Whisky : Allt-A-Bhainne 23 Year; Jack Wieber’s Fighting Fish

Country/Region : Speyside

ABV : 54.1%

Cask : Ex-Bourbon (Distilled 1993, Bottled 2016)

Tasting : Neat in a Glencairn @ Home

Nose :  Mellow and restrained, the full range of subtle complex notes take time to emerge.  There is a bit of a funk like hardboiled eggs, vinegar, or slightly off fish that permeates the nose.  Beyond the funky aroma of a hawker center food court in the early morning there are tasty tropical fruits: snake fruit, lychee, and coconut.  Honeyed sweetness comes out along with a bit of green grape or tart grapefruit.  There is so many interesting things buried in the aroma that it is easy to miss the faint smoke of ginger or turmeric frying on a well seasoned cast iron wok.

Palate : Restrained with a straight jacket, the profile is mellow almost to the point of being like sweet watery mead.  The dram tastes old, not refined, but like old things: a shriveled lemon, dried flowers, and overripe fruit.  A sour bitterness comes on the back end: sulfur stink, dried salted plums, bitter menthol.  In two separate blind tastings the wife described it as ‘licking a mossy stump’ and then as ‘bamboo panda snack.’  There is certainly some wood influence, but aside from a punch of spice near the opening the dram ends up mostly slightly sour honey water.

Finish : Lingering sour and bitter notes of lemons, sulfur, and oak spices.

Score : 2

Mental Image : Tropical Food Stalls at Night; near the garbage a sweet putrid scent hands in stale air.

Something Better : Caol Ila 6 Year SMWS 53.276 (similar moss & rot, less bitter, more cohesive)

Something Similar : Yamazaki 12 Year (similar fruit, less rotten, less complex, less finish)

Something Worse : Dewars White Label (similar mead/sweetness, less complex, more tea notes)

Notes :  Oh man this was a bit disappointing.  I was exuberant to try another Allt-A-Bhainne after running into such a great one with SMWS 108.14 “An Enjoyable Curiosity.”  I really wanted to like this one, but I just could not get there.  At more than three times the age and price, this was just no where near as impressive, and it certainly was not three times better.  It was interesting— just not cohesive.

The flavors were not all bad, but on the whole they just feel a bit washed out and the bitter notes a bit too prevalent.  This is so adjacent to being good that it was not a D that could be a C, it was a D that could have been a B if things had just turned out a little bit different.  I am not sure if some of the bitter off notes were a product of the cask— usually I would associate those more with sherry than bourbon, or if that is just part of the spirit.  I usually love all sorts of rotten notes and the aroma of a tropical hawker center with its lines of food stalls makes my mouth water.  There were just too many bitter or sour notes flittering around in there for the decay and fruits to really come together in a tasty package.  The dram was a bit too restrained to really bite into and savor, just too washed out (or up) in the end.

Maybe the fact that the distillery is misspelled on the label should have been a warning?