Jameson Caskmates IPA Edition

N: Tropical fruit and/or flowers, particularly pineapple and whipped banana. There's wood under that along with sweet breads or even bread pudding. A tart overripe green apple note comes in later. It's a quite pleasant nose. P: The fruit is there up front, but more subdued and with less separable flavors. Caramel, vanilla, and some spice - with a bit of a surprising pot still character no less - are more assertive, as one might expect. Other subtler flavors: toffee, butterscotch, and a rich but less sweet bread than the nose would suggest. Then the hops start to hit the palate: dank and bitter with a mild souring nature. I'm not really sure where the finish starts here: the spice hits fairly early, but never leaves; much later the hops come in and leave you with a grapefruit-like bitterness (albeit far less bitter than actually drinking an IPA) and occasional floral hits. That said, wherever the finish begins, the mix of the whiskey and IPA flavors is very hit and miss - sometimes it works really well and sometimes it's almost cringe inducing. That said, the IPA bitterness has grown on me some - I hated it at first, but now, at the end of maybe the third bottle of this I've had in ~3 years, it feels fairly well balanced against the spice in the finish. It's an interesting and odd experience, though, to take a sharp inhale after a sip and feel both that pot still spice and a hoppy IPA run through your nasal cavity. I have a hard time reconciling the ideas, although I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that can love it. Generally, I kinda just don't hate it (anymore). Side note 1: I'm fairly new to thinking seriously about whiskey (drinking at home is a silver lining of the pandemic for me), but I've been a serious beer drinker for nearly two decades. I've tried thousands of beers, written hundreds of reviews of beers, traveled for beer, attended beer events, written seriously about beer from a legal and academic perspective, visited dozens of breweries, etc, you get the point. I can count on one hand how many barrel-aged IPAs I've had - two, maybe three if I forgot one. The ones I have had were more of a novelty than a truly memorable beer. Barrel flavors and extreme hop flavors don't play nice together. You have to build a certain type of IPA in order to make it work with barrel flavors, and it's not what most people think of when they think of IPA, and even then it's just not likely to be great. I'm still (anxiously) waiting for that great whiskey barrel aged IPA. So this begs the question: where is all of the Jameson barrel aged IPA that would be required to allow Jameson to put dozens of bottles of this IPA barrel aged whiskey on every grocery and liquor store shelf in the United States (primarily, I assume, as I don't know that IPA means as much or has the same marketing value in most other parts of the world)? Something just doesn't add up. Even if Jameson uses the IPA barrels multiple times, which I have to assume would have diminishing returns, it seems there would need to be far more barrel aged IPA sitting on shelves somewhere in the world than I think it's likely that there is. I don't really have a conclusion to draw from that, just an observation and a hmmm moment. (And, yes, I have looked into where Jameson sources the barrels and the answers I found suggest that either Ireland is awash in barrel aged Pale Ales/IPAs - unlikely - or my question still stands.) Side note 2: I don't really think this blend is exactly the same as regular Jameson. There just seems to be a slightly different core flavor here, and it seems to match too well with IPA flavors. The bitterness I talked about in my regular Jameson review doesn't show up here - there's nothing tannic in this. I doubt that throwing Jameson in an IPA barrel for a few hours or few days or whatever "finishing" means to Jameson would change that tannic bite. More likely is that it's easier to just adjust the blend a little and get a product better suited to the IPA flavors. Wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Needed a gift and wanted something different, non traditional. So i bought one for myself as well! Nice sweet mild smelling. Smooth on the toung, no bitter or hard bite, nice flavor of the ipa, not at all overbearing. Low warmth going down. Was a good choice.