Welcome to Day 4. If you have ever had a whisky calendar before you probably have seen that Gordon MacPhail whiskies tend to frequently crop up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the family owned firm has one of the broadest ranges of bottled whisky in the world. Then there is the issue of quality, they won’t put their name on anything they don’t believe in, and it shows. Finally, and perhaps most crucially is the fact that they bottle quite a number of whiskies in both full size (700ml) and 50ml formats.
Inchgower is a whisky we almost never see bottled by its owners, Diageo, and even independent bottlings of it are infrequent. The distillery is about median sized by Scottish standards today, with an annual production of 3.2 million liters. Virtually all of this however goes into blends, principally Bell’s, Johnny Walker and White Horse.
Inchgower was founded in 1871 in the Banffshire town of Buckie, on Scotland’s Moray coast, near where the Spey River empties into the sea. The distillery was built by Alexander Wilson & Co., with equipment they had removed from their Tochineal Distillery (Est. 1825), shut down the same year. In 1936 Alexander Wilson & Co. goes bankrupt, and the town of Buckie purchased the distillery for £1,600. This seems like a ludicrously small sum by today’s standards, but the town council was no doubt quite pleased to sell the distillery on to Arthur Bell & Sons for £3,000 just two years later. Quite a tidy profit.
Photo courtesy: http://www.smwhisky.com.au/resources/common/libexec/image.php?image=1101
Th distillery’s capacity was doubled in 1966 at the beginning of the 20th Century’s first whisky boom. By the 1980s boom had turned to bust, and in 1985 Guiness acquired Arthur Bell & Sons after nearly 50 years of operating the Inchgower distillery and a number of others. Arthur Bell & Sons was merged with Distilleries Company Ltd in 1987 to form United Distillers under the Guinness umbrella. In the nearly 30 years which Diageo (a later reorganization of Guinness and United Distillers) has run Inchgower, there have only been a handful of official releases. Inchgower has remained one of the most important components in the Bells Blended Scotch whisky over the period. 26 million bottles of Bells were sold in 2015. The brand is the second best selling blend in the UK, and #10 in the world.
I have always found Inchgower to be a meaty, and naturally sulphurry whisky. A number f whiskies, like Mortlach and Dailuaine, are also made to have meaty-sulphurry styles, which add weight and complexity to Blends. In the case of Inchgower, its style is largely influenced by its long middle cut. The distillery starts its spirit run, or heart, at 72% (which is common), but runs it down to 55%, much lower than most distilleries. This particular bottling of Inchgower by Gordon MacPhail has been bottled at 46% without colouring or chill-filtering.
Tasting Notes
Nose: flan, salty,ginger,tobacco, leather,vanilla,sea breeze,brine
Taste: ocean, salt,custard,Standing naked at the seashore throwing rocks at seagulls,tobacco,leather, licorice
Finish: fading fudgy chocolate, dark fruits and leather, burning pear