2016 is coming to a close, and It’s time for a quick post about what I liked and disliked in 2016, starting with the best whiskies released in 2016. I’ve drank a lot of good whiskies this year, some excellent stuff, and some rather boring drams as well. it’s very hard to choose the very best of 2016, so I won’t start counting points or half points, in order to calculate the best drams released this year. What I am going to do is just take a couple of good examples , one that are not very expensive (yet, not dirt cheap as well), whiskies I feel are what we’re in the whisky drinking hobby for. Plain and simple.I will not choose whiskies costing 100’s of pounds or extra exclusive ones, you will have a hard time getting.3

Ups:

#1 Springbank 16 year old , Local Barley  

I was drinking Springbank 16 local barley a few days ago, and that got me thinking how great this whisky is. I posted a quick status to FB and got quite a few other malt lovers and enthusiasts commenting about how good is this whisky, and how these are the sort of the whiskies that made us fall in love with whisky in the first place. It is an excellent whisky, and it just stands out above most of new  “mediocre” and  “boring” whiskies we find ourselves exposed to more and more. Springbank for one is a distillery you can most certainly count on to produce good whisky, not mass marketed young NAS, and the 16 is a whisky that even better than most very good Springbanks out there. It’s also made our of local barley which is extra cool and adds another “romantic” side to the whisky, not sure how it would taste if regular barley was used. At any rate, it was quite a limited released, and sold like hot buns from day 1, people were really expecting it to be great (which turned out the truth), and it was rather limited as well. So, hat down, Springbank . One of the 3 distilleries in my opinion. Doing things right, as they should be, not much PR and focusing on creating whisky. Seek out a bottle if you can, it’s available on the secondary market, but would be much more expensive now.

#2 Compass Box 3 year old ‘Deluxe’ 

A very cool whisky boasting Old Clynelish and some 3 year old just for spite. Beyond the middle finger John Glaser is pointing at the entire whisky Industry, the whisky is bloody marvelous. It’s certainly not cheap at over 200 Euro, and speaking of VFM I am sure you can find quite a lot of excellent whiskies that will cost you less. At any rate, this is a top whisky, quality wise, concept wise and the bottle looks great too. Compass box are releasing gems , and this is certainly one.

Honorary mention : Kilkerran 12

I’ve not officially review this whisky on the blog (coming soon), but it certainly deserves a honorary mention . Springbank’s sister distillery has released quite some “work in progress” expressions in the last few years, and this is the first EVER , non WIP whisky to be bottled by them, and it’s excellent. At under 40 quid / € 50 it’s one of the best VFM whiskies out there, and certainly the best VFM released in 2016. Those guys just make cracking whisky, and let’s hope they boost production. Get one, it’s a no-brainer.

Downs:

Looking at these 3 excellent whiskies (and others good whiskies you can get) it seems that if you look close enough, you can score good whiskies. However, there is an increasing number of mediocre / sub par whiskies (some bearing age, and most not bearing age), which are popping all over by distilleries trying to sell young often boring whiskies, for prices that a few years ago were considered crazy expensive.I am not going to be naming names, but if you follow my blog you certainly know which whiskies I think are not good enough..   It is becoming harder to find those ‘rare’ good value for money whiskies, or whiskies that will make you say “Wow, this is really good stuff”. Don’t get me wrong though, there are still some good whiskies around, so don’t despair.

Wishing you all a great and prosperous 2017 .here’s hoping 2017 will be much better whisky wise too.