Balvenie distillery

The shape is also similar to

Balvenie.

It's just not a clear

glass.

But you would think that the flavor...

But

look at all the other ones, like the Balvenie Portwood.

I know it's only 21, it's not 30, but...

Let's get into this because, I mean, it's fascinating, right? You and I were digging into all the stories that we've got around about distilleries, about what they talk about, what's happened with us.

But the first one I want to jump into where I've actually got a personal experience of this is, is at Balvenie.

When we look at the history of Balvenie, William Grant buys New Balvenie House, right? And the previous owner of New Balvenie House, story goes that he just had it for his mistress.

No one knew who this mistress was, but she lived in the house by herself.

We then find out that she killed herself in New Balvenie House.

Now, what William Grant did was he takes the two top floors off this house and turns it into the Balvenie Distillery.

So now there are stories from the guys who work there about this green lady that goes around the maltings.

And some of the theories are that because the maltings, you know, she doesn't understand that The two floors were taken off, so she doesn't understand the levels and she's kind of walking about all confused.

I've decided I'm going to start getting back into scotch a little bit, cut down on my beer intake.

So tonight I have the Balvenie 15-Year.

Uh, single malt scotch whiskey from, uh, well from Belveny, um, distillery, which is, I should know the regions by now and I don't.

Um, but I'll look it up later.

That's an entirely different discussion for another time.

Well, like Mike, I decided to grab myself a scotch tonight.

So I am drinking from the Avalor distillery, which is just apparently down the road from Balvenie because they're both Speysides.

12-year-old Avalor single malt scotch, and it tastes like this.

It's kind of nice.

A little bit like Balvenie, a little squat, you know.

Beautiful color right off the bat.

I don't know if they add color on this one, I suppose.

But Sam has always been someone who likes to challenge convention and that's exactly why I love having him back on the show.

So we're gonna catch up with my good friend because we go back a long time back to the US and my William Grant and son's days when he was the Balvenie ambassador and I was the Glenfinnick ambassador.

So Sam, welcome back to the podcast, mate.

Can you believe it's been five years to the day? No, is that a happy accident or did you see that coming? No, when I was putting together notes for this last night, I was like, holy shit, when was the last time we had Sam on? And I looked at it and I'm literally like, that was unbelievable.

Yeah, I just remember sitting down with you in Vegas once and you're like, do you know what I fancy right now? There's a Johnny Walker black label with a couple of ice cubes.

And I was like, yeah, that sounds fucking good.

That was the first time I had black label for fucking years because, you know, we were just drinking Balvenie and Glenfiddich all the time.

I was like, I just remember thinking like, this is just quite refreshing right now.

I'm like, the problem is that Drambuie is sickeningly sweet.

taking like a Balvenie or Glenfiddich and then adding a honey whiskey liqueur is going to, you know, it's going to give you diabetes.

It's a so damn sweet.

The whole thing was when it was well made, you know, the old school bartenders would know.