Bunnahabhain 12 Year Old Cask Strength - 2022 Edition

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The Service has been prepared by us solely for information purposes to Members and the Service is based on information we consider reliable and we obtain the contents of the Service from a number of different third party sources (including Contributions), but we do not endorse, support, represent, warrant or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of the Services and any information therein. You are responsible for all activities through your account. You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you provide to us in relation to your account, and for updating it where necessary. You are not allowed to create multiple accounts. We may terminate or temporarily suspend your account to protect you, ourselves or our partners from (suspected) identity theft or other (suspected) fraudulent (e.g. false, misleading, deceptive) activity. You have the obligation to keep your login credentials confidential. You shall not authorize any others to use or access your account. There are lots of spheres of life where this approach pays off: sharing the road with lunatic drivers, my mother-in-law’s cooking, or the perpetually scatter-brained friend who can never manage to make a night out even after suggesting it himself. Yet, these are expectations I have of others, not expectations I hold for myself. This distinction is key to how expectations in whisky continue to raise us up, befuddle us, and sometimes come crashing down on our earnestly eager heads. Wandering around Finlaggan’s historical ruins of a meeting house, chapel, and various other structures long since demolished prompted us to stop and consider the kinds of things that these sorts of places are very good at prompting. As the ruins sit symbolically on a tiny island within a loch on Islay, and as we touched the stone walls as they started to cast shadows across the water at sunset, with orange skies drifting into pink clouds as the sun slowly descended, we each reflected how short a time we’re all here for. But there’s batch variation for sure, and that’s what, many of you dear Dramface readers, may be more interested in. How does this compare to last year’s 2022 sherry belter, or 2021’s first release?

The 2021 is good, but the 2022 is great.If you bought the 2021 edition and were disappointed, the 2022 is what you were hoping for.It’s what I was.It’s very close to the standard 12 dialled up.If you place drams of the 2021 and the 2022 next to the standard 46% 12 year old, right away you’ll group the 2022 and the standard 12 Glencairns together with the 2021 as the outlier.In modern times, changes to the norms of whisky production in a particular Scotch whisky region are welcomed. Along with Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhain was one of the first to deviate from the typical Islay profile when alternative fuels were made available and the demand for lighter spirit, without the heavy smoke, increased. At one time, there were 23 active distilleries in operation on the island, so competition to sell liquid was rife. I find myself enjoying this 2023 release just as much as last year’s more sherried release, but – importantly – for different reasons. This is not a repeat of the 2022. I repeat: this is not the 2022, so if you are expecting that with this, you may be either surprised or disappointed, or both. That the distillery has decided to make the 12 year old cask strength release explicitly batch variable means that we now have three very distinct drams across three years that showcase different aspects of the spirit. But those conga freaks wouldn’t pipe down. The weeks went by and it was still available. The music got louder. I sipped my standard 46% 12 and wondered: “What if this year’s is better?” I then heard a few trusted voices give the 2022 edition some high praise and that coaxed me to join the line.

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No partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship is created as a result of your use of the Service. Anyway we digress, at the time of writing all we could determine regarding cask type was that sherry casks featured prominently. Worth noting for those that love sherry that from the taste and colour these were refill sherry casks. From what I can find this cask strength version has a slightly bigger percentage of sherry casks in its recipe, compared to the standard release. Whiskybase B.V. (“Whiskybase”, “we” or “us”, company details below) offers a whisky enthusiasts online platform that provides its members access to the most comprehensive, transparent and trusted resource of whisky bottles and allows and stimulates its members to contribute information about whisky bottles to the platform (“Service”).