Tastes

My favorite release from Starward yet! Aroma is sweet with malty and fruity notes; Palate is a soft velvety delivery of fruity, candy, earthy and malty tones; Finish slides through warmly and far too quickly.

Aroma is good with a soft sweet complexity that pulls in some fruity roasty notes; Palate is a blend of young notes and old notes with pops of spirit here and there mixing with spicy and herbal notes; Finish is nice, but picks up a bit of that woody craft profile.

Meh… Aroma isn’t bad, just boring and comes through like slightly spicy clay; Palate is a touch fruity but mostly young and woody; Finish is the best part and seems to pull out more mature and complex notes than the rest.

Overwhelming craft essence. Aroma has a lot of grain notes and woody notes, it gets a tad spirity as it opens; Palate pulls through mostly raw woody notes and opens up to some banana chips, grain and spirity notes also continue to build; Finish is pleasant but also turns a tad spirity as it opens.

So good… so good. Four Gate Whiskey Batch 4 – (Split Stave By Kelvin) carries a deep heavy complex profile that’s tasty and rich yet restrained and balanced. It’s not a wild whiskey but rather heavy and elegant. Water opens up some biscuity, cocoa powder and peanut notes on the Nose. On the Palate it opens up to more dark fruit and introduces some leather, citrus, nuts and hints of baked apples.

Unique with well-balanced cognac and whiskey notes. Aroma is sweet and the grapey brandy notes are readily apparent with the whiskey notes coming through on the lighter side; Palate is a bit darker with more of the dark sweetness coming through along the lines of brown sugar and molasses with the whiskey notes kicking up heavily right before the finish; Finish starts out as cognac and moves to whiskey then fades sweet and butterscotchy.

It’s a decent whiskey. Aroma is a nice standard bourbon profile but bolstered by soft fruity candy notes; Palate is sweeter than the aroma and carries even more fruity notes; Finish is soft and equally rustic with nice dessert profiles.

Aroma is classic Booker’s but a bit drier and more oak-driven, not as oily and sweet as many other batches; Palate is quite nutty but here the sweet notes come up to balance out the oak more; Finish is a nice even fade out of sweet and rustic notes. Water brings out even more oak and nuttiness on the aroma, on the palate it turns the fruit a bit jammy and some biscuity notes arrive that remind me of the Jim Beam Distiller’s Cut.

Sweetly interesting. Aroma is soft and sweet with layers of sweets without much in the way of rustic notes to balance it out; Palate follows suite being sweet all around without much to balance it out; Finish picks up more nutty notes and kind of ends like a PB&J.

Aroma has a heavy baking spice – nutmeg dominant – quality to it, that sits nicely with the dessert and fruity sweet notes; Palate though is so so sweet, just one heavy sweet note after another that pummels through building and escalating to just shy of the tipping point; Finish borders on cloying, but pulls up just short with some dash of oak to keep it in line.