Here on the site, I’ve mentioned bottles that seem to linger for the better part of an eternity. If you know something is good and costly, it’s hard enough to drink it at all, let alone drink the bottle down to nothingness. Again, if you’re an aficionado of spirits, you just may find yourself with whatever space you’ve allocated to the “good stuff” cluttered with bottles that are 15 to 30% full.
As one might imagine, I’ve had a lot of bottles linger in the time I’ve written for this site and even before Spirit Animal launched its maiden reviews. No bottle, however, lasted on my shelf for as long as the Bowmore 12 did. And the reason was simple: I really didn’t know if I liked this stuff.
As I was sketching out my initial thoughts for the Bowmore 12, I remembered an acquaintance of mine long ago: a goofy guy named Jaron who was always an iconoclast. Jaron had suddenly reached the age of 21 and decided that damn it, he was going to develop a taste for Scotch and appreciate it. I remember once we were over at his place and he brought out what I’m pretty sure was some variety of Johnnie Walker. “Try it,” he urged. “It’s like drinking the Scottish Countryside.”
At that time, whatever Scotch Jaron poured for me was bracing. I wanted to become an instant convert, but it was just too much. (Swallowing 40-proof liquor like it was Coca-cola also probably didn’t help.) It burned going down and my mouth was filled with smoke and oak in equal measure.
A couple years passed and I began to accumulate some knowledge of whisky, at least as far as it could be culled from pop culture. I knew Islay was the place for the sophisticates, so at the age of maybe 23 or 24 and with a few six-packs of beer already in my cart at BevMo, my eyes landed on a bottle of Bowmore 12. “I think I’m probably old enough and wise enough to appreciate this now,” I said to myself.
To which me, at 41, would utter “LOL.”
“Bowmore 12’s biggest plus is that it provides a veritable smorgasbord of flavors. It’s malty and honeyed, with no shortage of fruit.”
It took until the end of my twenties before I genuinely loved whisky, and I think my bottle of Bowmore 12 finally kicked somewhere around that time. Even as I began to write for Spirit Animal, Bowmore 12 stood in my mind as this crazy bracing, mega peated scotch that was simply unapproachable. It always seemed too smoky and too hot—perpetually ready to push me and my tastebuds down onto the blacktop like a bored grade school bully.
On a lark, I tried it again this year, and I was reminded of a Mark Twain quote, which I’ll paraphrase here: “When I was sixteen, I thought my parents were idiots. When I was twenty one, I was surprised how much they had learned in only five years.”
The TL;DR of the above (i.e., “too long, didn’t read”) is this: don’t make Bowmore 12 your first scotch. It’s not Laphroaig in terms of kicking the front door down with peat, but it’s still unquestionably a lot for anyone not acclimated to the taste.
Warning labels aside, let me now talk to you like this isn’t your first trip on the merry-go-round of peated scotch. Bowmore has always been the “odd man out” on Islay—it even lacks Bunnahabhain’s reputation of being distinctive for not using peat. Bowmore’s lack of prestige is somewhat unfortunate, and not wholly the distiller’s fault. If anything, I’d say that what they put out is somewhere between Highland Park and Ardbeg in terms of character and peat content. It has the sweet-and-smoky nature of Highland Park, and the gentle salinity of Ardbeg. Unfortunately, it falls into a middle ground of offering more peat than the intermediate wants to deal with, though less than the peat heads demand.
Personally, I found meeting the whisky on its own terms made for a quality experience. If anything, I greatly misunderstood Bowmore 12 when I had it years ago. Much to my surprise, there’s a lot going on here, and the smoke ties everything together rather than constantly trying to steal the show.
I think the Bowmore 12’s biggest plus is that it provides a veritable smorgasbord of flavors. It’s malty and honeyed, with no shortage of fruit. I teased out plum, Asian pear, date, and honeydew melon over the course of a couple evenings. But there’s also an umami flavor that works well with the smoke, such as beef brisket and miso. Combine them together, and it’s highly reminiscent of glazed, barbecued meats.
With all of that kept in mind, you might return to the nose to find once again that there’s a lot happening beyond the peat. There’s even more fruit in the form of bananas and papayas, but I was surprised to find that what I first smelled as smoke was really closer to roasted nuts and burnt toast via later sips. It’s frankly hard to find this kind of complexity at the $60 level.
If there’s a clear point where Bowmore 12 joins the company of its Islay brothers, it’s in the finish. Going down, the spirit reminds you it was made very close to the ocean, with a briny, shellfish-adjacent aftertaste combined with some of the nice bits from the aroma and development, like caramel and pistachio. It’s intriguing from start to finish.
If there’s a knock I know some people might not be able to get over, it’s the strength of 40% ABV, which at least as far as my memory goes makes it the weakest of all the introductory-level Islay malts. I don’t see this as a mortal flaw: there’s enough multidimensional flavor here for me not to feel like the Bowmore 12 absolutely needs the extra volume, but I realize this quality makes it harder to sell to the dudes who always have a bottle of Laphroaig 10 or Lagavulin 16 on the shelf.
I’d also add this is one of those chimera-like spirits that takes you on a ride, has a lot to share, and reveals multiple layers from sip to sip. Still, there’s something I find just a bit lacking when it comes to clarity or cohesiveness of flavor. It all works, but it’s not something I want to dig into every week, nor something I think I’ll crave when this bottle kicks. (Admittedly, that’s going to be much sooner than the time it took the last bottle to expire, now that I can actually say I like it.)
In any case, reapproaching Bowmore 12 was very much like the time I ran into an old high school teacher decades later. It didn’t feel weird to call him by his first name and reminisce, and it was great to just enjoy his company without any kind of power dynamic in place.
At the end of the day, this is a surprisingly gentle Islay scotch. Clearly, the island is big enough to provide space for a quieter alternative to its best known malts, and I’d argue this is one the experts should certainly try. It’s a whisky that’s absolutely worth knowing.
