Kilkerran 8 Year Cask Strength (56.2% ABV)

This is one of my favorite distilleries. Fruit is the first prominent note on the nose. Dried banana chips, lemons, peaches, pineapples, tobacco, tea bags, hay and straw show up too. Going in neat is hot at 56.2% ABV, but not surprising. The palate brings a lot of flavors (same notes as nose), but needs a couple drops to fine tune it, more than usual. It has a nice medium mouth coat with a long woody, sourdough, and fruit salad finish. With all this talk of fruit, the theme to this dram should be "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel because of the cool claymation video. A very nice 4.0, but I think I may prefer the 12, depending on the mood. This one is great, but you have to be in the mood to work for it with the water drops.

Nose: Mild, soft and almost floral smoke. Leather, sweet malt, brine, earth, seaweed/iodine, menthol, eucalyptus, deep rich but subtle soft fruit (apricot, peach, over-ripe orange). If 24 carat gold had an aroma, it would be like this. A great nose. Palate: A spicy and smoky arrival with cracked black pepper and chili that is balanced in the development by sweet cereal and stone fruit flavours, a little vanilla, and a touch of oak. It’s an earthy palate overall, but there is sweetness as well. Finish: Long, with smoky and sweet/salt notes, like a very mild salt licorice. Some lime zest in the finale. A really good whisky that is very similar to the Kilkerran 12 year old expression but turns up the amplitude of everything throughout. Being younger, there is a slight prominence to its smoky nature and the fruity, honey and vanilla characteristics that it shares with the 12 year old are not quite as developed. Altogether this gives it a more exuberantly fresh profile, but even so there is an elegance and assurance about it. However it’s not what I’d call a soft presentation - you engage with this whisky on its terms, not yours. Bottling it at cask strength ups the ante further, adding considerable drive to the expression. For what is a fully bourbon cask matured whisky I detected only a little vanilla, so I guess refill casks were used. It’s certainly very spirit-driven. I enjoyed this very much, but on the whole I enjoy the 12 year old 46% expression even more. Others might prefer the strength and vigour of this cask-strength version, but for me the balance in the 12 year old is perfect and more engaging. Sampled at a Sydney whisky shop tasting, January 2018. “Very Good” : 85/100 (4 stars)