The Mahjong Series, Our First Foray Into Independent Bottling

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If you have followed Spirits Castle from our humble beginnings, you would have noticed or bought our Mahjong series. Launched in April 2019, the Mahjong Series is Spirits Castle’s first venture into independent bottling. Together with our more experienced friends from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, we brought our inspirations to life.

How did it happen?

Taiwan is a whisky haven in Asia and we gathered there at least once a year to meet up, drink and be merry. During one of such meetups in late 2018, our Taiwanese friend “jio” us to do a series of joint bottlings. After a night of discussion (and plenty of drinking), we all said “Yes”!

That started our collaborative journey, and the first thing we needed to do was to decide on a theme.

Why Mahjong?

Our leader suggested Mahjong. There is a couple of Poker cards series, but there is only one other Mahjong series. He further drove home the point by saying,

“Look. We are four friends from four different countries. Just like the four “winds” in Mahjong. Our friendship is the Mahjong table, where it keeps the game (our bottling) going on.”

We were sold on the idea pretty quickly. Decisions on the engraving of our bottles followed suit, as we want our consumers to “feel the tile” when they hold our bottles. To make it personalised, we designed a box to hold the bottles too, pretty much like how a Mahjong box holds all the tiles. Of course, we are not able to create a box that can hold all the whisky bottles that we plan to release, so each bottle stays in its own box.

Exciting News on Current Collection

The above picture is our latest release, a complex Caol Ila 2008 10 Years Old bottled at cask strength. In the recent release of the Malt Maniacs Awards (MMA) 2020*, our Caol Ila expression scored 85 points! It was an excellent encouragement to all of us, especially for Spirits Castle. It is our first foray into independent bottling, and we are pleased to achieve such results.

Our Plans For Mahjong

So far, Spirits Castle has released eight expressions of our Mahjong Series with our friends. Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 hitting all our shores in early 2020, all our bottling plans halted. Based on our current projects, it is likely we will resume the series only in 2021. Discussions are ongoing now, but we are not sure when we will choose the next cask.

Till then, we hope you will continue to enjoy our current selections. If you would like to purchase our bottles, please click here.

Slàinte Mhath,
Zerlina Zhuang

*MMA2020 is supposed to be labeled as MMA2019. However, due to challenging circumstances in a Covid-19 world, the organisers printed the medals as MMA2020.

Launching Whisky Talk, our opinions on everything whisky

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Whisky Casks maturing in a warehouse

Two years passed in a flash for Spirits Castle. 2020 has proved to be challenging, to say the least. Despite all the difficulties that we face so far, Spirits Castle is making inroads into the world of whisky.

Our wee achievement in 2020 is the blossoming relationship with our new supplier, Dram Mor Group. Their expertise in independent bottling has brought us tremendous knowledge, even before the first batch of bottles set sail from Scotland.

The new knowledge that we gain is beneficial to us as we started work on our newly minted cask ownership program. This program has gained some popularity since we launched two weeks ago, and we have sold two casks so far. We believe that there are many more to come as whisky drinkers move from one stage to the next in their journey.

Therefore, as a way to share our knowledge and information, Spirits Castle decided to launch Whisky Talk, our wee blog where we will share more information and our opinions about whisky. Whisky Talk will not only focus on the brands we carry but also about whisky brands in general. You can expect information nuggets about whisky, cask ownership, and general musing about glassware.

Occasionally, we may share malternatives, such as cognacs, rums or gins. It is a new project for us, and the team at Spirits Castle is raring to go. We hope that these wee articles will help you in your journey on the various spirits, even if your first love is whisky. We are all on this learning journey together.

Slàinte Mhath!
Zerlina Zhuang