Whisky review No.4 - Laphroaig 10 yo Scotch

I had an awesome day a week or two ago. I checked my bank account just to see how it was doing and found I'd been paid for some work I did four months ago and had forgotten about. So I went to the government's official booze dispensary to see what I could get. I was hoping for Bunnahabhain 12 yo, which I will be ordering on payday (PigHog from the straightrazorplace.com forum said he'd just got a bottle and since he was my first proper reader I thought I'd do a review of it just for him), but they didn't have it. They did have Bunnahabhain Toiteach but I hadn't heard of that expression, and it doesn't have an age statement. I was a bit reluctant to buy a full 70cl bottle without knowing more about it so I decided on Laphroaig 10 yo.


After reading a bit more about Bunnahabhain Toiteach it actually sounds really good and the lowest score I've seen it given was 4.5 out of 5. I still want to try their basic 12 yo first to get a baseline to compare it to. I'm also thinking Bunnahabhain Young and Feisty Provenance will be coming up soon, it sounds pretty interesting and they do small bottles so if it's awful I won't have lost much on it. So, Laphroig 10 year old, let's go...

Bit of an intro
This came out longer than I meant it to. I can't be bothered to edit it, so feel free to skip it and get straight to the tasting notes.
Laphroaig (pronounced la-froyg) 10 year old was the second single malt I ever tasted, so it's another one I have a long history with. The day my old friend Mr. Tiffen convinced me to buy a bottle of Talisker he bought a bottle of Laphroaig, before we ran away up the street giggling. The details are in the Talisker 10 review if you're interested. It's another old favourite that I haven't had for quite a long time, although I have had several other expressions like Quarter Cask, PX Cask, Cask Strength, 15 year old... The ten year old had almost been forgotten, so I'd been feeling like it was about time to give it another go.

Laphroaig is possibly the most well known Islay distillery and the name means something along the lines of "hollow of the broad bay". The distillery takes it's name from the area of land at the head of Loch Laphroaig on Islay. (If you didn't already know, Islay is an island on the west coast of Scotland where all the smokiest whiskies come from.) The distillery and the Laphroaig brand are owned by Beam Inc (as in Jim Beam, the well known American whiskey) and Beam Inc are owned by Suntory, who own Yamazaki which was my first review. It seems like soon enough it'll be a fight between Suntory and Diageo for ultimate control of the whisky world, with Springbank hiding in the shed making the the really special stuff. It seems a bit like Suntory are aiming slightly more upmarket than Diageo generally do, but maybe that's unfair.

Laphroaig describe their whisky as the most distinctive of scotch whiskies, and it probably is. Personally I'd put Ardbeg in the same category, but I concede that Laphroaig is quite different. Still not sure it's the most distinctive though. The only way of finding out if the claim is true that I can think of is to try all the whiskies there are, which I'll try to do. The website has a list of 26 awards that this expression has received, so clearly something is going right. Their other expressions at the moment are cask strength, quarter cask, 18 yo, 25 yo, triple wood, PX cask, QA cask and An Cuan Mor. I had a bottle of 15 year old years ago which was very nice indeed, but it's now discontinued. Apparently the 15 yo was Prince Charles' favourite whisky, hence the crest on the tube. Wikipedia also reckons there is a 27 yo, 30 yo and 40 yo and if you look on the internet (try www.thewhiskyexchange.com) you can find all kinds of different versions.

From the website, it appears that everything but bottling happens at the distillery. They reckon 15% of the flavour of Laphroaig comes from the water used, which they get from the Kilbride Stream. They have a dam and a reservoir that enables them to produce all year round. I heard some of the Islay distilleries only produce in the winter because that's when there is plenty of water, and use the summer for maintaining their equipment and whatever else needs doing. The Kilbride Stream contains a lot of peat. There's a video on the Laphroaig website where a guy is holding what looks like a glass of whisky, but it turns out to be water from the stream. The moss peat used is also sourced on Islay and is cut by hand in the traditional way. It's supposed to be the rotted down lichens in it that give the medicinal flavours associated with Laphroaig, but I don't know how they would work that out. The barley is dried for twelve to thirteen hours over peat and then finished off in hot air at the distillery, although I'm pretty sure they buy in some of their malted barley from other places like Port Ellen Maltings. Finding out it's only 12 hours in the smoke makes me want to try Longrow from the Springbank distillery, where the barley is peated for up to 48 hours. Laphroaig reckon peating first and then drying gives them a better flavour.

The distillery has seven pot stills and they have chosen not to switch to fewer, larger stills so as to maintain their unique flavour. When one of their still gets worn out they make an exact replica of it, right down to the dents. They also have the "longest and latest cut in the industry" but I'll talk about that later. Laphroaig have a cooprage on site to make sure the casks are all good enough. The cooper still uses the same tools they used over 100 years ago. When I read that I imagined the cooper himself to be over 100 years old, hobbling about and tinkering with barrels like some sort of gnome. That would have been cool and could even have been a marketing gimmick. "Laphroaig - Handmade by gnomes since 1815." I'd buy it. Anyway, they have a nice friendly website to look at if you're old enough. I don't like having to give my date of birth to access a whisky website. Not because of privacy issues or inconvenience or whatever, I just don't like how far down I have to scroll before I get to the right year. You could have a watch of this video too if you like.

Laphroaig Distillery Tour

Almost forgot the most relevant stuff: It cost me 499 kr (£50-ish, $83, €60) and it's bottled at 40% (I was sure it used to be 43%, but I did some research and it looks like official bottlings have been at 40% since before I ever tasted it), it doesn't say anything about chill filtration or caramel, which means it is chill filtered and has caramel added.

Packaging
The bottle comes in a cardboard tube with a metal lid and I do like the simple, no frills design on the tube. It gives the impression that this whisky means business. It's about whisky, not fancy stuff. It looks like the packaging has barely changed since I first bought it (or rather when my old friend Mr. Tiffen bought it). I think the foil over the cork used to be green but other than that it's about the same. The cork had a plastic top with the little pot still logo on it. I always think a plastic topped cork looks a little tacky, I prefer the wood topped ones. I remember the bottle of Talisker I bought when my old friend Mr. Tiffen bought a bottle of Laphroaig had a wood topped cork which I thought was pretty great at the time. Makes no difference to the taste of course. Oh yeh, here's a picture of it.

Nice and simple.

I've talked a little about simple packaging being a good thing before so if you're getting bored you can skip this bit (did you really need my permission?), but I think it's worth looking at an extreme example of overly complicated and expensive packaging. Here it is:

Pushing "fancy" to the limit.

This is a bottle of "Isabella's Islay". It costs $6,200,000, which is about £3,725,000. (Or in my world, 37,000,000 kroners. 4.5 million euros if you're one of the awesome Germans who reads this. They do use euros in Germany don't they? I once went to the bank and asked for euros to travel to Switzerland, so I no longer trust my own judgement in these matters.) The bottle's a bespoke crystal decanter with 8500 diamonds and 300 rubies set in white gold. I reckon if they put it in a normal bottle it'd be retailing at fifty quid.

The description on the tube uses typical whisky imagery of typical Scottish things - peat, heather, barley, streams, beautiful landscapes. It smells of marketing fluff to me, but nice marketing fluff with at least a little truth to it. It's very common for whisky labels to try to convince you that Scotland is great and everything there is great and this whisky is from there so its great too. I admit I fall for the Celtic type olde worlde imagery every time, but I'm not so easily fooled by this kind of thing. To be fair, they're just trying to find creative ways to describe the taste and make it sound appealing, and the description (if you ignore the fluff) is quite accurate and gives you a decent sense of what to expect in the taste. I rather liked the suggestion to "drink it neat like a stalwart".

The bottle label pretty much duplicates the tube. Maybe you're paying a little bit extra to have a tube with a metal lid, but you're not paying much for a fancy marketing department. Or if you are they're a rather lazy marketing department. Maybe it's that hundred year old gnome again.

There's a nice little gimmick with Laphroaig where you can register as a "friend of Laphroaig" and claim one square foot of Islay. You can even go and collect the rent of one dram ow whisky per year, but only if you show up in person. If I was feeling cynical I'd say it's a way to get you to come to come and pay for a tour of the distillery and spend big bucks in the gift shop, but I'm not feeling cynical at the moment, so it's just a rather fun and pleasant marketing gimmick. I think I have a square of Islay too, so I shouldn't knock it.

The bottle's green, which I'm told is quite traditional among the heavily peated whiskies. People naturally assume that a darker coloured whisky will be more flavoursome, but some of the most flavoursome whiskies are not dark at all. The coloured bottle is to hide the colour of the contents so you don't overlook the whisky because of it's light colour.

Smell in the bottle
First opening - salty fishy kippers, big smoke - quite woody smoke, bonfire, quite like a tobacco I've got (Gawith and Hoggarth's Balkan Mixture to be specific), plum or some kind of dark red fruit, definite banana, fig, very foody smoke like smoked salmon type smoke
Later - Peaty smoke, hint of banana and toffee, sweet toasted malt, christmas cake with a lot of brandy in it (fruity and alcoholic), ashtray that's had good tobacco in it (I recognized that because I had to empty cigar nubs out of an ashtray at work last night, rather than the usual cigarette butts), charred wood, plastic, maybe a hint of something a bit like menthol but not quite (maybe camphor)

Appearance
The Laphroaig website calls it "full sparkling gold" which translates to "fairly typical, middle of the road whisky colour". I reckon it's plain amber if you like that way of doing it. Possibly amber +1. Considering the full powered flavour it's maybe a bit lighter than you'd expect. Have a look for yourself:

About the same as most others. They use E150 to make sure.

While I'm uploading pictures you can have a look at my nice Laphroaig glen cairn glass. It was a gift from my old friend Mr. Tiffen a few years ago and is my favourite whisky glass. I could do with buying a couple more glen cairns at some point.

It's not so straight sided in real life.

Neat

I decided to say "finish" instead of "aftertaste" because I'm really referring to the tail end of the development as well as the aftertaste.

Nose - Solventy but not just alcohol (maybe gloss paint), TCP, first aid box, silage, smoke of course (peaty smoke, then kippery smoke, possibly the rest of the kipper too, but I wasn't sure if the fish element was really there or if I was imagining it to go with the kipper smoke), briney almost sea smell, chemically almost disinfectant like (I see what people mean when they say it smells like a hospital), more smoke but this time with a piney resinous quality, the smell of the frog pond in the botanical gardens I used to visit on class trips when I was a kid (maybe a mixture of moss, pond weed and damp stone), liquorice, elastoplast, pipe tobacco, coal fire, charred wood, fragrant peat, almost something floral that I want to call lillies but I'm not certain, more minerally smoke (almost salty), something like sun cream or aftersun (possibly a touch of coconut mixing with the medicinal smells), fruity (banana was very clear in the bottle but it's not so obvious in the glass), minerally smell that reminded me of quartz crystals somehow (probably a mineral smell I smelled on a class trip to a mine or something but couldn't quite place it), wood varnish

Arrival - Sweet, savoury, foody, earth and pine, medicinal taste (something in the hospital, doctor's office, pharmacy arena), rich oily mouthfeel

Development - Phenolic (whole combination of medicinal, peaty, smokey goodness), The smoke really hits in the development, piney resinous smoke I thought, medicinal flavours start to come back after the smoke clears, dry

Finish - Long lingering soft smoke, hot plastic (phenolic), dry, very savoury smoke like smoked meat or smoked fish

Water - 1 teaspoon (it's only 40% after all)
Nose - Honey, smoke, brine (like salty smoked fish), minerally, drier woody smoke like yesterdays wood fire, medical smells come back as it develops, sugar and marker pens, floral, watery peat like the peak district (very similar to what I tried to describe in the Springbank 12 yo CS), sweets, sherbet, maybe a bit of leather, melting sugar, vague hint of chlorine, sweet smoke, demerara sugar, silage, banana with something more tart, banana smell joining the demerara (try dipping a banana in crunchy demerara sugar, it's delicious), maybe sandalwood, malted milk biscuits, Sugarpuffs (honey and wheat cereal), dried cereal, rich moist christmas cake, something earthy and woody that made me think of a wasps nest (an old memory I think), light brown muscovado sugar, meaty greasy smoke a bit like a barbecue or a really good burger van
Arrival - Piney resinous smoke, charred wood like yesterday's wood fire ashes (definite ashy taste, not just charred wood), TCP/savlon/plasters, bit of sweetness, briny like prawns with the sweetness of really fresh seafood but not fishy, something savoury, confectionary (can't explain how that's different from sweets but it is), fruity and woody together, hint of banana, kind of toffee but not quite, pipe tobacco (not pipe smoke), dried fruit, raisins, bit biscuity, full bodied oily mouth feel

Development - A lot of medicinal flavours in the development (savlon, TCP, pharmacy, doctors office, first aid box, sticking plasters, hospital corridor, it's all there) smoke, charred wood, complex savoury character, oak, earthy, peppery glow comes in, black tea, sweet almost sticky feeling like chewy sweets,
Finish - Kind of buttery but still smokey, not oily but maybe greasy (maybe like greasy food, or thicker oil), long lasting fragrant and dry smoke like an old cottage with an open fireplace, pepper at the back of the mouth, doctors office flavour lingers too, slight tobacco quality to the smoke (like you were in the pub for an hour the night before, back in the days when people were allowed to smoke in pubs), tannin dryness, smoked salmon (gentle smoke and greasy mouthfeel), solventy dryness (reminded me of painting with gloss paint in a poorly ventilated room), sweet malt, chewy sweets mouth feel, maybe rubber, tea

Tumbler
I found the whisky to be quite different to how I remembered it. It seemed sweeter and more medicinal, when I remembered it mostly being dry and smokey. I remembered that I always used to drink it neat in a tumbler and decided to try it to see if it made a difference.

Gorgeous.

The tumbler is no longer the glass of choice for whisky. (I was going to write "humble tumbler" because it rhymes in a way that amuses me, but mine's cut crystal and doesn't look very humble at all.) The glen cairn is the best glass for really getting into a whisky because it concentrates all the lovely smells into a small area, and then funnels them up your nose to your eagerly awaiting olfactory bulb. With a tumbler half the smells escape around the sides and are sniffed up by passers by. I found I was able to get less smells in the tumbler but it was much closer to how I remembered it. Plus it looked amazing in the glass, the picture really doesn't do it justice. It was really nice to sit down with a whisky and relax a bit, I find with I get very analytical with my glen cairn. Here's my notes from the tumbler tasting, which was neat because I used to drink it that way:

Nose - Smokey and dry smelling (just how I remember), bit medicinal (but you notice that way more in a glen cairn), medicinal tone is quite sweet, slight burning rubber note, phenolic (in a fairly general way), minerally and faintly briny like rockpools, vanilla, oak, blown out candle (hot wax and parafin with smoke), fragrant peat, almost fragrant tobacco smoke, pine resin

Arrival - sweet, briney

Development - Phenolic, smokey, a hint of match strike sulphur

Finish - Dry, foody smoke

A few more comments

It's kind of a shame this whisky isn't a bit stronger in the alcohol department. There's quite a lot to it, especially with a drop of water, and the extra flavour and complexity that a little extra strength could add would make it pretty spectacular. I suspect they don't do it to make the casks go further, which makes sense from a business perspective. A 700 liter barrel at let's say 56% (I know their cask strength isn't at exactly that level of alcohol, but it's around that and it doesn't need to be precise to demonstrate the point here. Calm down goodness sake.) when diluted to 46% would give you roughly 852 liters, or about 1217 70cl bottles. Dilute it to 40% and you've got 980 liters, or 1400 bottles. Assuming you sell at the Norwegian price of £50 (500kr) your taking £60,850 with a 46% bottling, or £70,000 with a 40% bottling. Nine grand extra per barrel is worth having. It's not quite that straight forward of course, there's tax and extra labour and packaging and whatever to take into account, but the point is they can make more money by bottling it at a weaker strength. Unless people decide not to buy it, which would be silly. Just buy Quarter Cask instead, it's 48% and very tasty.

I was surprised that they make such a smokey whisky with malt that's only been over peat for 12 hours. I wonder if the phenols responsible for the medicinal flavours are overpowered by smoke flavours if you peat the malt for too long. They're definitely more subtle kind of flavours, where smoke is generally more powerful. Laphroaig is very phenolic indeed, but there's much more to it than just smoke.

I heard a great quote in a review of Laphroaig 10 yo by the guys at Common Man Cocktails (a youtube channel, have a look here) which was "It almost doesn't smell like anything you should ever drink". I just thought it was funny when I heard it, but it turns out that Laphroaig was the only whisky still allowed in America during the prohibition period. It was deemed too foul smelling for anyone to actually drink it for pleasure and was sold by chemists as a tonic.

The Cut
I read about this on the internet so it might not be accurate.

 In distilling whisky, steam from boiling the fermented mixture is condensed. As I'm sure you know, alcohol boils at a lower temperature to water and so the alcohol is separated out. However, the mixture is not only alcohol and water, there are all kinds of other chemicals in there with different boiling points. The very first steam to rise off the mixture and therefore the very first part to condense is not something you want to drink (it's got meths in which makes you blind and sterile!) and is called the head. The last part to condense is called the tail and is also not something you want to drink. The middle part which you do want to drink (after it's matured) is called the heart and the "cut" refers to the parameters which define the heart, and it makes a difference to the flavour of the spirit. The smaller the head the more flavour but the greater the risk of meths and other nasty stuff in the whisky. The smaller the tail the more flavour, but the greater the risk of unpleasant flavours and wicked hangovers, or so I've read. If the cut is too small, keeping just the very middle of the run, you end up with not much more than pure alcohol with no taste. I think that's what Smirnoff is. I'm not certain but I think the long, late cut used by Laphroaig means they keep less of the head and more of the tail than anyone else. I've just been discussing it with my old friend Mr. Tiffen and he sent this quote:

"Typical feints flavours are plastic, cheesy, soapy, musty and sweaty which are unpleasant additions to a whisky's flavour. Other feint flavours can be pleasant in small concentrations though, tobacco, leather, tea. "

Feints are what they call the tail end of the run in whisky making. Interestingly I detected plastic, tobacco, leather and tea in the Laphroaig 10yo, suggesting more feints in it, so I reckon my guess at what long and late means must be about right. Good times!

Conclusion
Entropy1049 from the straightrazorplace.com forums once described Laphroaig 10 as "like a Band-Aid that had caught fire and been extinguished with Listerine", which was a taste he liked. I agree 99%, all I'd add is that someone tried to beat the flames out with a kipper first. It's a very nice whisky if you like that sort of thing, but my mother would really not be a fan. If you want to know what whisky drinkers mean by "phenolic" drink this. If you want to know what we mean by "medicinal" add a drop of water and drink it, but ignore the smoke.

I think this could be better if it was bottled stronger, the extra complexity and range of flavour held by the extra alcohol would make this something really special. Would I buy it again? Probably, eventually. The problem with buying ten year old Laphroaig is that you could have bought quarter cask. It's very nice, but quarter cask is better in my opinion, and not much more expensive. In Norway you're only paying a little more for a significantly better whisky. It looks like the price difference in the UK is slightly more, it's 10% more for quarter cask here and nearly 20% more in the UK. I guess it might not be such an easy decision for you chaps back home. Well, I've tallied it all up and it's time for the final score: On the standard one to ten scale I'd say this is a very good whisky but with a little room for improvement, and it's rather overshadowed by other expressions from the same distillery.