Day 6 – Whisky in the Rain
Tuesday, 17.07.2018
Today I wanted to explore a somewhat bigger region again. But not before paying a visit to the nearby distillery. So first I went to Clynelish (pronounced klain-lisch, not klinellisch if I understood correctly), a rather unknown Dingle Malt brand. The simple reason for that is that this brand is part of the biggest conglomerate of Whisky distilleries in exitence at the moment, the Diageo group. With that Clynelish delivers 95% of their spirits to Johnny Walker. Accordingly the tour was rather unsurprising, with one exception. The brand Brora was completely unknown to me, maybe I had read about it in a side note, but it didn’t seem relevant. As it turned out, Clynelish was built on the same grounds as the old Brora distillery, which closed only in 1983. Their old Whiskies were seemingly that good and sought after that the last of their bottlings are calling up prices similar to Port Ellen. Because while Clynelish shows rather mild, balanced character with notes of pineapple, so as not to disturb the bigger impression of JW blends, Brora was the opposite. Smoky, salty, a lot of character how it should be with a northern Highland Whisky. The good news is that Brora will reopen around 2020. The bad news on the other hand is that we’ll have to wait until 2034 or so to be able to do a tasting.
Speaking of tasting. Of course we could taste a couple of drams after the tour. We had one 14 year old Clynelish Single Malt, a distillery only bottling without age mention and one JW Gold Reserve. The JW was named as such because of a gold-rush last century in the hills above Clynelish. Where rush here means flakes, not nuggets. Anyway, none of the three whiskies could convince me, everything was too much “Mainstream” to fit into the JW line. And no worries, I didn’t drink the three drams before I had to drive again, we could fill them into small containers. I won’t go into detail on how I think these containers looked like, I leave that to the observer.
After this warm-up I wanted to get back to nature for a change and find out what it’s all about the Forsinard flows of the RSPB (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Sadly it started to rain pretty soon, one of those persistent and annoying country rains again, which are just too much to drive without rain-overalls. Stopping and walking was not a good idea either. I had a raincoat with me, but the rai was that nasty that everything else would have been soaked in no time. So I clenched my teeth and rode on. From the road you couldn’t really see too much of the nature reserve, but I got some nice views of the rivers that go along this route. My goal was to reach the north coast, go to Thurso and the A9 and return that way to the B&B. The drive then was without further incident, but the rain-overall stayed on until the very end.
Today the route again, it totalled 193km in the end.