Compass Box Asyla (70cl, 40%) ***sold***
Asyla was a rich and full flavoured blend containing nothing but whisky matured in first-fill bourbon casks. One of the company's earliest blends, this was a key part of the core range until it was discontinued in 2018 due to difficulties in sourcing the requisite whiskies.
The recipe for the blend varies from batch to batch, however it always consists of a 50:50 malt to grain ratio with the former usually being distilled in Speyside. Only first-fill American oak casks are used. This 2016 release contains malt from the villages of Alness and Longmorn...
Despite brands like Ballantine’s, Johnnie Walker and Chivas Regal remaining the best-selling Scotch whisky brands in the world, the blended Scotch category played second fiddle to the more fashionable single malt market in the second half of the 20th century. This remains largely true today, however in recent decades the perception of the blend has improved. The company at the forefront of this is Compass Box, founded in 2000 by John Glaser, a former marketing director for the Johnnie Walker brand. Their core range consists of The Spice Tree, The Peat Monster, Story of the Spaniard, Oak Cross and Hedonism blends, and they regularly produce limited editions as well. The company prides itself on its boundary-pushing approach to its creations, and on occasion, boundary-crossing creations, such as the original Spice Tree in 2005 which was banned by the Scotch Whisky Association for its use of suspended staves in casks. Despite investment from Bacardi in 2015, the company continues to push the envelope and rebel against tradition, most notably in its Scotch Whisky Transparency campaign, launched in 2016 following another disagreement with the SWA, this time about their detailed revealing of the recipes of their whiskies.