SMWS 12.53 “Going Crazy in a Bakery”

I plan on sprinkling in some Scotch Malt Whisky Society reviews over the next few weeks as I have more on the way and I need to make some room on my shelf!  For those that aren’t familiar, SMWS is a club (required an annual fee) that buys casks from distilleries and always bottles them at cask strength.  They come up with colorful names and label them under a distillery & cask code so you don’t know who the distillery is, but it’s the worst kept secret in the whisky world and there are plenty of websites that tell you which each one is.  Distillery #12, which is BenRiach, is in Speyside and was distilled on Sept. 29, 2009 and put into 1st fill ex-bourbon barrels.  

ABV: 60.7%

How it smells…..vanilla but very mellow for 60%, a little boozy but that’s expected…with water it gets sweeter with confectionary sugar and whiffs of pizzelles and Italian cookies.  

How it tastes…..jumps right to a rye bread spiciness, ending with a mouthful of warm malt and a short finish of nutty cocoa nibs…with water you get more spice up front initially and pumpernickel bread in the middle ending in vanilla sweetness.  The finish is longer now with less nutty and more creamy mouth watering dark chocolate.

Price…$120

Rating…..🥃🥃🥃

Final thoughts..…I really like this, as I do with other BenRiach products.  I enjoyed it much more with water (diluting down to 45%-50% ABV) as the flavor stages became more pronounced and distinctive.  Undiluted was  more like a burst of everything at once and you miss some of the nuances, but at 60% that’s expected.  But this is also what SMWS aims for, to give you the raw product and let you explore the flavors by self-proofing it down. Rating SMWS is going to be difficult as they are pricier than their respective age-statement counterparts, but you are getting a cask strength bottle AND something limited and unique outside of the normal flavor profiles the distillery blends to for its core releases.  I believe this was one of only 90 bottles allocated to the U.S.

Given the price points, I suspect that going forward a lot of these SMWS bottles will be 2x’s - 3x’s 🥃 ratings. If I like them, then they’ll be 3’s and if I think it’s lacking, then 2’s. However, if I’m blown away then perhaps some higher ratings. We’ll have to see how how it goes, particularly for some higher-aged bottles where the cask strength release might be more beneficial.