Saddlesore: Mark Beaumont's single malt for after the ride
A 10-year-old Speyside malt named after the complaint every long-distance rider knows, from the man who rode round the world in 78 days. It gives 30% of its profit to motor neurone disease research.
Whisky has form on this site, mostly at the end of a long day in Scotland. "Tents up, food on, whisky out…" was how one wet night on the Central Highlander ended, and a bottle of cheap blend once did the rounds at Mark Cottage bothy after second dinner. What we hadn't come across until this week is one named after the least glamorous ailment in cycling.
Saddlesore is a 10-year-old Speyside single malt, a collaboration between the round-the-world record holder Mark Beaumont and the Adventurers Drinks Company, announced on 12 November. "Cycling the length and breadth of Scotland I have had the pleasure of enjoying many a dram," Beaumont says in the release, which going by our archive is the correct way to do it.
He has a better claim to the name than most. In 2017 he rode 18,000 miles (about 29,000km) around the world in 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes, which Guinness World Records lists as the fastest circumnavigation by bicycle. That is nearly 230 miles a day for 11 weeks. The rest of us have managed the same complaint over a long weekend.
A bottle costs £59, and 30% of the profit goes to the My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, which funds research into motor neurone disease (MND). There are only 102 bottles in the first batch, a number we'll come back to.
We haven't tasted it. What follows comes from the press release, the company's shop and the label, which you can read in the photos.
Mark Beaumont and the dram in question. Photo: Adventurers Drinks Company
What's in the bottle
The whisky was distilled at Linkwood, a Diageo distillery in Elgin that dates from 1821, and bottled for the Adventurers Drinks Company by Adelphi, the independent bottler that built and owns Ardnamurchan distillery in the west Highlands. Both names are on the label, so you know whose whisky you're drinking.
It spent its 10 years in first-fill and refill oloroso sherry casks and is bottled at 46%, unpeated and without chill filtering, a mostly cosmetic step that stops a whisky clouding when it's cold or watered. The colour is natural too, so the deep amber in the photos came out of the casks.
The shop's tasting note lists candied fruits, toffee apples, baking spice, cooked pears, malt, sweet caramel and coffee. Toffee apples and baking spice sounds like bonfire night to us, which was the week before.
The route in gold, and not a knobbly tyre in sight. Photo: Adventurers Drinks Company
On the dark blue label a road bike stands in front of a map of the world, with a gold line looping across it that the release says is the 2017 ride. Beaumont's signature sits at the bottom above the words "Time to commit".
Phil Kite, who started the Adventurers Drinks Company in 2022, has rowed the Atlantic twice, both times in a race with a whisky for a sponsor. The rest of his range is mostly gin and rum inspired by other adventurers. The Everest Gin has a drop of melted snow from the summit in every bottle, carried down by the mountaineer Kenton Cool. Given the name on this one, we're relieved the whisky contains nothing from the ride that inspired it.
Riding for Doddie
Beaumont's link with the foundation goes back to 2019, and it was made on a bike. That March he and the former Scotland captain Rob Wainwright carried a match ball 500 miles from Murrayfield to Twickenham in 48 hours, and the ride to a Six Nations match has become an annual fixture. This year's, Doddie's Triple Crown, covered 800 miles from Melrose to Dublin in four days, and its JustGiving page stood at just under £1.5m when we looked. The release puts the total from all the rides at more than £4.5m.
The foundation was set up in 2017 by Doddie Weir, the Scotland and Lions lock, after he was diagnosed with MND. He died in 2022. His line, which the foundation still quotes, was that MND "is not incurable, it's just underfunded".
The release promises only "a portion of profits". The shop is firmer: 30% from each standard bottle and 50% from the 20 signed by Beaumont. Neither figure says what that comes to in pounds per bottle, and we'd like to know.
Pricing and UK availability
Saddlesore costs £59 for a 70cl bottle from the Adventurers Drinks Company's shop, with delivery added at checkout. The signed bottles are £100. Both were in stock when we looked on 13 November.
The shop calls this a first batch, limited to 102 bottles, which is about one for every 176 miles of the record ride. "First batch" hints at a second, but nothing we've read says when. Six weeks before Christmas, 102 of anything with a bicycle on the label is not many.
It won't make anyone faster, and it's strictly for after the bike is back in the shed. As a present for the rider who has everything, saddle sores included, we'd take it over another pair of socks.
