The Pour-Over: I thought of this title name this week. I figured it’s a fun, and fitting, section title to introduce the Newsletter of the week, along with anything random I say. And, I love coffee first thing in the morning! Whisky barrel aged coffee… 😉 Also, it’s my Birthday today. So I’ll be pouring my 30yo Benromach like usual!

Some weeks the news trickles in. This one arrived all at once, and most of it landed on the same few blocks of Manhattan and Queens.

Windup Watch Fair took over Center415 on Fifth Avenue from October 16 to 18 [1], and on Thursday the 15th, two very different visions of the performance car went public within hours of each other. In Texas, Tesla launched a Roadster off a ramp and flipped it in midair. In Queens, Porsche parked a mid-engined concept on the same pier where it photographed the 550 Spyder in 1953 [2]. Meanwhile, my favorite distillery brought back a 25-year-old that hasn't been part of the conversation in years.

Pour something slow. There's a lot to get through.

Anyone who has read this newsletter for more than a week knows Benromach is my favorite distillery, so forgive me for leading with it. Just weeks after the new 12 Years Old, Benromach has revealed a 25 Years Old as the new pinnacle of its signature range, matured exclusively in bourbon and sherry casks and bottled at 46%, non-chill filtered [3]. It costs £250, and Friends of Benromach can buy it online and at the Visitor Centre ahead of the official launch on Thursday, October 22 [3]. The catch for those of us on this side of the Atlantic: shipping is UK only for now, with international markets promised very soon [3].

The old 25 sat at 43% and, as The Whisky Exchange notes, joined the core range in the early 2000s using spirit distilled before Gordon & MacPhail took over [4]. Do the arithmetic on the new one and something interesting falls out. Benromach was silent from 1983 until G&M relit the stills in 1998, so a 25-year-old bottled in 2026 almost certainly comes from those first few years of the revived distillery. If that holds, this is the first time the modern Benromach spirit, the one G&M designed, has reached a quarter century.

Why do 46% and non-chill filtration matter? Proofing down is just adding water, and every point of dilution lowers the solubility of the long-chain esters and fatty acids that carry a lot of whisky's oily texture. At lower strengths those compounds can drop out as a haze when the bottle gets cold, which is why many producers chill filter, stripping some of them out on purpose. The industry rule of thumb is that around 46% the spirit stays clear on its own, so Benromach can skip the filter and keep the texture. It answers the same complaint whisky writers aimed at the 43% core range for years, which the new 12 Years Old also addressed at 46%, non-chill filtered [5].

The distillery's own notes promise rich berry aromas with toffee apple and soft smoke, then raisin and orange moving into tropical fruit, dried banana, and mature oak [3]. That dried banana and gentle peat signature is exactly the Benromach DNA I keep coming back to. I will report back when I get a pour. And considering I’m thinking of London for Christmas…. I’ll be ordering one for delivery 🙂

English whisky is now a protected name. Here is what that means.

On September 11, the UK government approved a Geographical Indication (GI) for English whisky, making "English whisky" and "English whiskey" legally protected names alongside Scotch, Welsh, and Irish whisky [6]. A GI is a legal recipe tied to a place: if a bottle says English whisky, it has to follow the rules, and producers must first be verified under HMRC's Spirit Drink Verification Scheme before they can use the name [6]. The category is no longer a curiosity, either. England now has more than 70 whisky distilleries, up from 46 in 2023, with maturing stock estimated at around £1 billion [6].

The rules [6]:

Most of that will look familiar to Scotch drinkers, but three differences are worth knowing [6]. The grain must be 100% UK-grown, which no other UK whisky GI requires. Casks can be any wood, not just oak, and modern still designs are allowed. And the controversial one: a distillery can have a local brewery do the mashing and fermenting and still call the result single malt. The Guild traces that to the very first modern English whisky in 2003, laid down by Hicks and Healey using wort from St Austell Brewery [6].

That brewery clause is why the GI is already headed to a tribunal. The Scotch Whisky Association, joined by the Irish and Welsh whisky associations in a joint statement, appealed in October, arguing that mashing and fermenting away from the distillery breaks single malt's connection to a single site [7]. Meanwhile, two English distillers, Spirit of Birmingham and Bristol's Circumstance Distillery, appealed from the opposite direction, because the wording would bar their own products from being called single malt English whisky [7]. Circumstance founder Liam Hirt's main objection is the requirement that single malt be double distilled in copper pot stills [6].

That copper rule is a nice bit of chemistry hiding in a legal fight. Copper is not just tradition: it reacts with the sulfur compounds that fermentation produces, pulling out the meaty, struck-match notes that would otherwise carry into the spirit. How much copper contact a spirit gets is one of the biggest levers a distiller has over its character, which is exactly why Scotch-style rules lock it down and experimental distillers want room to play. My read: a GI is good for consumers, because it tells you what is in the bottle. But the most interesting English whisky may end up being made just outside the lines.

Windup is still the best room in the hobby for one reason: the people who design the watches are standing behind the table. Three days at Center415 [1] produced plenty of launches, but these four are the ones I kept thinking about on the way home. This show is always a great time, and I’ve become friends with so many brands, that seeing everyone all weekend is wonderful. It was great seeing everyone! And honestly, the line was insane. I can’t believe people waited 3hrs+ to get in. You guys are wild! Here are my picks from the show, and ones I would pick up in a beat-per-minute!

Formex took its all-ceramic Essence and gave it a motorsport edit. The case is black zirconium oxide ceramic, now sandblasted to a light-absorbing matte with diamond-polished bevels, measuring 41mm wide, 11.2mm thick, and a compact 46.2mm lug to lug, with 100m of water resistance and the brand's patented Case Suspension System holding the movement in a titanium container [9]. Red accents on the logos, flange, and seconds hand give it the Redshift name [9].

The dial is the part the scientist in me can't stop staring at. Rather than gluing a thin meteorite slice onto brass, Formex uses a solid slice of Muonionalusta meteorite with the dial feet soldered directly on, then applies a black-gold galvanic plating under a micron thick so the Widmanstätten structure still shows through [9]. That crosshatch pattern is interlocking crystals of two iron-nickel alloys, kamacite and taenite, and it only forms when metal cools by a few degrees per million years inside the core of an ancient asteroid. You cannot make it in a lab on a human timescale. It is, quite literally, a record of deep time on your wrist.

Inside is the Sellita SW200-2 Power+ with 65 hours of reserve, COSC certified to between -4 and +6 seconds a day, on a full ceramic bracelet with a 5mm, four-step micro-adjust clasp [9]. Production is 100 pieces a year, the first run numbered 001 to 100, shipping at the end of November at $4,450 [9]. I’m going to be frank. If this stays around long enough AND I have some spare cash, this will be coming home to me. It was great seeing you Markus, Raphael, Fernando, Sabrina, and Destina. It was nice that the Brew booth was close to Formex, as when it slowed, we got to talk. Anyone want to see Markus in a kilt from my wedding!? 😉

I have owned every Metric, and each one has been a little more refined than the last. The Taxi is the most fun of the bunch. It takes the Checker cab, the boxy sedan that worked New York streets for decades, and puts its livery on the dial: a taxi-yellow outer track around a matte center, a checkered stripe running straight across the middle, and a checkered chronograph seconds hand so a piece of the cab sweeps around every time you start the timer [10]. Flip it over and the caseback frames Brew's coffee bean in a polished checkerboard, and the box includes a Brew-branded taxi medallion [10].

Underneath, it is the Metric formula: a 36mm by 41.5mm cushion case in 316L steel, 10.75mm thick, 50m of water resistance, sapphire, and the Seiko VK68 mecaquartz movement [10]. If mecaquartz is new to you, it is a hybrid: a quartz oscillator keeps the time, while a mechanical module runs the chronograph, so you get quartz accuracy with the crisp click and snap-back reset of a mechanical pusher. It debuted at Windup, it is limited to 1,000 pieces, and it costs $495 [10]. People loved it at the show, and we were flying through them! This is still available on Brew Watches site, for now. It will be gone extremely soon. Make sure you get the additional Rally strap. It makes the watch! I just know it. You can read my Hands-On Debut on StrapHabit.

KUOE built this one specifically for Windup, and only 50 exist [11]. It blends two Royal Smith references: the waffle-textured dial of the 90-006, split into a sector layout, and the Dauphine hands from the discontinued 90-005 [11]. The bigger news is the size. After requests from overseas customers, KUOE stepped up from its usual 35mm to 39mm, with a cream dial, silver case, an Italian brown leather strap on KUOE's Fitwell micro-adjust buckle, and a Miyota 9039 automatic with about 42 hours of reserve [11]. It was sold exclusively at the fair [11]. I’ve always been drawn to this brand, and have seriously come close to pulling the trigger a few times. I think I will, but I want to visit their factory if I ever get to Japan.

This was my wildcard. I’ve seen and handled Héron before. But, when the rep came up to our booth to look at the Brew Taxi, she had this watch on her wrist. And it might be one of my favorite watches I’ve seen in a long time. Héron is a Montreal brand founded in 2021 [12], and the Mirabel is not new, but seeing it in person sold me on the idea. It is a dress watch that happens to be a GMT: a 37.5mm C-shaped steel case in gold PVD, 43.5mm lug to lug and 10mm thick (12mm counting the boxed sapphire), an enamel-painted sector dial with polished applied numerals, a cabochon crown, and a Baranil leather strap from France's Tanneries Haas [13]. The caseback is a world-timer engraving with a hand-painted enamel center [13].

The movement is the Miyota 9075, a "true" or flyer GMT [13]. The distinction matters if you travel. On an office GMT, you set the 24-hour hand to track a second zone. On a true GMT, the local hour hand jumps independently, so you can change time zones on landing without stopping the watch. A Blog to Watch's review called it a successful balance of a sporty complication and old-school design [14]. It is $690, and the brown is currently sold out on Héron's site [13]. They had TWO at the show for sale, and I regret not having the extra cash to swing it. But I will hopefully get it soon. I put my name on the waitlist. The brown and gold just go so well together. And that enamel dial sector dial is just gorgeous.

If you’re not familiar with Horage, you will be now. And you should remember their name. They are doing some incredible work.

Every mechanical watch drifts. A mechanical watch keeps time with a balance wheel swinging back and forth on a hairspring, and the length of that spring sets the beat. Regulating a watch means nudging the effective length of that spring until the gains and losses cancel out, and traditionally that means a watchmaker, an open caseback, and a timing machine.

Horage's MicroReg puts a "sleeping watchmaker" inside the case instead [15]. It is built with miniswys, a spin-off of Biel's Creaholic innovation house, around a miniature actuator designed by Swatch co-inventor Elmar Mock [15]. The actuator is just a ceramic element and a metal carrier: no coils, magnets, or chips in the watch, and zero power draw at rest [15]. When you wake it, it adjusts the regulating organ forward or backward in increments as small as 0.1 seconds, without opening the case [15]. In practice, as David from Horage showed me at the booth, that means sending a digital pulse from a phone app and dialing the rate as close to zero as you can get it. The watch itself stays fully mechanical; the electronics only ever touch the adjustment, never the timekeeping.

Why does that matter? Certifications like COSC test a movement for 15 days at controlled temperatures and in five positions [15]. Your wrist is not a lab. MicroReg lets you regulate to how you actually wear the watch, which is a genuinely new idea in mechanical watchmaking.

The watch around it is pretty special too. Horage flipped its in-house K2 micro-rotor so the movement faces you, finished in Peacock Blue with Côtes de Genève, a gold-plated tungsten micro-rotor, 72 hours of reserve, and a silicon escapement and hairspring [15]. The time on the front reads off a rotating disc at 6 o'clock in five-minute steps, while the caseback carries an hour disc with minute and center seconds hands [15]. The steel case is 41mm by 10.05mm, 48.22mm lug to lug, with 100m of water resistance on a custom FKM rubber strap [15]. Founders Edition pricing is CHF 4,950 before tax; the earliest pre-orders begin shipping now, in mid-October, and new orders ship in early 2027 [15]. David is one of the good ones in this industry, and this is one I would love to pick up eventually. I’m hoping I’ll be in Scotland in the winter, and hoping to have a few drams or pints with David if he’s home in Glasgow. Horage is based in Switzerland, but he frequently goes back to Scotland. Also, here is a video explaining the MicroReg.

Nine years after the first prototype and its promise of production in 2020, Tesla finally showed the new Roadster on October 15 at SpaceX's test site in McGregor, Texas, after a year of slipped dates that ran from April all the way to October [16]. The videos are genuinely wild: the car climbs a curved ramp, hangs upside down, launches into the air, rotates, and lands. It is Elon, so the first question everyone asked was how much of it is real.

The short answer: the physics is real, but the show was carefully staged. Here is how each trick works.

Driving upside down is a fan car. Fans under the floor pull air out from beneath the car, leaving lower pressure underneath than above, so the atmosphere itself presses the car against the surface. Tesla says it is enough to hold the car upside down even while stationary [16]. It is not a first: McMurtry's Spéirling did it in April 2025, using a rig that rotated the car into position [18]. Electrek put it bluntly: impressive, but no real benefit for actual driving [17].

Flying is cold-gas thrusters. This is the SpaceX part. Tesla packs every usable void with carbon-fiber overwrapped pressure vessels full of compressed gas and vents it through nozzles, claiming four to five times the force the tires can handle [16]. More gas means more "flight time," which also means the flight time is finite [16]. Reports also say the demo car ran the stunts with no one in it [19].

The 0 to 60 numbers deserve an asterisk. Tesla claimed a live 0.81-second run, after some technical difficulties with the timer [17]. Whether a one-foot rollout was subtracted changes what that figure means [17]. Do the math anyway: 60 mph is about 26.8 meters per second, so 0.81 seconds is an average of roughly 3.4 g, and the Rocket trim's sub-0.59 claim works out to about 4.6 g [18]. Street tires simply cannot push that hard, which is the whole reason the thrusters exist.

So who gets what? There are three trims [16]:

In other words, the stunts that made the headlines belong to trims most buyers will never get, and that cannot legally be driven on the street [16]. Meanwhile, the car you can actually reserve has drifted from the 2017 promise of 620 miles of range and four seats to over 300 miles and two [16].

Now, that $50,000. Reservations reopened at $5,000 up front, plus another $45,000 due within 10 days or the slot is canceled, the same $50,000 Tesla asked for in 2017 [16]. The Rocket asks $250,000 [20]. There is still no price for any version, and Musk's production date was "2028, actually" [16].

You read the legal language right. Section 4 of the reservation agreement says the Roadster is still under development and Tesla cannot guarantee when your car will be delivered, or whether it will be [21]. The good news is that you are not entirely out of luck on the money: either side can cancel at any time, and the agreement promises a full refund of the reservation payment, issued by check in the holder's name [21]. Reservations are also non-transferable [20]. So the real cost is not the deposit; it is time. Parked in a savings account at around 4%, $50,000 would earn roughly $2,000 a year. Wait from now until a 2028 delivery that may or may not happen, and that is a few thousand dollars spent on a place in line, which is what a reservation is.

On Friday, my buddy John texted me and said he could not believe what he just saw. The Porsche Mission S, out on the streets of New York. He was not the only one: the concept made its first public appearance on city roads over the weekend [22], and one bystander's photo from Queens parked it next to a Tesla Model Y, which made it look impossibly low [23].

I am in love with this car. Porsche revealed it on October 15 on the same Queens pier where it photographed the mid-engined 550 Spyder in 1953, and positioned it above the 911 [2]. CEO Michael Leiters was explicit that this is not a one-off hypercar but a permanent, versatile platform in the lineup [2]. And it will not be electric; Leiters said demand for electric cars in this segment is limited, and reports point to a mid-mounted flat-eight, possibly with hybrid assistance [23]. He has also said the platform could take either a manual or a PDK [22]. A mid-engined Porsche flagship with a stick. Read that again.

The design is a greatest-hits album done right. The round headlights and torpedo-shaped front arches come from the 911, the wide intake and car-within-a-car rear from the 911 GT1, the roofline running under the wing from the 959, and the wheels from the 928's famous teledials [2]. Inside, there is no big central touchscreen: physical buttons, a five-dial cluster with a big tachometer that can slide closer to the driver depending on the drive mode, and a retractable MagSafe phone mount [2].

My favorite detail is the cooling fan sitting on top of the engine, a direct nod to the 917 [2]. That fan was there to push air across the 917's air-cooled flat-12. Which makes this week a neat little physics lesson: Tesla used fans to suck its car onto a ceiling, and Porsche used one to remind you that a great engine needs to breathe. I know which one I would rather hear.

A meteorite that took millions of years to cool, a whisky that took a quarter century to mature, waiting in line for 3hrs+ to get into Wind Up and a car that may take two more years to exist. Patience was the theme this week, whether anyone planned it or not.

Until next time.