The Deanston 12 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes:
In the glass, the Deanston 12 is reminiscent of Goldschläger, but with a much less desirable particulate matter swept into a Brownian motion trance dance: think grade-school planaria experiments unattended during a long holiday, or remnants of a recently-flushed bus station toilet.  Unfortunately, the visual impressions are a presage of the conspicuously-imbalanced tastes that follow.  Sour, bitter, and salty, but unlike the Trinity, these are not harmoniously joined into one.  Neither do they redeem.  On the contrary, think of Sourpatch Kids candies used to absorb messes on a shop floor, or salted pomegranate pith candied in paregoric, or buried barrels of bleach and anthrax on Vozrozhdeniya Island. Briny?  Yes, but closer to Briony Tallis in the breadth and depth of misery it visits upon innocents. 
 

Rating:

--On the scale of presocratic fragments featuring alcoholic drinks--
The Deanston 12 is Heraclitus’ posset fragment (DK 125)--a mixture of wine, barley, and cottage cheese, “the posset separates unless it is stirred.”  We found it helps to close your eyes and pinch your nose.
 

                                                                                     --John
  

The Bowmore 12 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes:*
Hits the nose like bacon frying in a cast iron skillet, which is to say:  the aroma that wafts out from the opening of the pearly gates as you leave purgatory. Seaweed limns the nose, like the chiaroscuro highlights of a Rembrandt painting, and makes way for the hot ceramic olfactory emissions of mesquite charcoal, slow-cooking pork ribs in a Weber grill. (Clearly, now you are in heaven.)  After the skeleton of the superb structure climbs into your nostrils, the delight of the mouth is like the feeling of sinking into the supple leather seat of your Ferrari as you smoothly accelerate out the cobblestone driveway of Nicolas Sarkozy's chalet after an intimate soirée winds down (at least as best as I can imagine what that would feel like). Long finish like a curling stone being swept down the ice, and aftertastes sticking in the memory like Shaun White's nailing the Double McTwist 1260.
 

Rating:

--On the scale of infidelities to one's spouse--
The Bowmore 12 is what happens to Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby--It's demonic, it's procreative, it possesses you, there's nothing you can do about it, and there's no earthly reason to feel guilty. Sláinte!

                                                                                     --Bill

*--I've never met Stephen's father, but it's clear that his excellent taste in scotch is exceeded only by the silver tongue of his son, who talked his father out of such a wonderful dram.

 

The Balvenie 10 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes:*
Having once worked my way through a full-sized bottle of it and having applied it gingerly, though consistently and assiduously, as if it were a salve to my pain, approaching the Balvenie 10 now as a reviewer is like reconnecting with a high school flame at one's twenty-year class reunion (imagine you're not married).  Despite a beginning brimming with familiarity and schmaltz, it soon gives way to embarrassing fumbling towards which all present would be most merciful to turn a blind eye.  The middle loses its balance when confronted with the artificial mixture of scents and flavors, some introduced to mask others, much like Mint Vanilla Flavored Listerine™, even though the original was just fine as it was, despite its idiosyncratic and now slightly antiquated character.  Soon after the finish, there is the bitter aftermath, the bleak hours spent next to the former inamorata or inamorato, awash amid the detritus and decaying baggage of the middle-aged shipwreck that one's life has become.  Fortunately, as with such a tryst, the Balvenie 10 ultimately has an ally in human psychology:  after the maladroit valedictory, the thought asseverates itself, ineluctably and unmistakably, until it prevails as the ultimate arbitrament, "Ah well, I do still dig that label, though.  Man, I remember when I used to think that was simply the way a label on a bottle of scotch should be..."
 

Rating:

--On the scale of nostalgia-inducing items--
The Balvenie 10 is your high school yearbook--it reignites a solid set of memories, but it seems a world away from where you are now.  And it's got nothing on the 80's channel on satellite radio.

                                                                                     --Stephen

*--this bottle is the first of a nice batch of miniatures my father was good enough to allow me to take from his liquor cabinet and put toward the cause of the Malt Impostor.  Cheers, Dad, and thanks!

 

The Miltonduff 10 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes:
     What's in a name? A rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, but the Miltonduff by any other name wouldn't conjure images of a poet's keister as he sat squirming in a church pew, dreaming of the epic struggle between good and evil, eventually achieving enduring fame with Paradise Lost. Lambent, evanescent, and spicy: Perfumed--nay, censed, or crawling--with vanilla: A bottle of chardonnay gone missing from the warm climes of Napa Valley, crawling into a vat ensconced in Speyside? Swirling the malt, and holding the crystal goblet up to the light reveals legs; long, long, long legs as if a young Daryl Hannah were to be uncloaked as a sixteen-limbed spider prone to frequent whisky glasses. Disturbing? In the eye of the beholder.
     On the tongue, there is peat without smoke, which is certainly less lethal, if less interesting, than fire without smoke. One might indeed characterize the Miltonduff as Clay Aiken; a non-threatening entertainment option (admittedly, also in the eye of the beholder) that you'd trust with your 10 year old daughter. Pine in the sun, leather cleanser, but not as earthy as Moises Alou's or Jorge Posada's urine drenched mitts. Nice and round, like a baseball, or any other orb, for that matter; soft, fuzzy, and cooing like a tribble. Finishing with notes of maple syrup and exhaust fumes, as it runs out of gas.
 

Rating:

--On the scale of increasingly surreal interviews--
The Miltonduff 10 is NBC's milking and milking Lindsey Vonn after her gold medal run in the Women's Downhill--The first question struck pure gold:  Vonn weeping, saying she gave up everything for this, and finally achieved it.  Then, seeming to surprise her, more questions, and when the interviewer couldn't dredge up a gram of lead slag or even a dollop of garden manure, what did NBC do?  Send in her husband, wired for sound like he was an FBI informer, telling her over and over that she did good.  Wow, that was some seriously awful stuff.

                                                                                     --Bill

The Speyburn 10 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes: 

     Wine-dark sea, glancing-eyed Athena…  

These memorable epithets in Homer lead us to consider the variety of terms for expressing color perception in Greek.  What we find is unexpected: instead of the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue), the Archaic Greeks had four (black, white, greenish yellow and purply red).  And instead of organizing the domain of color perception in term of hue, the Greeks seem equally to have appealed to other properties of colors: their texture, depth, reflectiveness, and so forth.  What else explains how the same color term could be applied to honey and blood, or to sheep and the ocean?  These puzzles lead some scholars to conclude that the Archaic Greeks had not yet developed the capacity to discern color in the way moderns, with their 64-color crayon boxes, or Benjamin Moore paint wheels, take for granted.  Others suggest that the brilliant Mediterranean sun flattened out the chromatic spectrum, making shininess and opacity stand out.  And still others note that poets, in particular, sought to convey symbolic meaning in their color terms.  But I prefer to think that the Greeks simply found it more interesting to organize the visual perception of the world achromatically and willfully rejected the color spectrum we are more familiar with.  In like manner, what if we could reorganize our perception of taste, eschewing the traditional basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter and even such newcomers as piquance, and savoriness?  In effecting this sensible sea change, wholly new experiences await us.  Thus, the Speyburn 10 tastes of the vibrations of a didgeridoo pushing up waves across the surface of a liquid mercury lollipop, cresting onto ricotta cheese foot massages, and crashing over hand-twisted paperclips on a tipped cookie sheet.  

Rating:

--On the scale of jokes by 80's comic Steven Wright--
The Speyburn 10 is "My socks do match.  They're the same thickness."--much less random than "The girl I'm seeing now, Rachel, is a very pretty girl.  She has emerald eyes and long, flowing plaid hair," but less plainly witty than "I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five."  

                                                                                     --John