WHISKY REVIEWS, NEWS, HISTORY & FOLKLORE
A Distillery Full of Surprises…
A Scot on Scotch reviews Holyrood Ambir, a single malt Scotch whisky from Scotland’s capital city.
Holyrood is one of the most surprising of the new breed of distilleries to have arrived in Scotland over the last decade. It resides in an historic part of Edinburgh, home to Holyrood Park, the Scottish Parliament and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, otherwise known as the official residence of the Monarch in Scotland.
You might think a distillery setting up in such an area would lean heavily on the city’s significant tourist footfall. You might expect it to rely on traditional, tried and tested methods. Perhaps you’d expect marketing that drifts towards the twee – the shortbread tin image of Scotland, all tartan and antlers. You might imagine a low strength, inoffensive, mass-appeal whisky… but you would be wrong.
The team behind this distillery are determined to do things their own way. Whether it’s their restrained and contemporary bottle design and labels, or their insanely tall, narrow-necked pot stills, or their exploration of a vast amount of yeast strains, or their insistence on small batch, when-its-gone-its-gone, bottlings, or even their preference for unusual bottling strengths – Holyrood is a distillery unlike any other.
The pot stills are 23 foot high, which puts them close to the tallest in the land. They are also incredibly narrow and that should produce a very light, clean spirit. Prior to distillation, the production team are working with various barley strains, and different levels of roasting on the grain. They are experimenting with an incredible array of yeast strains including Brewers Yeasts, Distillers Yeasts and Wine Yeasts.
The founders of Holyrood Distillery also have an association with the Canadian Chapter of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society – a members club known for bottling single cask expressions – and that passion for limited releases has followed them to Edinburgh. They apparently have no intention of introducing a core range. Instead, the distillery will focus on limited releases, with each one offering something different from the last. It all combines to make an intriguing strategy and only time will tell if it’s a successful one.
Holyrood Ambir Review
Ambir is a showcase of the distillery’s experimentation with specialty malts. The whisky was distilled from Chocolate malt, Vienna malt, Crystal 240 and Caramalt. It was matured in both bourbon and oloroso casks and bottled at 49.8%.
Tasting notes: On first impression the nose presents like a light, grain-forward whisky with some gentle bourbon cask influence but when you probe a bit deeper, things get more interesting. You soon start to identify those toasted, chocolatey notes from the barley. It reminds of cocoa powder and caramel lattes. Moving onto the palate, it arrives with notes of honey and caramel before developing some woody spice around the sides of the tongue, and a touch of pepper in the middle. Then comes a warming chocolate note, wrapped up in some gentle wintery spice. The finish is drying with new oak.
Thoughts: I first sampled this dram as part of a Scottish Rogue online whisky tasting and it seemed a little underwhelming on that occasion but it’s not unusual for a subtle whisky to get lost in a packed tasting lineup. Revisiting Ambir for the purposes of this review, I found it much more interesting. There’s a touch of immaturity there but also more body than I would expect from that tall set of stills and the curiosities of the specialty malts come through well. Ultimately, however, it still feels like a bit of a sketch, a whisky created for the sake of creation, to see what would happen. There’s nothing wrong with that but I’d also like to see the team set out to make the very best whisky the distillery is capable of making – the definitive Holyrood – rather than everything being simply an interesting curiosity. Can a distillery, and / or whisky brand ever truly connect deeply with an audience if there’s no common thread running through their output? I’m not so sure.
Price: £64. It’s not too extreme a price, athough it’s also not particularly affordable either, especially given the youth of the spirit involved.
For more about Holyrood Distillery visit here
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