Highland Park Fire Edition

Pour from Standard Bottle (Advent Calendar Miniature).

Med dark color Nose of spice and berry Neat: notes of spice, berry, hint of cinnamon. Small amount of after taste with a nice warmth. On the rocks: lost the hints of berry but spice and cinnamon remain .... pick up maybe a little vanilla. After taste smooths out without watered down.

Not worth the cost unlike most their other expressions.

You can really taste the heather. It's so smooth, very slightly smoky, sweet and floral. Everything a great scotch should be.

Pleasant aroma, with a fairly light amount of peat smoke. The peat smoke is stronger on the palette, but it’s still relatively mild. Iodine appears in the long finish. The port influence may appear in the color, but I honestly don’t smell or taste it. It’s a good enough whisky, but I was surprised when I looked it up to see how much a full-size bottle costs. I’d rather spend that money on something else. 3 cl sample from The Premium Whisky Advent Calendar (2020 Edition).

So this was on "fire" sale for 120 and I figured why not. I went in expecting it to suck and well...lets see. Nose - The first impression is that this is very suety and earthy. The "fire" concept isn't out of line at all, this is perhaps the most earthy highland park I can recall, I know I had a few NAS pours where they were as or more peated but still this is coming off more so on the nose. Then there's that port finishing giving way to this dark dark fruit notes that play very well off of the earth character to give you this thought of well kinda lava lol. It's like I'm thinking in my head light purple hues over dark warm earth. So purple it's a bit reddish if you will. Going back I'm starting to get salted meats as well and then I always get a bit of a cooking sheet wax and sugar sweetness off HP's spirit, which I think my buddy mike is saying it white chocolate, I don't agree but I think we're getting that same element. I'm personally not a huge fan but I appreciate where they went here. Taste - Up front I get a lot of sweet and waxy and lightly earthy notes. Plums and dates. Then as it reaches the finish it gets really dirty earthy and funky weird. I could see this has charred oak smoke. Vanilla, chia latte, smoked fish even perhaps and yes some kind of chili powder or other hot peppery note. A really unique series of spices and notes really come through and the whisky is just an ever evolving transition from the start to finish, never staying the same. This all brings me to a difficult score to give as there's a lot here I like and a lot I don't. I however think they really nailed their goal of a "FIRE" edition and in that I have to give some praise while at the same time fully believing most people won't really enjoy this one. As a result the fire is for me a 2.5 out of 5. It's a profile and flavor you can't get elsewhere, it's well executed in terms of their goal, but it's also just weird in ways I don't think others are going to want either. Give I got this 300 MSRP bottles for 120, I'm guessing i'm not alone in my thoughts.