When this was released last year, I felt I had to do a bottle-share with a couple of its compatriots. Especially since this has all the statistics of a very interesting whisky

• I tend to like the whiskies bottled by Paul and Simon Thompson
• I tend to like Mannochmore
• I like the beers from Black Isle Brewery
• The ABV is slightly elevated without being napalm

All these things sound good to me! Also, at 12 years old it was aged acceptably and the price wasn’t too high either. That’s far from a given, nowadays.

So, let’s see if this works out!

Sniff:
Very spirity with the sweet notes of alcohol. Very spirity indeed. I also don’t get much of the stout. Not a lot of barley, not a lot of roasted malt. Strange.

Sip:
Again, almost like its new spirit, with a bit of alcohol sweetness. There is a bit of white pepper, and a bitterness that I don’t attribute to the malt of stout beers.

Swallow:
There is a bit of oak that I didn’t find before. Also some creamy richness that’s new. Suddenly the cask is making a wee dent, but it’s still mostly raw spirit in a lazy cask.

Well, it didn’t. Work out that is. It is like the cask barely influenced the whisky at all, except maybe to remove some barley notes. There are some different variables, but I wasn’t too far from thinking this tasted like a cask aged vodka. Rather flat, not a lot of oak. I can’t detect what the beer cask has done to the whisky.

In short, this was absolutely not my cup of tea. Nor was it my glass of whisky.

Let’s hope that there are more experiments like this, but with a better outcome. The concept of a strong stout beer cask with a whisky that leaves room for it still sounds good, in my book!

78/100