The Legend of Laphroaig. Marcel van Gils & Hans Offringa

Try to get the complete history of a distillery into one book and add to that a collector’s guide and a lot of pictures. The book has 216 pages and it took me 3-4 hours to read it all! The book succeeds in the historical account, at least with the explaining of the history, the pictures of unreadable documents could maybe have been shortened down a bit. The older pictures of the distillery are however almost worth the purchase price of the book. Seeing pictures of worm tubs, and bolted stills are something else.

The history section gets 9 out of 10 only deductions are the high number of pictures of unreadable old documents. My advice would be to make the distillery pictures larger, especially the older ones.

The collector part of the book soon looses interest with me, and I find it a bit confusing. Pictures of 10 almost similar 10 year old bottles on one page, why? If you are a collector these pages probably make a lot of sense, however to me, only the pictures of the really old bottling make sense. And, I really miss a timeline for the different bottlings. My guess is that from a collecting point of view this section would probably fetch 7-8 out of 10. But since I’m not a collector, I won’t rate it more than a 5 out of 10. A timeline with dates would raise that grade considerably.

This book is for you if;

You are a beginner who wants to learn about distilling in general, and/or Laphroaig in particular.

You are a connoisseur interested in the history of distilling, and/or collecting and/or Laphroaig (but then again you would have already purchased the book if you where)

In total I will give the book 8 out of 10 even though I don’t like the collecting bit very much, the rest of the book is really interesting.


Peteys