No Name Scotch

It's a lovely thing when the post-holiday dust settles and the national distribution chains start going through their remaining inventories. It's not easy trying to predict which parts of the country are going to be able to sell the appropriate number of bottles, which is why I find January is a great time to start making phone calls for previously-allocated whiskies. For example, Compass Box released an outstanding limited edition whisky in 2017 called "No Name," a blend of 75.5% Ardbeg, 10.6% Caol Ila, and 13.4% Clynelish with an additional 0.5% French oak-aged Highland malt for extra flavor. We sold through our allocation in a flash, even with the "one bottle limit per customer" allocation slowing things down in the sales queue. 

But that was upon release. 

Now that the furvor of the Christmas shopping season is over, it's time to move through what's left in the inventory for many of our national distributors. I was very lucky. I managed to consolidate a large chunk of what was left in the states of the "No Name" and get it all delivered to K&L earlier today. That means no bottle limits, no restrictions, and no risk of running out anytime soon. If you were a fan of the Flaming Heart or the Peat Monster, this is sort of like a combination of the two. You get the clean, focused, highly-peated intensity of Ardbeg, tempered ever so slightly by the roundness of Caol Ila and the oiliness of Clynelish. I just polished off a glass with my co-workers in the Redwood City tasting bar and we were all quite impressed.

Now let's get down to dollars and cents: I saw some of my local competitors online earlier today at $170 and even $250 in parts of SoCal. Of course, that's because they thought there wasn't anything left in California, so they moved the price up to reflect the scarcity in the market. 

But now there's plenty, so I'm going to bring the California market back down to earth.

Compass Box "No Name" Blended Malt Scotch Whisky $139.99

-David Driscoll