Whisky : High Coast 7 Year SMWS 144.2 “Walked off to look for America”

Country/Region : Sweden

ABV : 62.3%

Cask : Charred New Oak Barrel

Age : 7 Year (Distilled 3 Sept. 2012)

Nose : Medicinal spice, pine, and licorice candies.  Opened with notes of dried pine needles, musty pinewood attics, and notes of pine-sol.  Beyond the heady arboreal aromas were notes of creamy butter, cinnamon, black licorice jelly beans, and Mr. Sketch black marker.  Creamy butter and taro pudding stood out with a few drops of water while a faint plastic note (and memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures) hung in the background.

Palate : Creamy and mouth coating with notes of jasmine tea, heavy cream, and creme brûlée.  The mouthfeel was incredibly creamy and oily as if milk fats coated the tongue while herbal notes of jasmine tea and mint gave the impression of a milk tea latte.  Notes of sweet coffee beverages, creme brûlée flavored latte perhaps, as well as floral musk cream candies, coconut cream, brown sugar, and vanilla extract.  A few drops of water brought out more cinnamon, licorice, and cola.

Finish :  Lingering waxy creamy sweets and spice.

Score : 6

Mental Image : Milk Tea with Pudding

Notes : There is definitely some interesting whisky being distilled in Sweden.  I have had my eye on Mackmyra for quite a while so I was a bit surprised when my first chance to try single malt from Sweden came out of High Coast through SMWS.  

I absolutely adore global single malts and love the variations that distillers apply to their products.  I would not claim that you can always taste the terroir of a place through its single malt— not when the barley, water, yeast, and oak might be coming from somewhere else— but the approach of the distillery or the climate for fermentation, distillation and maturation all work to imprint a subtle mark of place onto a dram.  Every world single malt is an act of interpretation or translation, I may know the gist of what to expect, but I am often surprised.

This was pleasantly strange.  It was incredibly interesting with its heady aroma of pine and licorice, flavors that mellowed on the palate as an intensely fatty cream took hold.  I went back and forth whether to score this a bit a higher.  The score is both precise and imprecise— I went with a six as a mark of its subjective quality in terms of whether I would rather drink this or something else.  I was tempted to rate it higher because I thought it was a lot of fun and I have a feeling that this is the sort of dram I may suddenly start to crave.  This was unique and I am left excited and curious to try more from the distillery.

At our local tasting everyone seemed to approach this with hesitation.  Initial comments were lukewarm at best as people found it a bit weird.  By the time we were deep in the glass the room seemed to come around and by the end of the night everyone rated this as one of the best of the night or at least the most interesting.  Yet, the true mark of quality was that a couple months later people are still commenting about the dram and recall it fondly.  While many of the other pours from that evening have faded to memory, even a few scored better than this, this one stuck with people and they remembered how much they enjoyed it or enjoyed coming back to it at home.