12 New Samples!

Just a quick post to let you know which samples we’ll be adding to the site today. We’ve been adding loads and loads and the range is starting to get pretty big! Click here to see all the drams.

Today we’ve got a very interesting selection for you; in fact we’ve only just got most of these in a week ago!

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The Maker’s Mark party line is a stoic stubbornness when it comes to quality and, in more or less every production process, Maker’s use slower and often out-dated techniques to maintain theirs as an incredibly smooth and supple bourbon.

Aside from production, the grain selection is a big factor in the overall flavour. Maker’s Mark is what’s called a “wheated bourbon” - distilled from a mashbill with no rye, and a higher content of wheat in its place. Rye is a spicy, heavy grain – like the Iron Maiden of the grain world, and wheat is mellower – like a cereal version of Lionel Richie. The omission of rye makes for a smooth and supple spirit that’s easy like Sunday morning. 

At every step it’s all about reducing harshness and retaining the distinctive character. More...

The Next Batch of Whisky Samples

The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the birds are just about to start getting on our nerves. But times are good, and after launching Drinks by the Dram – our whisky sample service – the Master of Malt offices have become organized chaos.

The samples are flying off the shelves and we’ve been flooded with emails and phone calls from you all, telling us how much you like them.

We’ve made a solemn pledge to keep adding loads and loads of new samples to the site every day, so this morning we gathered around the board table (sat in a huddle on the lawn) and came up with the day’s batch of whiskies to “dram” (turn into samples). More...

Imagine a world where you could try a glass of a whisky, or rum, tequila, even vodka for that matter, without having to buy the bottle first. A world with 100% customer satisfaction, and an end to buyer’s remorse! To literally try before you buy…

If you’ve got a little stash of whisky, you’ve also almost certainly got “that one bottle” (maybe even more than one) that just wasn’t quite what you expected, or wanted. Maybe it was too peaty, too sweet, or light, or rich, or maybe it just wasn't that good. More...

After one of the greatest montages in motion picture history (the training sequence in Rocky IV), came the epic fight between Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago (a fight that ended with a victorious Stallone and also what looked like the beginning of the end of the Cold War).

A similar title fight took place in the whisky world last year, when Bruichladdich flexed its peaty muscles with Octomore, and Ardbeg came back with a well-placed right hook in the form of Supernova – the peatiest Ardbeg yet - weighing in with peating levels of over 100ppm!

The interesting thing was Bruichladdich’s riposte – Octomore 02.1, a monstrously phenolic whisky at 140ppm. The odd thing is, it just doesn’t knock your socks off like Supernova does. The ‘Laddie just doesn’t seem as punchy, and perhaps this is because Bruichladdich’s style is much lighter and fruitier than Ardbeg.

When we first tasted Supernova we were beguiled by the medium weight nose of toffee and tequila. It leads you into a false sense of security. What comes next is a palate entry of mescal, smoked paprika and iodine, and then it develops into the biggest chili hit you’ll ever experience in the world of spirits. It’s just mind-blowing! More...

Alchemy is one of Science’s earliest precursors; it is the tool the ancients used in the search of the three most desirable treasures known to mankind: gold, eternal life, and infinite knowledge.

The early Arab chemists - more conjurers and cooks than scientists - were obsessed with Alchemy’s elusive rewards, but they remained unattainable. They did, however, make one great discovery: alcohol – without which there’d be no whisky!More...

Signatory came up with an excellent game plan: find the best single cask whiskies in Scotland, and package them beautifully. Unsurprisingly, they’ve been very successful.

The range is staggeringly large, with an enormous breadth of whiskies from all sorts of Scotch distilleries; some silent, many still up and running, some grain whiskies and some from the most legendary distilleries in the world!

There are several different Signatory lines, but the jewel in the crown is the Cask Strength Collection. The range consists of natural cask strength whiskies, almost all of which are from single casks. Every time we’ve tried anything from the range we’ve been consistently delighted, so imagine our joy when a set of 5 samples arrived through the letter box!More...

Okay, so this was taken a couple of weeks after the jar was filled…

Every good bartender (and home cocktail enthusiast) knows that a cocktail is only as good as its ingredients, and one ingredient that is indispensable in the preparation of a plethora of whisky cocktails is the Maraschino cherry.

Traditionally, Maraschino cherries are prepared by preserving small, light coloured cherries in a brine solution, dyeing them red, and then dousing them in Maraschino Liqueur. This technique, whilst effective, is also time consuming, and impossible to undertake unless the cherries are in season and fresh.

Commercially available ‘cocktail cherries’ (note the conspicuous absence of the word ‘Maraschino’) for sale in supermarkets and on the interweb tend to be of inferior quality, containing no Maraschino Liqueur at all, using cheaper sugar syrup, and artificial flavourings to achieve a poor approximation of the real thing. More...