Zoals eerder beloofd hier dus een stukje over Ardbeg Serendipity. Het volgende stukje is niet van mijzelf (klik op de titel of onderaan de link voor het origineel) maar vond ik op het net na een aantal uurtjes rondneuzen opzoek na iets bijzonders. Ik heb zitten gniffelen en besloot mede hierdoor de fles te kopen. Ik kan het niet nalaten hier nogmaals te publiceren: het is gewoon te leuk!
See, once upon a time, the Ardbeg Distillery sent off a few casks of the 18-year-old that they unearthed from the warehouse to the bottler's. These casks had sat quietly maturing in a stone-and-wood building just north of Port Ellen for eighteen years, through two changes of ownership and a multi-year period where the distillery was closed entirely; slowly absorbing rougher phenols and complex organics into the charcoal while releasing smooth carbon compounds back into the whisky.
They were a small but worthy batch of a truly great malt and as such, they needed to be free. Plus, of course, they were worth a heap of money. So off to the bottling plant they went, to be decanted into Ardbeg labelled bottles and shipped around the world where enthusiasts would pay happily for those moments of peat and pain.
The barrels were tapped; their contents (no doubt verified the old fashioned way good men) placed into a holding tank from which the bottling machinery would draw. All correct.
Then the horror struck.
Somehow, a button was pressed, a component failed, who knows? But a quantity of much younger Glen Moray whiskey was dumped into that same tank.
This, in a stroke, removed that entire batch of single-malt Ardbeg from the world. It could no longer be sold as Ardbeg; indeed, it no longer was Ardbeg.
In amongst the hullaballoo, though, someone eventually and inevitably asked "So 'as anyone 'ad a swig of it, then?"
See, that's the thing. It's...really, really good. It's not Ardbeg anymore. Where once there was an unremitting flare of charcoal and peat, finishing on the tongue with a trail of smoke, now...now there is a peat blast with a peal of clear bright flame running through it; one which - most importantly - finishes not with the sullen crackle of burning, but with the clear gold of a Speyside. The full power of the Ardbeg is present in the initial mouthful, but as you swallow and the whisky subsides, the power of the peat gives way to the tonals of the grain. The best part, for people who like to drink their whisky rather than look at it, is that because it was no longer a single-malt and because it was a one-time 'accident', it was given a slightly light-hearted label and sold only through local distributors (local to the distillery).
The bad part? The bad part is that there were those few thousand bottles made, and no more.
And, by God, there never will be again. This is ironic because this whisky, while it may not be better than Ardbeg's standard, is certainly (for many people) much more 'drinkable' in terms of simple palatability for straight consumption, as opposed to sips of a powerful yet distinctive flavor.
Please. Please, friends. If you are fortunate enough to get your hands on a bottle of Serendipity, do yourself and the bottle a favor. Remember that it was never meant to be. Its time on earth was a gift of accident and whimsy. Its existance is meant for your palate. Don't stock the whisky.
Drink it.
Het originele sukje is te lezen op:
http://everything2.com/index
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