Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye Whisky is a new blend from the folks who run the Crown Royal Distillery in Gimli, Manitoba. It is a bit of a throwback in style as the whisky features a heavy dose whisky produced from Canadian Winter Rye grain in the blend (almost 90% of the spirit is produced from Canadian Winter Rye grain). Winter rye imparts a robust spiciness throughout the spirit when distilled which (in my opinion) provides a much stronger ‘Canadian Whisky’ feel for this particular Crown Royal Whisky than we find with the flagship blend Crown Royal Deluxe which is produced predominantly from corn rather than rye.
This movement towards a more rye forward flavour profile seems to be a common theme within the Crown Royal family as two other recently released blends (Crown Royal Hand Selected Barrel, and the new Crown Royal Monarch 75th Anniversary Blend) have recently followed that common path.
Here is a link to the Rum Howler #5 Canadian Whisky of 2015:
Crown Royal Northern Harvest
__________________________________________________________
You may read about the Top 25 Canadian Whisky Countdown here:
We have now entered into the top 5 rankings for my 2015 Rum Howler Top 25 Rums of 2015, and up until now I have ranked each rum in my countdown based upon the score it received during my summer tasting sessions which I conducted as part of the determinations for the Rum Howler Top 100 Spirits. I decided to add another layer to my countdown at this point, and add in two more jurors to help me determine the rankings for the top 5. I gathered two friends, the same two who helped me determine the Rum Howler Top 25 Canadian Whiskies of 2015, and together we tasted the Top 5 Rum spirits of 2015 side by side. Using an amalgam of the three scores I assigned my final top 5 rankings.
Dufftown is the largest distillery in Scotland belonging to Diageo. The whisky from this distillery is primarily intended for blending. Bell’s, Islander, Dewar’s White Label, and of course Johnnie Walker all require Dufftown Whisky as part of their construction.
In the past, Wiser’s 18 Year Old advertised itself as a Limited Release bottling totaling only 3500 bottles for each batch produced. This year I noticed that the whisky has undergone a subtle brand change and is now listed as J.P. Wiser’s 18 Year Old Canadian Whisky. As part of the brand re-identification the bottle no longer contains any information on the label with respect to the batch size. Whether any real substantive change in the whisky inside the bottle has occurred is unknown to me but since we know that we can expect the whisky to change from batch to batch at a minimum, I thought it wise to provide a brand new review for the whisky this year.
The Rum Howler Blog 