Almost a month ago, the Balvenie unveiled a new expression available only to UK residents, and members of the Warehouse 24, Balvenie’s whisky lovers club. To celebrate this new expression they announced a live tasting event for anyone who’s a member of that club (one can easily join the club online, for free) and was quick enough to ask for a sampler kit. Being a fan of the Balvenie, I knew I could not miss the opportunity of tasting this new expression, and although I knew I could not get my hands on a sample kit in time for the tasting event, I did manage to get a sample kit (how you ask? if I told you, I would have to kill you of course). 
Kudus for the Balvenie on the initiative and the well prepared tasting kit, with two lovely glasses and a generous 10Cl of liquid gold. I followed the twitter tasting event online, although back then I had no sample, and it was very interesting to see how people reacted to this expression. I only managed to get the kit over here at Whisky Israel Towers this week, and set to taster those the other night. Hearing great things about this one, from fellow whisky friends and whisky folk, I was really eager to try them myself.
Before we dive into the notes a little background : The Cooper was selected by David Stewart and eseentially is a marriage of two casks : casks 10142 and 17949, both 15 years of age, and both European sherry butts. All in all there were 300 bottles available for the UK market at a very reasonable price of £65 (remember that a 16 year old Highland park, Thor, is selling for £120) , and no wonder they were snatched so fast from the Balvenie website earlier this week. Sadly, I was too slow, to lay my hands on one myself. This bottling celebrates the art of the cooper, and is the first in a series of such expressions each celebrating a different craftman in the whisky making process. Take a look at this video of Head cooper Ian McDonald.
Balvenie Craftsman’s Reserve #1 – The Cooper , 15 yo , 59.4% , £65
Nose: balsamic, fortified wine , earthy. Some dark chocolate sweet honey. Bookshelf with old paperbacks. After some time a lot of butterscotch. Caramel.
Palate : big. Oily. Viscous. Dried apricot , coffee and dark chocolate. Vanilla and honey. Plums. A sort of bouillon too. Masculine. Aggressive but at the same time refined. If you give it some time you will discover some Werther’s original candies underneath too.
Finish : dark chocolate with plum jam,wood and honeyed malt. Fairly long.
All in all a lovely dram, sort of a Balvenie on steroids with much accentuated flavours, quite a dram this is. I was meaning to match it H2H with the Tun 1401 batch 2 & 3 but this one is quite different in many ways. An impressive dram by all means, at an outstanding price, while very limited.