Big Week Ahead
On Saturday night after work I picked up my wife and we went out to dinner. We took a cab because I knew I was in the mood to drink. Dinner was excellent—a bottle of wine and a nice spread of various appetizers and snacks. The only problem was that the restaurant was too efficient. We were in and out in less than an hour.
"Let's walk down the street and see if we want to grab a drink somewhere else," I suggested.
"Have you ever been in there before?" my wife asked, pointing to a Japanese restaurant I'd seen many times, but never entered.
"No, let's see if we can just sit at the bar," I replied. That's what we did.
I won't go into all the details, but let's just say that within twenty minutes we had struck up a conversation with the owner and within another twenty minutes we were drinking extremely rare and expensive whisky in a secret VIP room underneath the kitchen. We stumbled out of there around midnight and I hit the bed hard when we got home. What an evening, however! I'm being vague about the details on purpose because I want to plan a few upcoming events at this place and I don't want the location to leak out quite yet. There are some big Japanese releases at K&L this week and I think we might be able to throw a couple of tasting parties in correlation. Obviously the Ohishi single cask is a big deal, but the email for that whisky goes out on Wednesday and I'm expecting it to be gone within the week. Suntory just released the pristine Ao vodka here recently and I just got our inventory on the shelf. Nikka will also be releasing the long-awaited Coffey Malt in California this week, which is pretty much my favorite whisky they make (malted barley run through the column still!). Keep your eyes peeled for those and for potential events revolving around them.
Springbank is also geared for a few special releases this week including a 16 year old expression from their extremely rare and collectable Local Barley series. Springbank was about four decades ahead of the localvore curve with this idea. They were distilling special batches of single malt using only local Campbeltown barley as far back as the 1960s, and today those whiskies often sell for anywhere between $1000-$3000 per bottle. We'll have a limited allocation of the 16 year coming in this Friday so make sure you check the website. This is the first time that I can ever remember getting a Local Barley release here in the states since I've worked at K&L (if I'm forgetting something let me know). I've already put my order in for two bottles. There will be a few other oddballs as well.
There's a lot happening this week, and it doesn't even include our K&L Exclusive Kavalan casks that just landed. Stay vigilant!
-David Driscoll