Kilkerran: Heavily Peated Small Batch (Scottish Campbeltown Single Malt Whisky: 59.2% ABV)
Visual: Pale light gold. Fast thick streaks come from the spirit.
Nose: Oily. Peaty. Apples. Smooth yet lightly medicinal. Grassy. Slight apricot. Water makes slightly more obvious medicinal.
Body: Honey. Golden syrup. Tannins. Slight tea bags. Apricot. Peaty. Smoked meat. Raisins. Water adds green grapes. Fatty butter. Red grapes. Vanilla.
Finish: Dried meat. Smoked meat. Generally meaty. Raisins. Water adds vanilla and more smoked meat.
Conclusion: Ohhh this no longer feels like a work in progress like the peat in progress releases, this feel like how a peated Kilkerran should do. As mentioned in the background it seems peat in progress and small batch heavily peated are often released during the same years, so this isn’t the natural endpoint of those, but still, this feels like a finished product and a worthy one at that.
Initially coming across as just oily and peaty, as you acclimatise to that you start to realize there is a sweet, apricot like set of notes along with both red and green grapes working there in the background. Such a fruity range behind an impressive level of peat. Even more so, behind all of that there is still that traditional grassy Campbeltown character helping give it some savoury grounding.
It makes it feel much more polished than my previous encounters with Kilkerran peated expressions. There is usually that peat meets grassy character, but this has much more. You need a touch of water to really get the best of it, a lot of the notes are hard to grasp when neat, but with that the lovely, more fruity range comes out.
A genuinely good release. If the end point of the peat in progress leads to anything similar to this I will be happy indeed.
Background: So, previously I have tried Kilkerran peat in progress, which seemingly was the peat equivalent of the work in progress early whiskies they released of Kilkerran while they only had young whisky available so were not ready for standard bottlings. This is not peat in progress, this is small bath, so does that mean they have finally reached a time they can release a standard bottling of peated Kilkerran? Apparently, nope, these small batches have been released for a while. So what makes this small batch and not peat in progress? No idea. Ah well, I’ll take any excuse to try some more Kilkerran. This was the final of the whiskies in Independent Spirit’s Burns night whisky tasting. Saving the big peat bomb for the end. Despite having had a lot of strong and strong flavoured whiskies in the night I did my best to try and turn out decent notes. Hope you like them.
