hello malty mighty malt many makers and thank you to mike addison's safe for that mop mention
welcome to the botti i'm ralphie i'm talking whiskey and this is ralphie review 913
extras extras means that i'm giving additional information to whiskey drinkers and other quality
spirit drinkers which is not specifically referencing a single whiskey rum bourbon
or whatever review of a specific bottle but is more generalized and is simply me
sharing experience to help you to gain your experience that much much faster so that
when you go out to buy whiskey rum bourbon rye cognac whatever you get better value for money
simple as that and um this particular subject i'm going to cover in a wee bit more detail about
keeping whiskey long term because it's not that long ago where someone would
open a bottle of whiskey and it would be finished within one night one week one month
and maybe someone who only brought out a whiskey for visitors and special occasions
would keep a bottle a couple of years and those that got a wee drop from that bottle
would come in and how marvelous it was for the simple reason that it had been left alone
not shaken not battered about stored away from sunlight in a cocktail cabinet or dark cupboard
somewhere possibly even the kitchen uh it was ignored and um so the oxidate oxidization of the
whiskey was happening at a slow and measured pace particularly when there was still a decent amount
of spirit in the bottle but um eventually it would just flatten off i mean i've had whiskeys and bars
which have been under bright spotlights and i've just been curious it's not happened very often i
might add but there's been a few weed drops left in a bottle of single malt that's been sitting
there for several years so i bought a wee dram and i have to say it had oxidized out completely so
what happens is eventually the favor the flavor and the taste the flavor smell the flavor and
the taste once you've got the spinach in the glass starts to show signs of diminishing fading turning
ghost-like um losing its potency into stating tasting a little two-dimensional and flat a little
bit malty without much complexity despite the fact that the alcoholic strength is still intact
now i know i hear you you may be saying hey ralphie how do you know that the bar's not sort
of just topped up these wee empty bottles with some half blend half single malt um well you're
right um many whiskey drinkers couldn't tell can't tell um when i was working in a bar briefly um
it was known that one of the other bar men was cutting the blended whiskey to make up margin
but it wasn't happening to the malts they never touched the malts because they knew that malt
drinkers would spot it even if they didn't but that was the kind of culture in the old days
now you've got people who open a bottle and say this is a particular interesting version of this
for the year in which it was bottled and the decade in which it was produced
i want to keep this in my library i'm not going to finish the bottle i'm going to have
rather than open one bottle and drink it all till it's finished and then open another bottle
it's a regular situation mom makes where people have had fifth have 15 20 up to even 50 bottles
of whiskey another quality spinach open at the one time and are just going slowly through the
different bottles depending on how the mood takes them i've done it myself i still do it myself
and it's great because you're constantly getting your palate challenged by the diversity
of signature styles smells tastes profiles forms and sensations
that single moths can deliver the whole cavalcade of experience of smell and taste is second to none
it really is there's nothing else comes close bourbon is great but there's far less
diversity of flavour and bourbon than there is in scotch and nobody's going to quibble with that
so there's a number of options to keep in your bottle once you've opened it here's a here's a
bottle of um glen liver that opened last year so it's down at a full level now that tells me that
i don't i could get away with a few months but a few years it's not going to happen so there's
a number of options available to me one i can get hold of a smaller bottle right and decant into it
or a smaller bottle yet or a smaller bottle yet
because we collect bottles we're bottle collectors all shapes and sizes and we can decant what's in
there into these other bottles when they're empty and rinsed and we're removing the oxygen volume
that's going to slow down significantly the oxidization of that malt something else we
can do before we move these out the way is get one of these wine saver little hand pumps
and suck there out of it but i can tell you right now they don't work they are
a very very very temporary solution so as you can see the cork snapped in this
never mind something else you can do is get something like private preserver
an inert gas that contains nitrogen carbon dioxide and argon argon i believe is the heaviest
and you can buy this in ebay and amazon and you simply it's like an aerosol a very soft
pressure aerosol you just pop the put the little like just like a wd-40 sprayer you got a little
plastic pipe pop in the bottle a couple of squishes the cork on and the inert gas
settles down displacing the oxygen in the gas in there in the air in there
meaning it isn't in contact with the whiskey i find from experience this really works there is
a debate that somehow the net gas can change the flavor of the whiskey but that is not my
experience so far i've kept a bottle of laphroaig 10 year old for over 12 years um completely intact
using neutral gas this is used quite often by some melees people in the wine business someone
in a restaurant for example or in their own home buys an expensive bottle of wine
it tends to oxidize very quickly once it's opened so they only have one last because it's precious
stuff and a small glass because it's a real tonic this is a very good way of preserving the wine
another way is granite granules seriously i don't have them i don't use them
but if you want to get that a little bit of minerality into your bottle of whiskey
you can put washed sand in or washed granite gravel or whatever you want marble you suppose
you could use that as well you could even use um glass marbles if you've got a wide enough bottle
neck pop them easy easy and cheap to buy and of course they look fascinating sitting there in
your bottle of whiskey another option which i use more and more frequently is because i very rarely
finish a whiskey very rarely these days i'll take a say a glen liver illicit still
which is filled up to there an independent bottle of glen liver they're both glen livet
he remains a single malt and from the smaller bottle i'll top up into
the higher fill level bottle so that fill level is now up to there
it's the same as if it was new
and the rest remainder of this
i can just pop into a small bottle and mark it
when you're buying small bottles glass bottles which are easy to source online
get ones with the wide tops make sure it's metal screw tops or corks and if it's wider than top
there's less chance of stuff spilling when you decant into it very easy to recycle and reuse
so i now have literally that left in the bottle which hey i'll just polish off
tonight then i'll have an empty bottle which is fine it'll go on the empty bottle shelf
if it's a real standard bottling i'll just put out the recycling bin but often i keep some of
the more exotic labels and more enjoyable whiskeys i just keep the empty bottles in a wine rack uh
and i'm a bit of a hoarder it's just the way it goes so these are techniques to help keep your
whiskey not just a few months or a few years but see this now this glenn livett i can mark on it
literally right on the label
plus about 20 centiliters 25 centiliters of sig limit
or seven
let's mark it on the label
or alternatively you can actually get like luggage labels and bits of string and tag them
for presentation i hope you find this useful i'm briefly going to
mention a subject for a future um extras and that is how long can we keep whiskey in our library and
by library i'm not talking about book library i'm talking about the fact this time goes on as people
explore infinity bottles for example like i have here this is my one goes back about 11 years i
think but now as people are much slower to drink whiskey because it's the it's the new cultural
norm people don't want to be getting drunk and then cancelled out in social media and people a
lot more people particularly younger generation don't want to be getting obviously drunk don't
mind being a bit tipsy but clearly not obviously drunk because it has impact on your health simple
as but i'll be talking about the reason why we would actually have and develop our own archive
of whiskey rather than drinking one whiskey after another because it means that there comes a point
that when we go to our archive we're going back in time and we're going on a history tour and smell
and taste and that's a very unique situation which nobody's ever thought about in the past
apart from the forward far-sighted distilleries that actually kept bottles of their own product
as archive references and it would surprise you amount of distilleries that don't
i'm rafi done for the moment you're wonderful you're beautiful you're
totally malt mates i'm ralphie in the bothy have a lovely lovely day bye bye