In my last post I explained why you go to Whisky Live Tel Aviv: for the odd, unrepeatable Scottish drams that are rare to find in Israel. This time I want to turn the glass the other way. Because while I was busy hunting rare Speysides, it was the Israeli stands that kept pulling me back.
Legends Distillery:
Right at the start of the show I bumped into Alan Cohl, an architect by day and, more usefully for my afternoon, co-owner of Legends Distillery near Beit Shemesh. Legends has committed fully to the bourbon-style camp. I am genuinely impressed by ‘Slingshot’; a high-strength dram that drinks like a Speyside single malt wearing a bourbon’s clothes.
Alan poured me a healthy measure of Foxtail, their newest release. It is a three-grain mash of wheat, barley and corn at 45% ABV, available in two variants. It was a great way to start. And if you are on the lookout for something original that punches above its ABV, this is the bottle.
Pelter:
Pelter’s original premises were located inside their winery. In recent years, it has moved seriously into distillation, and not just whisky. I bought their 10-Year-Old last year, and that deserves its own post rather than a paragraph here.
What was on the table this time was the second batch of that 10-Year-Old, matured in first-fill bourbon casks and bottled at 57.8%. Absolutely delightful. And yet, if I’m honest, I preferred the first batch that I posses.
As for their praiseworthy 12-Year-Old, that is a conversation for another day.
Ruach: Neil Wasserman Widens the Range
It was great to catch up with Neil Wasserman of Ruach, whose Ascent bottling I’ve praised before. The range has widened since, and he had 3 new bottles open. At the top sat Genesis (50.7%ABV) , a vatting of seven casks, including first-fill ex-bourbon, ex-stout, ex-Scottish ale, an Israeli white port-style cask.
What made it exciting was how the flavour kept shifting: Just as you thought you’d placed it, something else arrived; fruit, then malt, then dark summer fruit, then winter fruit. It almost burnt the tongue early on, but a splash of water mellowed it into something sweet, with an Israeli red port cask rounding off the finish. At 900 shekels it isn’t cheap, and it’s limited enough to sell out.
Special mention too for Wilderness, 48%, from ex-bourbon and ex-Israeli port casks, which I totally enjoyed.
A Word for Arava
Before moving on, a quick detour south. My companion for the evening, Tony, bought a bottle of gin from the Arava Distillery. However, it slipped from his bag and smashed as we walked the hall. He went back to purchase a second. BUT, Arava replaced it on the spot at no extra charge. Kudos to them.
Yerushalmi’s Burnt Offering: The Night’s Surprise
Finally, over to Golani Distillery, based in the far north, which also has a stake in Yerushalmi Distillery down in the Beit Shemesh area. I’ll say upfront that I’m not a great fan of either house style generally. And by this stage my tongue was thoroughly worked over.
Nevertheless, I had not tried much peaty whisky and that is the core of the Yerushalmi range. Burnt Offering comes in at 55% ABV, peated to 55 ppm and is matured in a mix of new charred French oak and ex-beer barrels for around 4 years. Because of humidity, that is often the equivalent of a 6+ from Scotland.
On the nose, I find it a touch neutral with maybe some dark fruit and maybe a hint of cardamom. It’s on the tongue that it earns its place: peat and earth, black pepper, chocolate, and a spicy smoke that one critic, with some irony, has called smoky bacon. The finish is again a little soft, but the palate is what keeps pulling me back for another pour. I suspect the ex-beer barrels are doing something slightly odd, and slightly wonderful.
Given the state of my palate by then, I had half expected to miss the point entirely. Instead, the flavour came through, and it was something genuinely unusual.
That was one reason why I purchased a bottle. The other? Because 55 is the lucky number of my favourite blogger, Roy Duff. The silly things in life that turn us into consumers!
Milk & Honey: A Deliberate Skip, and a Look Ahead
You’ll notice I spent very little time at the Milk & Honey stand, one of the event’s key sponsors. That was deliberate as I wanted to save what was left of my palate for the things I hadn’t tried before. But their news is worth flagging. Milk & Honey now have barley growing on Kibbutz Be’eri, already a year into cask. This means we’ll start seeing Israeli whisky made from Israeli-barley in about three years.
The Takeaway
Walk the Israeli stands at Whisky Live now and the story isn’t “look, we make whisky too”. It’s the cask experimentation at Ruach, pricing confidence at 900 shekels a bottle. It’s the bourbons at Legends that taste like a single malt. Don’t forget peated surprises, whiskies matured at the lowest place on earth, and much more.. That’s a ‘maturing’ industry, and it bodes well for the future.
