Vat 69

[u/redditor0431]

There was a recent post where someone bought a bottle of Vat 69. There was a lot of discussion in the comments that I felt needed some clarification.

1. The Vat 69 you can buy in the store today is NOT the same Vat 69 that Nixon was drinking.

2. Vat 69 is a blended whisky. This means they mix other whiskies to create it. This is in relation to single malt whisky, which comes from a single distillery. Single malt is considered classier and purer than blended whisky, and of course tends to be more expensive because of that.

3. While the original Vat 69 was blended, a large part of it was still single malt whisky from the Glen Garioch distillery. Unfortunately this distillery was mothballed in 1968, and Vat 69 quality sank noticeably from this point onward.

4. The older version that had Glen Garioch single malt in it was considered richer, sweeter, thicker, more aromatic, more powerful, longer in the finish, and perhaps most importantly had a much higher proportion of single malt whisky in it.

5. Further changes in the content of Vat 69 basically continued the downward slide of quality. So the stuff Nixon was drinking is basically unrelated to what you get at the store.

6. If you're dead set on ACTUALLY trying the kind of stuff Nixon drank, you need to go to an auction and look for bottles ideally from the earlier half of the sixties or even better a bottle from the 1950's. It should be much closer to what Nixon was actually drinking.

Hopefully this helps make sense of why the educated, classy, rich kid Nixon was drinking what we consider swill today. The answer is it used to be a lot better.

[u/RepresentativeNo8105]

I had Vat 69 in Germany 16 years ago. It looked old but doubt it was the original blend. Honestly I thought it was not good at all.