Compass Box Flaming Heart (Sixth Edition)

Smoke, red apple, fresh fruit nose. Smoke hits the tip and sides of your tongue...in a good way. Taste and finish like if you took a bite of BBQ’d pork and cinnamon apple sauce.

Nose: burnt malt, lemon pound cake. Vanilla and apple. Caramel and burnt toffee. Heavy honey. Caster sugar and raspberry. Peat is not really present at all. Very sweet nose. Taste: sea salt and caramel with vanilla and light banana. Peat shows up immediately on the taste then transitions to a bananas foster and then ends strongly with peat and oak. Peat transforms after a while into bacon grease and burnt cheese then into burnt rubber. Leaving a few minutes after the sip really lets the peat evolve. Water brings some sweet and sharp malt notes to the front. Taste really brings out all the sherry along with some pepper but buries the malt. Finish transform into cherry chocolate covered almonds with a strong pepper finish with a heavy burnt peat taste. Letting this one sit in the bottle for a few months definitely improved it as did taking a few minutes between sips.

Peat smoke, sherry, strawberry, and salt are some of the aromas. This is dry and smoky. It starts with a quick sweet sherry note and develops into charcoal and bitter dark chocolate.

Nose: very strong black pepper and malt with a hint of the sherry cask. Honey, vanilla cream, and light caramel as well. Taste: christmas fruit cake with very lightest hint of some peat at the back. Very intensely sherried almonds and grapes. The peat represents itself as cheese and bacon grease after you get past the sherry notes. Very dry oak on the finish Water makes the nose very honeyed and crisp with pear notes. Taste is much of the same sherry notes with a long after taste of rubber

You can generally tell whether a limited run whiskey is a great dram at the right price point..if its sold out. 2 years later this still hasn't. At $130 there are probably a couple of hundred drams (literally) I'd buy over this. Similar to the Juveniles release I'm picking a price drop. CB has been just too detached from reality over the last couple of years in their special releases. No doubt COIVD-19 may put paid to that. Sometimes when they do something special it really is hard to put a price on greatness and it's hard to argue if it's overpriced or not. There is no hesitation with this one..it is. Peat monster is 40% of the price and not to far off this one (albeit a different dram). I heard this was a pale imitation of the original and that seems correct. Simple Caol Ila style dram, higher abv and lighter style wrapped in expensive clothing and priced accordingly. Move on folks nothing to recommend purchasing hear unless you see it 50% off. Even then just go for the real deal Caol Ila 18