#LastDrinkOfTheWeek – Coronation Double Bill

Mark Gill, aka The Cocktail Geek, started up a tradition a while back of posting up your last drink of the week on Twitter, complete with a hashtag to aid in the finding of other participants. It didn’t really catch on, but I flung a drink up each week and Mark did a blog post. It’s gone a bit quiet over on the Twitters, so I thought I’d have a go at joining in again, but this time with an actual blog post. Just a short one…

Tonight I’ve decided to go for a couple of Last Drinks. Which is obviously cheating, but it’s a vaguely special day for a couple of reasons so I thought I’d reward myself.

Firstly it’s the 60th Anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II today. Well done, ma’am. In celebration I’ll be ending my evening with the last few drops I saved of the sample I have of last year’s Macallan’s Diamond Jubilee bottling. I wrote tasting notes for it last year (here they are – tldr: It’s really good) but as it’s become a bit of a collector’s item here’s a bit of an investment update:

June 2012: Released at £300
September 2012: £560
January 2013: £620
March 2013: £760
April 2013: £920
May 2013: £750

Numbers from ScotchWhiskyAuctions.com

Andy Simpson from Whisky Highland reckons that the recent drop back to sensible levels was due to there being a glut on the market, but it’ll be interesting to see how they do over the next year, as this week a new set has been released – The Macallan Coronation Bottling. A pair of half bottles, one from European Oak one from American Oak, initially on sale for £350, which sold out pretty much immediately on the Macallan website, complete with the usual webshop melt down. Cue another year of Macallans appearing at auction…

My second last drink of the week (and the one to be consumed first) is my first whiskey sour of summer. Now, the definition of summer varies from place to place, but in my house it is formally ‘the first weekend that Billy leaves the house while wearing shorts’. This has occurred and I spent the time before leaving the house, allowing my bare legs (well, part of my shins. I don’t want to go to far) to acclimatise, juicing all of the remaining citrus fruit in my fridge. I now have a big bottle of sour mix to keep me in sours and lemonade all week.

I wrote about whiskey sours a while back but this one is significantly more downmarket than usual. It use almost the last of my Sainsbury’s Bourbon, an impulse purchase that I have come to regret. It might appear in a future quick tastings post, if I can bring myself to drink it neat. Fortunately my sour mix is top notch, so much of the evil is hidden. I have, however, learned a lesson – I will be good and avoid cheap bourbon in the future.