My most memorable experience with Glenlivet 18 started with the image above. Some work friends and I secured the company’s beach house for a day and a half of remote working and relaxation. We arrived at about 3 p.m. on a Thursday and by 1 am that bottle was killed by the 3 whisky drinkers in the house. We got to know a lot about each other by the end of that trip, but I also got to know this whisky as well.
I use Evernote to write all of my reviews and also to keep notes “in the field” when I don’t have one of my physical notebooks with me and here at the beach house was no exception. Everyone at the house knew that I’m a whiskey nerd and they paid no mind while I took my time and dissected my first glass to really hone in on the key characteristics and record them on my phone. Though unlike 99.9% of the whisky I taste and drink we went through the entire bottle in one night, which presented a unique opportunity.
Through the day and into the night I kept track of newly discovered nuances in flavor and shifting aromas as the whisky blended with the day and then the night. The first post-review dram accompanied a cavalcade of work emails and follow-up drams mixing with dinner and evening festivities of Cards Against Humanity and beer pong. It all culminated in a 1 am dram on the beach-facing back porch while listening to the surf blindly crash into the shore. Looking at the notes it’s fun to see how the whisky evolved through all of this.
Overall the Glenlivet 18 is a great whisky and I have zero real complaints about it. It’s complex enough that if you want to sit on a porch on a beach at 1 am and get lost in the glass you can. It’s also so easy and approachable that it can easily pair with a great meal and an evening with friends. Tasty, balanced and well rounded it’s a great whisky for just about any occasion.
Glenlivet 18 Review
ABV: 43%
Price: $80
EYE
Golden hay
NOSE
Starts off very sweet with notes of caramel, citrus, cherry heavy dark fruit, agave and a sugary malt. As we progressed through the bottle the citrus became more orange like and floral notes began expressing themselves more fully. By the last dram some interesting notes of orchard fruit, almonds and a bit of leather began to appear, but they weren’t very heavy.
TASTE
Caramel, malt, honey, orchard fruit and an intense, almost cloying, sweetness dominated the initial flavor. After a while the orchard fruit started to define itself more as a peach like flavor and some bits of oak and baking spices began to appear. In the last dram of the bottle the orchard fruit had died off a bit, but the honey, malt and oak had become much more dominant and mixed with some arriving notes of cinnamon.
BALANCE, BODY & FEEL
A well balanced dram with a medium body and a light effortless feel to it. The combination of the light silky feel and sweet flavors make it far too easy to kill a bottle in a night with some friends.
FINISH
A long finish that started out with caramel, honey and a sherry like sweetness that faded to oak. As the night, and bottle, progressed it took on a bit more of a peach and apricot fruit quality to it, but the oak stayed true. By the end of the night it had come back around to caramel, honey and oak with some sweet raisiny notes.
SCORE: 89/100
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Glenlivet 18: Empty Bottle Reflections (7-10-14 update)
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Well, I might as well do this here and now since the bottle is already gone. I don’t really have much in the way of notes about my final thoughts on this bottle because by the time we were having the last drams of the bottle on the porch somewhere around 1 am I was not all there. Drunk one might say, though not sloppy by any means. The days of drunken orangutan behavior and large scale over consumption are gone along with my early 20′s.
We were still hanging out on the porch having conversations about work and things of no consequence to anyone besides us when I made my final entry in Evernote. The entry reads exactly like this “goood buy again atrnadura” which I can safely interpret as I thought it was good and I wanted to buy again, but only after I picked up a bottle of Nadurra. So there you have it. The Glenlivet 18 is a good whiskey that you can see some definite changes in as a night progresses, but you should also not neglect the Nadurra. Cheers!