Wullie & Gerie MacMorland When you are alive and breathing in the Netherlands and are in one form or the other enthusiastic about whisky and passionate about good food, there is a good chance you have heard about Wullie MacMorland from Hielander Scottish Restaurant in Alkmaar. Besides running the restaurant & whisky bar, he is…
Category: Tastings
Smokes on the water of life, and a bottle of rum
We have been to several festivals in the Netherlands and love finding new festivals to go to and discover. At most events we find the same tables and selections of whiskies, and the only difference seems to be a bigger or smaller location. After a while, there is less and less to discover whisky-wise, and…
Maltstock 2015
Warning This lengthy article covers many of the relaxed events happening at Maltstock 2015. It may cause a relaxed jealousy, start you (relaxedly) drinking whisky or trigger uncontrolled (but very relaxed) urges to purchase relaxed tickets for the next edition (here) After the 2014 event, we (as everybody else) were offered a €25,- discount per…
The Sleeping Beauty..?
You know the feeling when starting something and just not getting it to complete satisfaction? It just seems not to “do” what you want it to “do”? For us, this happened to what we experienced the morning after the Benelux release of “the Beast of Dufftown” in Brussels, where we had a chat with…
#WhiskyFabric Gathering – Feis Ile 2015
Plans for the Feis Ile 2015 festivities were made over a year before, where online chats began about the 200th year celebrations of Ardbeg and Laphroaig and how cool it would be to be able to meet all of the #WhiskyFabric people on Islay. Most people we had met only online so far, and we…
the Beast of Dufftown
Over the past few years, we have tasted our fair share of Mortlach whiskies, and except for the rare Diageo bottlings, most of them were only available from independent bottlers, and most of the ones we have tasted we in private collections other than our own (hence the lack of proper notes). Times change; Diageo announced mid…
The Speyside Incident
This is what we called it amongst ourselves for the last year because the Police had asked us not to talk about the incident online (close to impossible for bloggers, we tell ya) until the perpetrator was caught, and here is our breaking news from earlier today: Ladies and Gentlemen: they’ve got ‘em! The guy…
Benromach – touch, feel, smell and experience…
Recently we received a set of samples from the Benromach Distillery, their lovely 10 years old and the Organic 2008. The 10 years old consists of whisky from 80% ex-Bourbon barrels, 20% ex-Sherry hogsheads and had a final finishing year in first fill ex-Oloroso casks. The Organic 2008 is a certified Organic whisky from…
A Sensory trip through the Seasons with Martine Nouet
After an amazing 10 course opening dinner we told you all about in an earlier post, we had some more food and whisky combinations during the Whisky Festival Noord Nederland. We were lucky enough to have obtained tickets to another of Martine Nouet‘s masterclass where she paired eight different bites – four sweet and four…
WFNN 2015 opening dinner
The earlier mentioned WFNN tenth anniversary opening dinner was in one word; fantastic. As we might have hinted on some occasions, we are experimenting with food and whisky for some time already, in order to find what fits well in combination with one another. We got tipped that the organisation had planned a ten-course…
Ten years old
In Groningen, up North in the Netherlands, the Whisky Festival Noord Nederland (WFNN) has celebrated its tenth anniversary. Because we have been regular visitors to this festival and always had fun, we decided to dig deep into our pockets, and have them entertain us during this extra-special edition from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon….
whisky and food pairing
Late March 2015, Spring has just begun and we were invited to a whisky and food pairing in our own city of Almere, the Netherlands. Almere does not have a rich history of whisky (nor, for that matter, a history at all), but the organisers had managed to get about 25 people together in…
WhiskySpeller 