Arran 10yo Arran Barley
Batch 001 Official Release 2025 | 50% ABV
Score: 7/10
Very Good Indeed.
TL;DR
A positive emulation of their 10yo, with a twist
Emulation… A Sincere Form Of Flattery
Or is it? Copy-catting. Duplicating. Emulating. All signs of trying to be similar to something that either is or was.
Fun fact: I’m colourblind as all hell. Most people don’t understand what colourblind is. Well, erm, because they aren’t colourblind. I don’t see the world in black and white, otherwise I’d be a dog, but I see the world in a false color. Your greens might look like my browns or reds. Your blues might look like my purple. And your purple might either look like pink or blue in my mind. It’s fun, isn’t it?
It’s not. I recently (well ok, it was a year ago) went to the optometrist after significant spousal pressure as I hadn’t been in nearly 18 years. I hadn’t had the need to. I remember getting my eyes tested as a kid, especially when I was “discovered” to be colorblind around 5-6 years of age after I couldn’t color the scenes with the right crayon colors in early school.
Talk about dreams of being a pilot or firefighter exploded at a young age. As a kid, I remember being diagnosed with being “colorblind” but not fully understanding the depth, breadth, and ancillary impacts of that statement. Heck, I even underwent auditory testing to ensure I wasn’t a “simple” kid (yes, that sounds crass but think about the era). But as a kid, and through those tumultuous teenage years and burgeoning young adult years, I had better than “20-20” vision. I knew I had it because I could spot the mole hairs on a tick.
But with getting older, and also considering the words of someone wiser (ahem, wife), I went to the optometrist to do a double check on my eyes but with an ulterior motive of asking if those “colorblind glasses” actually work. Now, as someone who has published peer-reviewed papers in the field of high-speed videography of plasma, I understand wavelengths of light, or as you all understand it, colour. Knowing what I know, which admittedly, I know what I don’t know, I asked the question to someone who should know. And the answer was what I knew to know, which was as expected of knowing what there is to know because of science. Did you follow?
Basically, those fancy “colorblind” sunglasses are bandpass filtered coatings that make an attempt at dropping out the interlap of wavelength in the visible light spectrum. It will very likely work for some, especially those with mild colorblindness, but for those of us with more severe cases, they’re a waste of money. Plus I came out of the optometrist consultation with eyesight still better than “20-20” in my late thirties. Ha. Call me Golden Freaking Eagle Broddy folks. But wait, there’s more…
The hidden truth. My superpower if you will? I have night vision.
Yes, that's right. Colorblind people are adept at seeing through camouflage, which makes us invaluable as a spotter in the military as our brain can more easily decipher those camo patterns and identify them as man-made rather than natural, but it also has a side benefit in that our eyes are more photoreceptive. We can see a far wider dynamic range, which admittedly is a nerdy technical term, but in essence, it means I can see more of the brightest brights and the darkest darks than non-colorblind people in the same “view” of a particular scene. What this means in the real world however, is that I don’t need to wear sunglasses as early or as often as most people do, but most importantly, I don’t need to turn the lights on at night. Yup, you read that right. I’m Seal Team Six at night, dodging kids toys and Lego blocks on the floor with ease, much to my wife’s expletives and sore feet.
So what is the emulating angle here?
Well it comes down to color science. Or a reproduction of a chemical reaction. A chemical reaction that was rooted in the 19th century. You see, I have a small fancy in photography. As a colorblind idiot. Yes, laugh it up. But I like the brightness, shapes, angularity, and all those facets that make a picture engaging, yet I’d be the dog’s bollocks if I could tell the right shade of testicular pink was rendered by the camera sensor. So when people start describing “color accurate”, I have some hesitancy. How the hell am I going to make sure I’ve got it right?
Well over a decade ago, I made the switch from Nikon to Fujifilm digital cameras. Nikon was a great ecosystem: great lenses, great technology. But something was always just a smidge “off” in the color rendition. And me being me, I couldn’t fix it properly. So I made the jump to Fujifilm’s digital lineup because of their more accurate renditions of color. I’ve been there through the highs and lows but I’ve been a loyal patron since. And their colors have been incredibly accurate. Plus, I sit in front of a computer 8-10 hours a day for my day job, and I don’t want to be editing pictures in the evening to ensure color accuracy in Lightroom.
Recently, there has been an insane amount of online fervor in creating accurate “film-like” digital emulations of older film stock, including significant amounts of “grain”, color tonality and temperature shifts, and other emulations. Which I’ve got a beef with, surprise surprise. A vast amount of effort has been devoted towards making pictures look like they used to but that’s not entirely what our eyes see. We don’t see grain, color shifts, tonality differences, and other items because our eyes and brain are immensely powerful. Those items, forever engrained in a piece of paper taped into a scrapbook, are a function of chemical reactions. Chemical reactions that may be wrong, through mishandling the development process and even the scanning and printing process.
But yet they are trusted, and in 2020+ cases, used as the benchmark as “accurate” or “representative” for pictures. Which I call nonsense on. It makes no sense, absolutely no sense, to be taking our uber-clean, low noise, and hyper accurate and sharp images from any camera in the past decade, and purposely making them worse by crushing shadows, insane split toning, adding mega amounts of fake grain, and altering the color accuracy. It’s like technology has advanced so far that people said “nah, let’s make it look worse”.
It seems that if you don’t have the right “film simulation”, filter, or other jazz, it just isn’t “right”. Heck, we have an entire generation of photographers running around that have never shot a single roll of film at all yet they are trying to emulate a Kodak Portra 800 look! Mental.
Which is confusing as all hell to someone like me. Because of the whole color thing.
Review
Arran Barley 10yo, Official release, Batch 001, 2025, first-fill bourbon and refill sherry casks, 50% ABV
CAD$105 (£56) paid and still some availability
So, Broddy: cool story but what does this have to do with whisky and emulation? Well it comes down to this particular whisky, and honestly, Arran is inviting this faceoff themselves. Ladies and gentlemen: the 10yo vs the Arran Barley 10yo!
Title fight between these two whiskies. Wally recently gave us his views on the newly returned Arran 14 yo, which appears to be a sweeter angle on the Arran spirit. So what is this Arran Barley trying to do? It’s not a small outturn at 18,000 bottles, with a proudly displayed Batch 001 on the label hinting that this might be an ongoing release. Is it trying to emulate the venerable 10yo, of which I fancy quite a bit? Is it trying to be something new?
Is it worth the ~30% premium over the ubiquitous and amazing core range 10 yo? Did they accidentally make a simulacrum of their own doing?
Score: 7/10
Very Good Indeed.
TL;DR
A positive emulation of their 10yo, with a twist
Nose
Orange oil. Orange zest. Baked apple and peach danish with vanilla icing. Light caramel sauce. It smells denser and richer than the standard 10yo, notably with the malty notes absent.
Palate
Lovely weighty and dense entry on the palate, with lots of honeyed orange oil and candied fruits. After the initial sweet notes recede, some peppery bite appears, much like candied ginger. Vanilla starts to enter the fray with the spices, transforming into some mild caramel sauce dotted with those now cinnamon tingles.
Compared to the standard 10, this is weightier, oilier, and features a much longer finish. It is noticeably “spicier”, although I don’t find it detracts from the experience . If you don’t like some spicy tingles, I think the standard 10yo is probably more to your liking.
The Dregs
Personally, I think this whisky begs to be enjoyed with the ‘wet mouth’ technique. Yes that sounds weird, but hear me out. Take a drink of water and while there are some very minimal vestiges of it remaining and coating your mouth, take a drink of this. Your mouth experiences a lovely array of flavours and textural changes while the whisky undergoes very slight dilution, releasing all those lovely flavours and oily textures from their ethanol entanglements.
This is a slightly darker, richer, and less bright and spritely version of the venerable core range 10yo. My personal ranking of the standard Arran 10yo is an easy 6.5 and I usually round up because the price per experience ration is so exceptional. I view this special release in the same vein because it isn’t priced like other distilleries “special releases” and is very similar in experience, with the core backbone still there and the Arran-grown barley providing a nuanced but welcomed take on their spirit. So a 7 it is!
I personally find that this emulates the standard 10 yo quite closely, with 80-90% of the flavours and experience being the same. So it emulates the original then, but with some slight variation. Like a “filter” is placed on the experience - slightly altering the experience, but the backbone Arran-ness is still there.
Score: 7/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. BB
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At the point of this article’s publication, Arran (Lochranza) currently sits in position #6 in the Dramface Top 40.
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