184 Proof Scotch
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Ahhhh, there’s Scotch whisky and then there are the others. Now a distillery on the island of Islay is preparing a potent mother of all Scotch single malts, with a quadruple-distilled, limited-edition product. Bruichladdich (pronouncing the name right is enough to cause the room to spin) will produce the potent distil of at least 92% alcohol, following an ancient recipe in their possession. Now a taste of that might just be something worth bragging about because it apparently is not going to be made again. Yeah right, if it is a best seller, watch it be introduced as a regular Bruichladdich product. Reports say that it is going to retail at around $700 a case.
I believe the correct pronunciation is “brook laddie” though I have heard some others say it as “brook laddik.” I had reviewed a vintage in one of the earlier posts here. It’s a regular brand in my liquor shelf these days. Quite smooth for an islay.
I wonder why they bother calling it a single-malt if it’s distilled 4 times, and is 92% alcohol? The malt is likely just a faint memory at that point. Why not go the whole hog and just make pure industrial-strength spirit? Now there’s something guaranteed to take your breath away, and perhaps keep it away. I knew an arrack shop in Trivandrum which used an ancient recipe involving battery acid to do precisely that. But that guy did not have a fancy marketing department.
One also has to wonder why it is priced so high. In other parts of the world, the higher alcohol content normally means that it’s a poor man’s drink. I have written about the “overproof” rum that I had in Jamaica. This is very much like the battery acid type arrack and is over 65% alcohol. The same goes for my favorite Chinese liquor Er Guo Tuo (90 cents for a bottle in Beijing).