Kilkerran: Heavily Peated: Peat In Progress (Scotland Campbeltown Single Malt Whisky: 56.4% ABV)
Visual: Pale grain. Fast thick streaks come from the body.
Nose: Heather. Dry smoke. Dried ham. Soot. Water adds a soft lime touch.
Body: Vanilla. Custard. Oily. Oily peat. Smoked beef. Honeycomb. Peach. Water adds more vanilla to vanilla toffee. Nutty oiliness. Smoother peat.
Finish: Light peach. Soot. Charred oak. Peat. Lightly oily. Drying. Water still has slightly numbing alcohol touch. Nutty oils.
Conclusion: This is such a good mix of influences again, like and yet unlike the 8 Year cask finish in so many ways. One big difference is obviously the peat. There is a lovely dry peat take to this and sooty character. Some smoked meat notes but less than you would expect.
However by that less heavy intensity of peat, especially for a heavily peated dram, it leaves room for so much more of the base spirit to show to complement the peat. There is the bourbon influence showing a surprising number and range of sweet but understated notes – the custard, vanilla and such – not a huge part of the whisky but showing the bourbon style and giving good backing to the peat.
Then there is the subtle peach again, so unexpected, this is peaty but restrained just enough as is needed to let all these delicious extra notes come out – an amazing balance of peat to base spirit to barrel ageing, such a good dram.
A lovely peated cask strength whisky.
Background: This was the final listed whisky of Independent Spirit’s lovely Springbank tasting – I say listed as it was not actually the final dram, but more on that later. Another cask strength whisky at the end of a cask strength heavy tasting, I was definitely feeling things by this point, but continued to do my best. This being a heavily peated whisky did help with its big obvious flavours. The peated take on Kilkerran is comparatively recent, hence Peat in progress, comparing to their Work In progress for the early, young age releases of Kilkerran. Anyway, so as well as the extra Hazleburn 10 dram we got mid tasting, we also got a lovely taste after this of what is called a “Cage Bottling” – basically at the distillery each day they do bunch of single bottles each drawn from different casks, and this are held in and sold from the aforementioned cages. Much in demand, and each is unique – this was a special treat to try – our one was a competitively young six year old Longrow which had less peat than you would expect from that dram but lovely strawberry flavours. Due to being at the end of a long tasting (Seven drams including this, most cask strength), and not one you can buy any other bottles of I did not do notes on it, but it was a lovely capstone to the night.
