfe.
Irish Whiskey Tasting > The Vaults, Leith – Thu 19 Mar
Contrast and compare Society and proprietary Irish bottlings.
Sheffield Preview Tasting > Leopold Hotel, Sheffield – Fri 20 Mar
Society Ambassador, Les Harrow introduces a preview of truly remarkable drams
Scotland v Ireland Tasting Lunch > 28 Queen St, Edinburgh – Sat 21 Mar
3 drams and 3 substantial courses: perfect warm up session for the game
Whisky & Beer Theme Night > The Vaults, Leith – Tue 31 Mar
As part of our Spritzich Whisky & Beer celebrations join us for a night focused on beer & whisky pairing
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith EH6 6BZ Contact: sales@smws.com or call 0131 555 2929 (Mon-Fri 9am-4.45pm). Visit the Society at here for membership information This is your chance to join and to take advantage of their great offers!
Spot the SMWS bottles in this amusing You Tube video
Hello to old friends and new, We hope that the year 2015 is treating you well! We have lots to tell you about in this update, busy and exciting times at the Trace including:
– The completion and opening of Warehouse X – our new experimental warehouse
– Latest awards – Upcoming events at the Distillery – Our Visitor Center expansion
– Our ever expanding distillery
– Our first coffee table book
– Employee anniversary celebrations
Warehouse X We completed construction of our experimental warehouse at the beginning of last year and rolled in the first set of barrels this past summer, beginning the first batch of experiments. The warehouse is comprised of four independently operating chambers that will allow specific variables to be tested, in order to determine their effect on aging barrels, along with a barrel breezeway with an open air rick that will allow a small number of barrels to age while being exposed to the natural elements. The very first experiment that just began this past summer is focusing on the effect of natural light over the next few years. Now that we’re more than six months in, we’ve pulled some samples and have some interesting results so far. These next couple of years will be very enlightening! If you would like more information about Warehouse X you can find it at www.experimentalwarehouse.com.
Latest Awards We have continued to be honored with awards for our whiskeys. Some recent highlights: The Distillery was named “Distiller of the Year” at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, “Brand Innovator of the Year” by Whisky Magazine at its Icons of Whisky America Awards, and our William Larue Weller Bourbon and Sazerac Rye 18 Year Old Whiskey won second and third finest whiskies in the world, respectively, by the esteemed Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible. To see all of the awards the Distillery has won, click here.
Community events We’ve recently wrapped up some exciting dinner events at the Trace including our Legendary Craftsmen Dinner Series and our Buffalo Love dinner. Later this month, on March 28, we will have our most favorite community event – the annual Easter Egg Hunt which sees almost 1,500 happy, smiling faces looking for Easter eggs and on May 1 will be our Oaks Day Festival. We host several community events at the Distillery throughout the year. To learn more about upcoming events, check out our 2015 Events Stampede on our website at http://buffalotracedistillery.com/events.
Visitor Center One of the most enjoyable aspects of our work at the distillery is the number of folks coming to visit us, especially since we love showing visitors around the Trace. Last year we entertained over 100,000 guests! Unfortunately, our visitor center started to get a little overcrowded so we are expanding upstairs! Our visitor center is housed in a beautiful building constructed in 1881 and it has a lovely second floor still in its original condition, so we are adding 5,500 square feet of visitor center space right above the current footprint to include an additional tasting area and meeting and event space. The expansion is expected to be complete by June 2015.
Expansion! In response to the growing demand for fine Kentucky bourbon whiskey the distillery continues to expand. We have been very fortunate to acquire an additional 233 acres of land adjacent to the distillery on which we will be able to accommodate new barrel storage warehouses as needed. We are also using the land to plant corn and other grains as we are planning to have our own “farm to table” bourbon in just a few years’ time! Even more significantly, we have been able to buy back warehouses R, S, T and U which had been sold off and converted into office buildings during the great industry crash in the 1970s and 80s. We have converted them back into barrel warehouses and are already filling them with barrels!! In total, the distillery now covers 376 acres and has 125 buildings, spanning four centuries of construction – 1700s, 1800s, 1900s and 2000s. Also, rest assured, we are making lots more whiskey as we try to catch up to the demand but aging cannot be rushed, so thank you for your patience during this period of shortages on our brands.
Coffee Table Book For the past few years, we have been working with the very talented photographer David Toczko of Lone Dakota Photography on a coffee table book featuring more than 200 color photos of Buffalo Trace Distillery. This beautiful book is now on sale in our Visitor Center as well as online at http://buffalotracegiftshop.com/. David did a spectacular job of capturing the distillery in all its glory and we are very appreciative of the work and effort that he put forth on the project.
Anniversaries Long service, tenure and experience are critical to a distillery’s success. We recently celebrated two of our finest team members for their contributions to the Trace. We recognized our Jimmy Hall, process technician, who monitors our stills and has now worked at the Trace for 51 years, and our Warehouse Operations Manager, Leonard Riddle who has worked here 50 years! We appreciate all of their hard work!
Future Updates Hopefully, the updates are helpful and not too intrusive, we are certainly glad to be able to be back in touch on a regular basis now! Look for upcoming updates about our botanical gardens, Visitor Center expansion, tours, whiskey experiments underway as well as the conclusion of the Single Oak Project. If we can be of any help at all with questions, needs, wants please just reply to this e-mail and it will be personally answered. If there are topics you would like to hear about from us, please do let us know that too. In closing, and on behalf of all the 425 folks at the Trace, thank you for your support of our whiskeys, it is very much appreciated. Cheers, Mark and Kristie, Mark Brown The Buffalo Trace Distillery Direct: (502) 696-5978 E-Mail: MBrown@BuffaloTrace.com www.buffalotracedistillery.com www.greatbourbon.com Kristie Wooldridge The Buffalo Trace Distillery Direct: (502) 783-5652 E-Mail: kwooldridge@buffalotrace.com
Brace yourselves – it’s the 50th anniversary of ‘The Sound of Music’. Expect a sing-a-along at a venue near you soon! The perfect Mother’s Day gift perhaps? Alternatively we have the usual fine range of whiskies,
Also on the horizon is St Patrick’s Day. While we are fully aware that this usually entails the sampling of a glass or two of the Black Stuff, it would be amiss of us not to highlight the strong growth (not forgetting the long history) of the Irish whiskey category of late.
Elsewhere the whisky year is shaping up very nicely with a plethora of exciting new releases becoming available. Last month we had some very short lived Springbank, Highland Park and Glendronach. This month we have Arran, Tomatin, Benriach and Teeling, to name but a few.
NEW FROM TOMATIN & ARRAN
Very welcome addition to the core range. This is the first release of Tomatin Cask Strength and it’s a delicious fruit and nut cracker!
Another limited release (only 6,000 bottles) of the Tomatin’s Cu Bocan stalks onto the shelves and our staff have been mightily impressed.
.An actual age statement new release! The first ever 18 year old single malt from the Isle of Arran distillery. Long may it continue.
Ireland – Irish and Blended Scotch
Scotland – Single Malt Scotch
United States – Bourbon and Rye
K&L Wine Merchants
http://www.klwines.com
Phone: 877-KLWines (toll free 877-559-4637)
Email: wine@klwines.com
San Francisco, Redwood City, Hollywood CA
www.ralfy.com shows how to settle down a hot-finish malt with Whisky Review 526 – Edradour 2003 Vintage @ 57%vol and space.
Glenfarclas 60 Year Old launched in Taiwan, 5th of February 2015
J.&G. Grant officially launched the Glenfarclas 60 Year Old in Taipei, Taiwan at the beginning of this year – a great start to the 2015 calendar for Glenfarclas! Preparations were underway for 2 days to make a spectacular Glenfarclas themed event for the 60 Year Old unveiling.
The interior of the events hall was decorated with a Glenfarclas style living room, including a cabinet full of Glenfarclas whiskies, artwork on the walls with Grant family pictures, warehouse photos, a collage of old whisky labels and even a Glenfarclas vinyl next to the family’s 175th Anniversary book.
George Grant took to the stage to present the Glenfarclas 60 Year Old – a rich and full bodied whisky which develops full flavours of dried fruits, coffee, cinnamon and cloves. George explained the Grant family history and the momentous decision of his grandfather, also George Grant, to start putting stock aside during the late 50s & 60s for the future generations. Thanks to this foresight, Glenfarclas now presents an exceptional age statement from a first fill sherry butt which since late 2014 has been sold in over 20 markets and continues to be launched worldwide.
Grant says “It’s such a pleasure to see the Glenfarclas 60 Year Old reach so many corners of the globe, and achieve such high demand. Out of the 360 bottles available worldwide, the majority of these have been sold in Asia, principally in Taiwan and China, which makes this Glenfarclas product launch in Taiwan seem only fitting”.
Glenfarclas 60 Year Old reaches Bulgaria, 7th of February 2015
Ian McWilliam, Marketing Executive, continues the worldwide Glenfarclas 60 Year Old Launch in Bulgaria at the Whisky Experience Festival. It was presented during the first Whisky, Rum & Wine Master Test held at Fabrica in Sofia attracting quite the sizeable crowd of whisky enthusiasts!
The Glenfarclas 60 Year Old was described as an incredibly rich & fruity whisky specially selected from a first fill oloroso sherry butt; it boasts a beautifully dark mahogany colour and intense flavours of sherried fruits, treacle, oaky tannins and roasted coffee beans. Presented in its Glencairn crystal decanter, with crystal base alongside a hexagonal box, the Glenfarclas 60 Year Old is designed to represent the 6 generations of the Grant family. The family signatures, from John Grant (1805-1889) to today’s 6th generation, George Grant, Glenfarclas Sales Director are inscribed around the crystal base.
This monumental Glenfarclas expression sincerely reflects the core character of Glenfarclas as a product, but also as a company. The Grant family’s commitment to sherry cask maturation and their exceptional history in stocking so many single casks reinforces the family vision of creating a Single Malt Scotch whisky which is unique and continues to stay true to the Grant values of independence, authenticity and quality.
Glenfarclas Email: info@glenfarclas.co.uk Website: www.glenfarclas.co.uk Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/glenfarclas/ Tel: +44 (0) 1807 500257 Fax: +44 (0) 1807 500234 Address: Glenfarclas Distillery, Ballindalloch, Banffshire AB37 9BD, UK
This week Joe Ellis reviews Laphroaig 10 Year Old.
We’re not holding back with the March Outturn – from three Icons of Whisky award winners to four bottlings over 60%abv, we’re throwing down some of the best we’ve got! For complete tasting notes please visit http://www.smws.ca/ but for now be tempted by the bottle notes below:
Cask No. 71.38 A cheese-board in a library
27 years old; refill hogshead; 57%; Sweet, fruity & mellow
A tired bowl of fruit, with polished wood, leather books and faded roses behind, then a scent of mild cheeses which is echoed by the taste. Becomes ‘full-fat creamy’ with water, and more fruity. Soft and sweet and lightly spritz-ish.
Cask No. 35.87 Exuberant, confident, energetic, vivacious
9 years old; 1st fill barrel; 60.1%; Young & spritely
The exuberant nose displays a rainbow of colours – toffee, marshmallows, vanilla, apple pie, leather, tobacco and polished furniture (with water, apple skins and cream soda). An energetic, vivacious palate offers toffee sponge, dark chocolate and dates, balanced by citric zestiness.
Cask No. G1.11 Iced mulled wine and Sorrento Limoncello
21 years old; refill sherry butt; 65.1%; Spicy & sweet
This one is for you if you have a sweet tooth, Bourbon vanilla buttercream and toffee apple sponge pudding on the nose and Scotch pancakes neat. With the addition of water, orange cream fondant, fudge and caramelized sugar as well as some zest and spice.
Cask No. 73.64 Anytime can be Christmas
24 years old; refill butt; 58.4%; Deep, rich & dried fruits
Dried fruits and spices; rich Christmas cake, well dosed with sherry and ginger wine. A voluptuous texture and a sweet taste with dried figs and chocolate. Water brings fruit-cake mix and candied peel, and introduces hazelnut praline to the aftertaste.
Cask No. 93.61 Cal-Mac welder’s tea break
14 years old; refill hogshead; 58.3%; Oily & coastal
The nose combines Crunchy-nut cornflakes and chocolate flapjacks with smoky bacon crisps and baked ham – later a Cal-Mac welder enjoys a Daim Bar. The taste- big, rich and chewy, with charcoal, ash, liquorice, peat reek and industrial garages – is ‘acceptably dirty’.
Cask No. 10.76 Duelling banjos dram
8 years old; refill barrel; 60.8%; Peated
The nose has burning driftwood, boat sheds, canvas, leather and salty smoke against cranachan, honey, pear, citrus and vanilla. The palate delivers big, sweet, nutty smoke, liquorice, toffee and dark chocolate – fruity, oily and briny with a tingling Tabasco continuation.
Cask No. 53.184 Fairground on a beach
19 years old; refill butt; 60.4%; Heavily peated
The nose suspects beach fairgrounds (candy floss, donuts, peat smoke, rock-pools) – also lemon, ash, dark chocolate and bacon Frazzles. The palate is vast, with lots of smoke, spice, dark chocolate, roast pork, lavender, crispy seaweed, black pepper and something medicinal.
