Really Good Whisky Advent Calendar

If you’re the kind of person who, like me, says ‘Bah Humbug!’ to Christmas, you might just change your mind if someone gives you a Really Good Whisky Advent Calendar.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of Christmas. I like getting together with friends and family, sharing meals and a few drinks, reminiscing, and appreciating the good things in your life no matter what your religious beliefs.

What I hate is (a) having to think of the right presents for people, (b) trekking through crowded shops to buy them, and (c) receiving presents that you don’t want when you know the person buying it has taken the time to pick it out. One way round this is to do what my wife’s aunt and her friend said to us when we were going to have Christmas lunch with them one year- we each buy each other a present, but you can’t spend more than $5, and they must be consumable.

Well, let’s rethink this. An Advent Calendar, with or without whisky, can’t be a Christmas present as you have to start opening the 24 windows on December 1st, so you can open the last one on Christmas Eve. But hey, if someone wants to give me my Christmas present in late November and tell me to start opening it on December 1st, I’m totally OK with that. And if I want to buy one for someone as a Christmas present, and tell them they can wait till next December 1st to start or they can start enjoying it now, that’s cool too.

Or you can just say to yourself – hey, the next few weeks are going to be stressful, I need to treat myself, how about a whisky Advent Calendar so I can have a wee dram every day before Christmas? Or two wee drams, if I miss a day.

That’s why I was thrilled to get an Advent Calendar from the Really Good Whisky Company. It’s going to be hard to review this as I’m writing this in November and am determined to wait till December 1st to try the first one. From then on, it’ll be a dram a day. Well, each bottle is 3cl so if you drink it solo it’s a generous dram a day, if you’re prepared to share it’s a dram for two people.

What is a Dram?

The definition of a dram is confusing (but fascinating). It’s like asking ‘How big is a tot of whisky?’ To me, a dram is the kind of single helping you would serve to someone, and it might be a generous dram or a not-so-generous dram, depending on your point of view. But for me, eyeballing the 3cl bottles in this Whisky Advent Calendar, I reckon it’s two regular drams or one generous dram in each bottle. Which amounts to somewhere from 24-48 drams per calendar.

Reviewing the Whisky Advent Calendar

Now this Really Good Whisky Advent Calendar is hard to review, for two reasons. Firstly, as I just said, I’m writing this in November and really want to wait till December 1st to try the first one, in the spirit (so to speak) of advent calendars.

The second reason is that advent calendars are meant to be a surprise. You don’t know what’s behind each of the 24 windows. If you’re thinking of buying this as a Christmas present for someone, you’ll want to know what’s in the box. If you’re thinking of buying it for yourself, well… hello, spoiler alert!

Spoiler Alert!

So, if you don’t want to know what’s in this box, stop reading now and buy it here.

If you want to know what you’re buying, then let me say that this is, as it says on the box, really good whisky. Let me pick out some of the whiskies included.

To start, just look at some of the names: Glenmorangie, Tamdhu, Tomalin, Old Forester, Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Glenfarclas, and Laphroaig. And that’s only eight of the 24 whiskies included in the whisky advent calendar.

If you look more closely at the whiskies selected, they’re not’ choosing any old rubbish! And there’s some pretty potent stuff in there, which the whisky aficionado will appreciate. The strongest whisky included is 64.6%, called As We Get It, and it’s made by Ian Macleod, though the exact distillery remains a secret. As it sells for £50 a bottle, it’s not cheap whisky.

Let’s Do the Maths

This Really Good Whisky Advent Calendar sells for, in round figures, £150. For this you’re getting 24 whiskies to sample, so you’re paying about £6 for each one. Given that you can share each sample, that’s £3 each, which is pretty cheap for a tot of good whisky. In fact, I don’t know how they can do it for the price.

On December 10th, for example, you’d be sampling an Old Portero 18th-century style rye whisky, which sells at £85 for a 75cl bottle. That’s £3.40 for a 3cl sample, but to sample it you’d normally have to buy a whole bottle. This advent calendar is also a brilliant way to try 24 different whiskies before deciding whether you wanted to splurge on a whole bottle of the ones you like.

So, I’m now a big fan of boozy advent calendars, and you can get others for gin, vodka, wine, and beer. The only time I’ll now be saying ‘Bah humbug’ will be on December 24th when the last daily dram has disappeared.