Compass Box - Just Ask

In the spring of 2016 Compass Box started a campaign for more transparency in Scotch whisky after they had to remove the full recipe of all components of two of their blends (you can read everything about that campaign here)

Fast forward half a year and not much  has changed and Compass Box has now ended their drive for more transparency for now.

But with the release of two new bottlings the company has also found a solution for their intent to provide the consumer all the information that they want. As difficult the problem seemed as simple is the solution: Just ask them. The regulations of the SWA forbid them to acticely promote another age statement than the youngest component of the blend. But if you just ask them by writing a mail or on social media they are free to provide you all the information they want to. 

I only see one problem and that is that you can't be 100% sure if the provided informations are true because I think what really matters, legally that is, are the informations on the label. Nevertheless I am sure that Compass Box won't provide wrong information or something but it's just the same as if you go to visit a distillery and they tell you something that isn't written on the label. You can only be 100% sure about the information on the label but Compass Box would also provide those information on the label if they could, wouldn't they?

The new releases are a blended malt called "Three Years Deluxe" which is a perfect example of the problem with current regulations. The blend contains 0.4% 3yo malt whisky produced near the village of Brora (it must be Clynelish), 90.3% malt whisky from the same distillry, but "considerably older" and 9.3% malt whisky from the Isle of Skye (Talisker).

The other new release is a blended malt called "Spice Tree Extravaganza" which marks 10 years since the inaugural version of the Spice Tree had to be discontinued because of the use of inner staves made of a special French oak. A second version of the Spice Tree was released later that used the same oak as cask heads. The Extravaganza comes at 46% ABV and contains older components than the core range and also has some Sherry influence. 

If you want to know the ages of the components go and ask them

Slainte, U

Scotch Whisky Transparency

Hey everyone. You may or may not have heard about it but a week ago Glasgow based blending company Compass Box have launched a campaign for more transparency in Scotch whisky. Those of you who are up to date of what’s happening in the world of whisky may wonder why I publish this article now when the campaign started last week and there have been several articles about it. That has different reasons. The first reason is that I am just amazingly lazy and as a student a natural born procrastinator J. The second and more serious reason is that I didn’t want that important topic to be hot for a moment with thousands of articles being written about it and a few days later everyone forgetting about it. The truth is that I started writing on this article just when the campaign started and waited until now to try and keep the topic hot. I think this is a great campaign that is worth supporting so I will explain the background to you.

It all started in October 2015 when Compass Box released two limited editions; Flaming Heart 5^th edition and “This is not a luxury whisky”. The special thing about those two releases was that Compass Box decided to publish the whole recipe of the blends.

This action earned them a lot of compliments from all over the whisky world because it was full transparency which was really nice if you think about all those NAS (no age statement) whiskies that are released at the moment.