4th Annual Whisky Fest

The 4th annual Victoria Whisky Festival was held over the 23, 24,25 of January at the Hotel Grand Pacific. This whisky fest featured spirits from Canada, USA, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and India, and featured several "Master's classes" as well as a VIP tasting and a consumer tasting.
While it is impossible to try everything at this festival, it is possible to put a pretty good dent in the line-up, provided that most of the malts are tasted and then the spit bucket is used.
One of the most interesting spirits at this festival were the 4.5 year old Indian single malts, Amrut.
http://www.amrutwhisky.co.uk/
Although Amrut has been producing spirits since 1948, they have recently released three different single malts. There is a regular strength single malt, a peated cask-strength single malt and an un-peated cask strength single malt. They are each produced using select Indian barley grown at the foot of the Himalayas, then carefully mashed and distilled in small batches. It is then matured in oak barrels in a unique tropical location, 3000 feet above sea level at Bangalore, the garden city of India.
Each one of the single malts was available to taste, and although each tastes young, there is much promise. My personal favourite was the un-peated cask-strength, but there was a nice balance between peat, smoke and soft fruit in the peated cask-strength. The regular strength single malt was also quite tasty, and semi-reminiscent of a nice Speyside malt- a little hint of sweetness, a little citrus and some slight sea-breeze. Quite well done.