I disagree: the popularity explosion was accompanied by the development of local production in surprising places. You can now find good whisky nearly everywhere.

And to be fair it’s the same with herbal liqueurs. Don’t get me wrong Chartreuse is good but it’s highly likely people can find something comparable produced close by.

Apparently, the five best substitutes for Green Chartreuse are Dolin Génépy, White Sambuca, Strega, Bénédictine and Drambuie.

Can't say I tried any of them though.

Drambuie tastes nothing like Chartreuse, and I think has gone way downhill since it was bought and production moved to a different site.

It's only similar in that its a fairly unique region-specific spirit.

Dom Benedictine and Hierbas de Montserrat are others.

Sure, local distilling has benefited. It's a great point. My tiny town had an excellent micro-distillery that made really nice bourbon and my favorite gin.

But I really miss the way Talisker tasted up until the 1990s. And I'm guessing that's never coming back. For better or worse, Scotland isn't local for me and whatever may have replaced Talisker seems to be under the radar from here.

Even in the area around where Chartreus is from there is Genepi. It’s not a brand, more of a style. I’m not an expert but one might say Chartreus is a style of Genepi. There’s some very good Genepi’s out there (and some pretty bad ones targeted at tourists).

Is it "good whiskey" or whiskey flavored PGA.

I was born in the early/mid 90s so I haven't experienced what it was "before", but can you expand? I'm a big enjoyer of whisky so I'm interested in what changed for you.

I can't talk to as far back as GP, but as someone who's been teetering on the edge of whisky snobbery for the past decade or so: a major change has been a shift to no age statement (NAS). This has been accompanied by an obliteration (either complete unavailability, or equivalent due to costs exceeding sane economic bounds) of older options. The logistics for a product that has a 20+ year lead time are extremely fragile against varying market demands.

This isn't inherently bad. There are some mind blowingly good options (Octomore et al) that fall under the NAS umbrella, just a different set of products to what may have traditionally been seen as a defining production technique.

Ah I see. You are definitely way deeper down that rabbit hole than I. I got Ardbeg Uigeadail (which I think didn't state its age, like you are mentioning) and thought it was fantastic. Even Laphroaig and Macallan and so on suit me fine.

Thanks for asking. For me a lot of single-malt scotch, up until around 2000 (maybe later) seemed never to have been completely domesticated as a normal consumer product. Depending on what kind you liked, it could be almost kind of gross. My favorite in the 1990s was Talisker, which had almost a kind of rotting fish flavor. I have literally tried mixing a dash of fish sauce into today's Talisker to recover that. (Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work.)

Talisker now is a bit fiery, maybe very slightly reminiscent of the sea, and otherwise unobjectionable. It doesn't have what I need. I wish them well, but either my taste has changed or theirs has.

This is interesting, and I love your taste for weird off flavours. I lately have developed a new love for whisky that appeared almost out of nowhere. Something about the alcohol taste disappeared suddenly and opened a whole world.

Can I ask kind of Scotch you like now? There's probably something out there that I'm just not finding.

EDIT: I'm open to things that I hate on the first sip. In fact that might work best for me.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask, because my tastes are very indiscriminate (I like pretty much all of them) and I'm not that experienced tasting whisky. I had the cask strength Laphroaig (10 yrs) and loved that with just a touch of water. Really wild deep flavours.

Thanks! Have you compared it to the "regular" 10y Laphroaig?

Not side to side! I vaguely preferred it, but I can't say without a blind trial or something.