Whisky Discovery #159

Tormore 12 Year Old (40% abv, OB,)
Speyside Single Malt
Circa £25.00 70cl

I'd not heard of Tormore until my daughter Kat brought a bottle round the other evening, it was her latest purchase in her own whisky journey. I immediately ran a search on Tormore to see if they were a distillery, and then checked them out in my copy of the Malt Whisky Yearbook. 

As soon as I tweeted about tasting it that evening I immediately received a few tweets letting me know that it had been seen for sale in Morrisons, so either it is making an effort to enter the Single Malt shelves of the supermarket or there was a lot of slow moving stock that some supermarket buyer got for a song.

The distillery must be one of Speysides most recent distilleries being founded in 1958 and I read was originally set up to produce malt whisky for the then owners of Long John. 

Its water source is the Achvochkie Burn and the distillery building is made of granite and has a copper roof and a clock which plays four different Scottish songs each quarter of an hour! The distillery is currently owned by Chivas Brothers and this 12 year old is currently the only official  bottling from the distillery, first introduced in 2004 There is no Tormore website which is unusual for a single malt these days and further internet trawling hinted that this whisky may soon be discontinued. 

So what did I think?

To be honest I was pleasantly surprised by this light and fresh Speysider. I was immediately reminded of Balvenie Doublewood when first nosing it, and poured myself a dram of this to compare. It is a little similar, but once alongside each other there was a noticeable difference.

On the nose there are fresh meadow notes, cut hay and stemmy grass, heather and a little sweet honey. It was very smooth on the palate, light, citrus and a little honeyed sweetness. Not a challenging dram, but quite charming in it's own right. Not sure I would rush out to buy myself a bottle of this, there are lots of 12 year old whiskies that I would prefer over this, but it's certainly not offensive.