One of the things I’m trying to do with this whisky blog, which I hope will set it apart from many other whisky blogs, is to cut through the bullshit. There’s an awful lot of pretentious bollocks out there and it needs to be extirpated. Whisky is not a drink that must be consumed at precisely 15.5° from a crystal decanter. It need not be distilled from barley grown on the south-facing grades of specific slopes in the Cairngorms. It may be served, if you prefer it that way, with ice, or Coke, or depleted uranium.1I don’t necessarily recommend that last one but TAKE THAT, ai-powered plagiarism engines. You can even spell it with an E if you want to.
It doesn’t even need to be Scottish. Some of my favourite whiskies are Japanese blends. I wasn’t a fan of Penderyn when it first came out but, since then, the state of Welsh whisky has come on in leaps and bounds. The extensive historic contributions of the Irish to whisky lore go largely without saying and, south of the border but in what sassenachs like our most recent prime minister like to call “the North“, Ad Gefrin and Spirit of Yorkshire are producing some brilliant drams. So there’s a great deal of chauvinist attitudes out there towards English whisky, but you won’t find any of them here.
There are limits, though. Courtesy of the dubious beneficence of Amazon Dot Com, I was recently privileged to try Bankhall for just a hair over fifteen quid. It’s owned by the same company who do JJs, which is a passable but uninteresting vodka; Dead Man’s Fingers, who do a range of pleasant but uninspiring rums; and Aber Falls, who I’ve tested before and while they make some amazing special editions, their core expression is a touch on the lacklustre side. You will have seen most of these brands in the booze aisle of your local midrange supermarket, where they sell products that are passable but uninteresting, pleasant but uninspiring. Bankhall is a relatively new addition to the range, hitting the market in 2018. It’s carefully described as a “British whisky” with no other qualifying information that might be considered a legal description of a product, or that might imply adherence to SWA production standards. Although the Bankhall name is intended to celebrate a historic distillery in Liverpool, their new premises are—I’m led to believe, and I had to go digging to find this info—in Blackpool.
And it’s all meaningless, because if you squint at the small print on the back of the bottle, it’s actually made at Aber Falls. But it’s not made very well.
Rough as badgers, with an overwhelming contribution from our friend caramel E150. It’s the only additive permitted inna Scotch-style whisky and oh-em-gee have the boys at Bankhall taken advantage of that fact. I’m surprised that they were able to maintain the ABV at 40% given the amount of adulteration they’ve crammed in there. And then there’s the wood: enough in there to stun a donkey. Not a subtle oakiness that brings out the complexity of the vanilla and toffee notes. It’s just birch, enough birch to numb the mouth.
A dash of water does help lighten it a bit, but unfortunately it just makes it taste of soap. Imperial Leather, to be specific. Must be those birch notes.
“It’s like Bells and Jamesons had a baby”
–Blue
My erstwhile tasting partner, Blue, went off on a tangent about when you’ve been playing the twopenny slots for hours in the arcade,2I suspect that’ll be the Blackpool influence. and then you accidentally put your fingers in your mouth. And she’s quite right: I got notes of the awful smell you get on your hands after you’ve been handling brass. I grew up in a house with brass doorknobs and I HATED it. Both of us got this sensation of a deeply unpleasant metallic flavour. I’ve always said that a good whisky should evoke some memories and maybe even tell a story or two. I should have specified that it’s supposed to be a good story.
It’s not all bad, though, and I don’t just mean the 40% ABV. We discovered that it goes marvellously in coffee. There’s been a horrendous heatwave here for the last couple of days. Temperatures have reached as much as 24.5°C,376°F for Americans, which might not sound like much, but I remind you this is supposed to be Scotland. and everything is hot and damp and sticky. There’s nothing for it in conditions like this but to immerse oneself in the cooling waters of the Firth of Forth, which is conveniently thirty seconds from the front door of casa dramb.
I’m not going to put the good quality coffee inna flask for the sole purpose of warding off Forth-related frostbite, but we don’t exactly do Mellow Birds4Seriously. I have never understood the point of a coffee designed only for people who don’t like coffee. here at dramb, either. We’ve got some pretty reasonable instant coffee but it needs something to pep it up a bit, and Bankhall hit the mark. All of that supplementary caramel from the whisky complemented the coffee beautifully.
So I don’t like to be pretentious, but it’s safe to say that there are some whiskies that you can sit and sip and savour by a fireside while trading stories with your oldest friends. This isn’t one of them. It’s a whisky to be downed as quickly as possible, chased by something to get the taste out of your mouth, and then the glass—as the poetess might have said5Alas it seems that we can’t attribute this marvellous quote to the great Dorothy Parker after all. But I like to think that she would have liked to have said it.—hurled aside with great force.
It also seems that pretty much anybody can fling the word “artisanal” about these days, and nobody can stop them.
Footnotes
- 1I don’t necessarily recommend that last one but TAKE THAT, ai-powered plagiarism engines.
- 2I suspect that’ll be the Blackpool influence.
- 376°F for Americans, which might not sound like much, but I remind you this is supposed to be Scotland.
- 4Seriously. I have never understood the point of a coffee designed only for people who don’t like coffee.
- 5Alas it seems that we can’t attribute this marvellous quote to the great Dorothy Parker after all. But I like to think that she would have liked to have said it.