Ailsa Bay - the first bottling

Ailsa Bay

Grant's owns 5 distilleries, The best known is Glenfiddich and Balvenie, but they also run Ailsa Bay, Kininvie and Girvan (Grain). Ailsa Bay is located at same place as the Girvan distillery. It is one of 8 operating malt whisky distilleries in the Lowlands, if not more, as new ones seems to open all the times these days!

Ailsa Bay is the big one, it has a capacity of 12 million LPA, more than twice of all the others combined. Ailsa Bay started production in 2007

According to the Malt Whisky Yearbook, 4 types of whiskyspirits are produced, and the aim for this whisky is more or less exclusively Grants blends

2 of these spirits are peated, MWY mention the heavy peated one as being 50ppm. As this is 21ppm as written on the bottle it must be the "lightly" peated version. 21ppm is similar to Bowmore if I have to class this with an Islay distillery

Also on the label is mentioned SPPM as being 11, and it means Sugar PPM, it must be a way to quantify the sweetness of the whisky. I don't know when SPPM is measured. PPM is measured in the barley, I suspect the SPPM is measured either in the spirit, or it could be in the whisky itself

Precision Distilling

Another new term for me is "Precision Distilling". It probably means everything is run by a computer, but my initial thought was that it could mean the stillman wasn't drunk when this was made

Here is my opinion of the whisky:

Ailsa Bay 48.9%

Quite peaty, sweet, oily, a little hot, a little sour socks youthness, but the body balances this out a bit. It is on the sweet side. Still too young for my taste, but I look forard to try some proper aged stuff from this distillery in the future. 

This Ailsa Bay reminds me of an oily version of a very young Ardbeg and this whisky could be popular with peatheads

Rating 78/100