The Balvenie Single Barrel First Fill 12 Year Review

Maybe it was said and maybe it wasn’t, but either way, the statement remains incredibly righteous. “Only the white man’s leaders,” the old Indian chief observed, “would cut from the top of the blanket and sew it to the bottom and believe he’s made it longer.”

Daylight Savings Time is a pestilence upon this land. It’s a pall of demonic blackness that chafes life’s skin, relentlessly shearing away until the emotional nerves are exposed and the mind is alight with disorienting misfires of confusion, pain, sorrow, and general frustration.

What good is it? What does it accomplish? I’ll tell you what it accomplishes—nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. It is the crowning blueprint for ushering in death and destruction. Over the course of the three days that follow the clock’s change, heart attacks increase by 24%. Strokes increase in tandem. Automobile accidents and incidents of road rage rise dramatically. Bouts of depression are triggered. And with this, I dare you to try something. I dare you to set yourself into the perilous den of a family with small children. Just ask the parents what blessings are bestowed by the hands of this vile scourge. My wager is that they won’t even answer you. They’ll just kill you and feed you to the cranky little beasties whose body clocks are so terribly misaligned that they’re tummies are growling while at the same time they’re trying to figure out why they have to go to bed when they’re not even tired.

Daylight Savings Time is of the devil and should be wholly shunned by humankind, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the fall or the spring—whether you gain or lose an hour—by it there is only suffering.

The blanket isn’t longer, folks. It’s just being used to smother us.

It has to be Daylight Savings Time that would make me tap the following on my keyboard. It has to be this stirred animus that would cause me to utter these words: I didn’t like this edition from The Balvenie.

I can’t believe I would ever say such a thing. Can you?

I love The Balvenie. I’ve never been betrayed by a single dram poured from this Dufftown bloom. But the Single Barrel First Fill 12-year-old, unfortunately, didn’t seem all that great.

The nose is pleasant enough, promising sugared barley and butterscotch. But with the first sip, the whisky has an initial bitterness that confuses the palate and makes discerning its other contours a challenging endeavor. Another sip—readied, this time—reveals oak, sour citrus, and vanilla beans. Not vanilla, but vanilla beans. You’re sucking on unwashed vanilla bean stalks.

The finish hovers at the edge of medium to long. There’s an aftertaste of oak that I normally wouldn’t mind so much, but here it’s a little too sharp.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood.

I hate Daylight Savings Time. Whoever came up with the idea should be sentenced to one 24-hour period in prison, except at the 59^th minute of every 23^rd hour, we should inform him that we’re setting the clock back an hour to save him some time.