Blend Your Own Whisky - And Bottle It!

I grew up next to a distillery. The distillery man used to give our cat a wee thimbleful of whisky in a bowl of milk each day, resulting in one very happy, purry moggy with a slightly slurred miaow. Despite my childhood proximity to one of Scotland's finest purveyors of cat sedatives, I've never given much thought to how whisky blends are crafted. UNTIL NOW. Thanks to Master of Malt's Blend Your Own Whisky Kit, I'm beginning to fancy myself as a bit of a whisky alchemist.

For a very reasonable £49.95, this kit gives you everything you need to perfect your own blend at home. Eight little bottles of single malt and something described quite emphatically as 'very, very old grain whisky' provide the distinct flavours or notes for your blend. Four base whiskies make up the, um, base of your concoction. There's full instructions, of course, so that you're not just blindly pouring fine malts down your throat into your beaker willy-nilly. And then there's the Science Equipment Bit: Pipettes! Measuring cylinders! CONICAL FLASKS! You even get a crystal tasting glass so you can sip your samples in style, possibly while doing some sort of overblown Jilly Goolden-style sniffy thing.

But all that prancing about with pipettes is just the beginning of our journey, dear readers. Once you've hit upon a blend that rivals everything you've ever tasted, ever, it's time to bottle it. Oh yes - use Master of Malt's nifty Sciencey Slider Technology™ to input the quantities of each whisky you used in your perfect blend. 

Once you've done that, you can name your whisky (it occurs to me that I should have checked with the lovely folks at Master of Malt to see whether sweary whisky names are allowed. It is you lot we're talking about, after all) and order a full-size bottle. Your bottle will look just like this one, assuming your given name is indeed 'Your Blend's Name Here'. 

The price of your finished blend will depend on your ingredients - but really, isn't a bottle of your own whisky, invented by YOU, simply priceless? I think so. And if you really love it, you can order a case of six bottles. 

Hic.