Whisky : Octomore X4+10 Concept_02

Country/Region : Scotland/Islay

ABV : 70%

Cask : Ex-Bourbon/Wine/Sherry

Nose : Sweet and clean with just a touch of BBQ smoke.  Grain or grassy sweetness, clean linens, citrus spritz, dash of salt, and some mocha give an understated complexity to the nose.  The overall sweetness is less candy than it is candy wrapper.

Palate : Thick and oily the whisky just pours across and sticks to the palate.  Lightly salted caramel, peanut brittle, and warm milk give the impression of whisky sitting at the crossroads of salty, sweet, nutty, and creamy.  Full steam ahead, the dram is firmly pointed in the direction of more saccharine notes.   Smoke from a distant grassfire hints at more stereotypical peat notes and comes with a slight dryness.

Finish : Lingering salted caramel nuts.

Grade : One Owl, Three Turkeys.

Mental Image : Praline Milkshake.

Notes : This is weird.

So what does the weird name mean?  First up, Octomore is Bruichladdich’s super heavily peated range of whiskies and this edition clocks in at 162 PPM.  The X4 refers to the fact that the team at Bruichladdich quadruple distilled this batch of Octomore— not a common approach in contemporary scotch making, though something that was more common in the distant (and unregulated) past.  Finally, +10 refers to the 10 years spent in a variety of casks.

Would it be shocking if I said this does not drink like it is 70% abv?  Probably not— I doubt they would have bottled it if it felt like rocket fuel burning out your senses.  This dram finished 10 years in the cask with an alcohol content 1% higher than Octomore typically even goes into the cask.  In fact, Bruichladdich states that this came off the stills at a blinding 89% before mellowing out over the last decade.

So what to make of this?  It is just weird.  I want to say that I do not like it— I was certainly neither swept off my feet, nor wallowing in regret that I did not jump into the buying frenzy when it came out and swamped the gerbils turning the wheels to run Bruichladdich’s servers— but I did not hate it.  I thought it would be more like vodka than scotch after a quadruple distillation and I do not think that impression is totally wrong— though it is not correct.  This sits somewhere between typical Octomore characteristics and an excellent craft Vodka that still has a lot of character from its raw materials (maybe because it has not been six times distilled or whatever nonsense vodka makers are pushing.)

If you need a rating to feel satisfied, just take a pen and write a C where the grade goes— it was fun to try out, but it does not get close to crossing into the territory of something I would buy or wish I had, yet there is something weirdly attractive about this that kept me from putting a real score.  This is a bottle for the collector or the fan of Octomore who wants to try something a bit different in order to keep the relationship feeling fresh and new.  If this were an assignment, I would hand it back to the student with the note “either you missed the point of the assignment, or I missed the point you wanted to make: come see me.”