Cragganmore 12 yo ('Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life)

Diageo owns 17 whisky distilleries, and have done a lot to market single malt whisky as a drink. This has had the effect of creating lots of different expressions of malt - single, blended and vatted - where once there were just mostly blends. I suppose Diageo deserve congratulations and thanks for this, but then they've closed Brora, Port Ellen and Rosebank. Big sins, and I'm not sure they're forgivable...

Anyway, Diageo's single malt marketing effort focuses on representing each whisky producing region by one or more "typical" ("Classic") malts. There are 12 Classic Malts, and Cragganmore is one of 4 representatives of the Speyside region.

The 12 yo is Cragganmore's flagship official bottling. It's nice and complex, and I think of it as somewhat atypical of Speyside malts. It's got a lot going on in it, for one thing, and to my palate there's an unfamiliar bitter thread running through it. Sometimes it's chocolate, sometimes it's coffee. It's also less fruity and creamy than many other Speysides. I thought it would be interesting therefore to try to offset the lack of creaminess by tasting this whisky alongside sweet milk-based products (which excludes cheese, unless someone is willing to give me some Norwegian gjetost?).

The Tasting Notebook says:

Cragganmore 12 yo (OB)

Single malt - Speyside

Golden

40% ABV

Nose: Chocolate, walnuts, malty beer, iodine, hints of apples, hints of raisins, hints of oak.

Mouthfeel: Light body, thin, quite watery.

Tasting: Bitter sweet. Peat, apples, glace cherries, leather, coffee, hints of metal polish, hints of smoke.

Finish: Long. Pineapples, spicy.

Here we go:

1. Yakult

Lactobacillus, fermented milk and whisky. The nutty, apple notes in the whisky change to orange and coc0nut. Hints of wet stones appear. The mouthfeel becomes harsh and hard, very chewy.

2. La Fermiere Yoghurt with Orange Flower Honey

These little pots are great for desserts. The Pretty Lady gets them at work. The combination is fantastic - the whisky displays notes of salt caramel, and the slight bitterness goes away, replaced by apples and honey. Very creamy and milky as you'd expect, but the tanginess of the yoghurt is surprisingly quite muted.

3. Hot milk toddy

This is something I've known about for ages but first had in China in 2004. Hot milk, honey and spirit - in this case Cragganmore 12 yo - a good night drink. Maybe it's the steamed milk, but the whisky suddenly tastes salty, and the bitterness comes through more clearly. Big whiffs of artificial scents now - new plastic, brown paper, tyre rubber. Very strange.

4. Dulce de leche

I'm doing something I used to get told off for when I was a kid - eating stuff straight out of a jar on a spoon. In this case it's milk toffee. Strange. I get the same saltiness as I did with the hot milk, but this time there's no bitterness. Instead I get coffee (very good with salt in it - like the stuff I once tasted in Egypt courtesy of a diver from Her Majesty's Navy), and a big hit of magic marker. It's not unpleasant.


The clear winner, of course, is the La Fermiere yoghurt pot. Light and tangy, with orange blossom honey in it, it complements the whisky perfectly. It's actually improved the spirit by replacing the slight bitter note with a milky, creamy taste and texture. Very nice indeed.