Blending Exercise Part II - Blending Whiskies
How foolish of me! To get everyone all excited about blending their own whiskies at home, but then not list any selections or recommendations for use during this exercise.
I got many an email last night from readers who are interested in trying this out. The only thing we need to consider here is that your standard distillery edition single malt has already been "blended" for you. I don't mean it has grain whisky in it, but rather that it's a marriage of different casks that has been artfully crafted into the expression you have in the bottle. To really get an idea of what blending your own whisky would be like it's best to use your single barrel, cask strength edition whiskies for this exercise.
In order to encourage more people to do this, as well as stand by my word as someone trying to bring value back into the single malt market, I'm going to heavily discount some of our single barrel selections for a limited time only. We at K&L want to help subsidize the costs for anyone looking to enhance their own single malt education, therefore:
I know these whiskies are still a bit pricey, but they're the best whiskies we have in stock at the moment for blending and they're the only ones we're in any position to offer serious discounts on. With the Linkwood you've got your classic "Glenlivet" or Speyside malt. The Caperdonich gives you the "North Country" flavor and the Caol Ila is the perfect Islay blender. Now, if you've still got a bottle of the Springbank Bourbon cask we did a while back, one of the Auchentoshan barrels we bought from A.D. Rattray, and the Girvan we had from Sovereign, you're in the perfect position to recreate Barnard's blended recipe! We'll also have half bottles of A.D. Rattray single casks coming next week if you want to wait for those. If you recently purchased the new K&L Clynelish 16 year, that's another good choice.
Best of luck with your exercise.
-David Driscoll