- Joined
- Tuesday May 22, 2012
- Location
- Cumbria, England
Has anyone tried this stuff? It goes for £46 a bottle which puts it into the fairly serious malt bracket, I'd been curious to try it as it got a lot of press, albeit mostly bad. Anyhoo, Asda had miniatures so I thought I'd give it a go.
It has quite a bit of colour in the glass which I suspect to be largely thanks to E150. There is no nose of which to speak, it just smells like alcohol. It will come as no surprise then that the mouthfeel is thin and that there is very little flavour, mostly just rough alcohol with some grain sweetness and then a very mild whisky flavour. Essentially it tastes like cheap vodka with a spoonful of Bells in it. The development is non-existant, as is the finish, which in this case is a mercy. Oddly for such a thin and flavourless liquid it was still pretty rough on the way down, again like cheap vodka.
Even though it was a £3 miniature I was too tight to just throw it out, so I decided to see if it could be salvaged by blending, and dropped some Laphroaig into it. (About 1/4 of what was in the glass.) This totally dominated it and left it tasting, well, pretty much like Laphroaig. This rendered it drinkable. In the interests of experimentation I also added some Whyte and Mackay Special to see what would happen. This resulted in an entirely acceptable blend, although in retrospect it would have been better just with more Laphroaig in it. Further experimentation was scuppered by the fact that by now there was probably so little being contributed by the Haig it had become irrelevant.
To sum up, Haig Club - don't buy it, it's shit.
It has quite a bit of colour in the glass which I suspect to be largely thanks to E150. There is no nose of which to speak, it just smells like alcohol. It will come as no surprise then that the mouthfeel is thin and that there is very little flavour, mostly just rough alcohol with some grain sweetness and then a very mild whisky flavour. Essentially it tastes like cheap vodka with a spoonful of Bells in it. The development is non-existant, as is the finish, which in this case is a mercy. Oddly for such a thin and flavourless liquid it was still pretty rough on the way down, again like cheap vodka.
Even though it was a £3 miniature I was too tight to just throw it out, so I decided to see if it could be salvaged by blending, and dropped some Laphroaig into it. (About 1/4 of what was in the glass.) This totally dominated it and left it tasting, well, pretty much like Laphroaig. This rendered it drinkable. In the interests of experimentation I also added some Whyte and Mackay Special to see what would happen. This resulted in an entirely acceptable blend, although in retrospect it would have been better just with more Laphroaig in it. Further experimentation was scuppered by the fact that by now there was probably so little being contributed by the Haig it had become irrelevant.
To sum up, Haig Club - don't buy it, it's shit.
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