Virgin oak on a malt from Glasgow Distillery
The Thompson Brothers are rapidly becoming everybody’s favourite independent bottler, and a batch of releases most of us look forward to are the Mystery Malt bottles. You get a black bottle with a big white question mark on it, and then you just have to unwrap the lead to see what you got. Some friends of my went all in, and bought a whole load of these mystery bottles. In it, there were a lot of interesting distilleries, ages and cask variations. Spread out over the next few weeks, I will slip in this or that sample into the proceedings here on Long Pour Amour.
The single malt of today came from Glasgow Distillery. This setup from 2015 celebrated its 10 year anniversary in 2025, but today we still taste a rather young example.
Glasgow Distillery 4 years old, bottled by Phil & Simon Thompson at 48,5 % abv
First things first: The Glasgow single malt whisky matured in an American virgin oak barrel. There are 273 bottles for batch 3 the Mystery Malt series.
Upon Sipping: Virgin oak, so we expect a lot of wood and a lot of sawdust. The colour is impressively dark, I have to say. The impressions are as predicted, but also with perfume, musk on a freshly shaven carpenter working in a Canadian forest. This is a Scotch to drink while reading a Wolverine comic book. Underneath the big vanilla and caramel layers, there is still something of a soul from malted barley to be found. Thanks to the diluting to 48,5 % abv (I guess, or was this a cask strength?), the arrival on the palate is quite soft, with a sweet and chocolatey touch on the tongue. The remainder of the journey is too one-dimensional to really shock me to my core, but the whisky is nice for everyday drinking.
Word to the Wise: Good stuff, but a tad too simple perhaps for inclusion in this series? On the other hand, always a pleasure to drink something from the Glasgow Distillery. I have a feeling this will please regular bourbon lovers very much.
Score: 80 points.