opinionated alchemist

This post is inspired by a post on Diffords Guide online . But even though, I have never really thought about calling a distillate "Botanical Spirit", I always thought, that there have to be a new category of spirits. It all began with the Sub Rosa Saffron and Tarragon vodka - sometime in 2011. I directly felt, that there is something "off" of calling those distillates vodka. Yes - there is flavored vodka - and mostly they are pretty simple and straight forward. However they already differ greatly from your classical pure vodka. However the Sub Rosa products were an even farther departure. Since then, there have been a lot of new products, which mostly go under the vodka moniker, but are more complex... there are also "quite old products" like the flavored Absolut vodkas. Some, like Citron or Mandrin can be easily called vodka - there is a reasonable delicate aroma of the respective aroma. Some others are so strongly aromatized, that vodka seems not t...

In my old blog, I posted a long time ago some common complaints, when it comes to spirit competitions: usually the spirit companies have to pay for their participation [so small companies usually don't compete], they have also to offer their product free of charge to the tasting panel. And to believe, that these competitions are independent, is analogue to the belief, that their is a tooth fairy. And then there are so many competitions [it is a lucrative business to do this competitions due to the participation fees] and usually there is no clear winners but a lot of gold medals, double gold medals [WTF is double gold??] as well as silver and bronze and so on. But even if everything would be utopian fair - there would be one point, which cannot be neglected: it is quite easy to judge a quality of spirit - but to make a ranking is almost impossible [at least not a fair ranking]. It becomes obvious, if you just take a rather small category: Scotch Single Malts: there is a grea...