Sawyers Bay Unpeated Refill Cask (UR1)

Fourth in my Furneaux Distillery Line Up, and second from the Sawyers Bay range I have cask UR1, a special bottling of Sawyers Bay Unpeated Single Malt. In 2020 Furneaux emptied some peated casks and set them aside for refill with unseated spirit. After three years in the Flinders Island Peated Casks 187 bottles were released in May 2024 at 47% ABV N: Light and restrained. A very white fruit (melon, grape, peach, pear) and mild honey driven nose that has a little grassy and slightly musty undertone that does remind me of the vegetal peat smoke in the Flinders drams from yesterday. A bit of generic tannic spice lifts up the back end and perhaps with enough time pondering, some minerality also. P: Full and luscious. A sharp contrast to the previous double oaked Sawyers Bay. This is a warming sensation from cool smoke and briny tar blended with floral and bright malt rich in golden syrup biscuits, oatmeal and bright, sharp ginger-spice. Juicy white fruit keeps things very drinkable. F: Long. Cool smoke, preserved lemon, tar and mineral laden brine offer a lovely depth to the finish. This surprised me. The previous Sawyers Bay was a generic sherry cask that lacked identify. This though, this is clever. The seemingly aggressively early second cut on the newly made spirit has delivered so much fresh, bright, juicy white fruit that the balance of strong malt flavours has been well balanced with a tempered peat that simply put: works. Bright, floral, and novel there is something for everyone in this dram I think. The nose is a little under developed, but meh; no big deal. My concern now is growing for Furneaux. I worry that they are going to get lost in single cask offerings. I do not believe the two Sawyers Bay drams I have had represent the same underlying character, these two were wildly different. I think that is an omen for jumbled decision making in the warehouse and variable bottling that fail to deliver consistency. I would be hesitant to splash out the high cost for one of these bottles not knowing if I was going to find a hero of a bottle or a generic dud. Distiller whisky taste #278 [Pictured here with a chunk of quartzite from Cradle Mountain in the northwes199t of the Tasmanian mainland. This rock was formed from the massive dolerite intrusions that form pretty much 3/4 of Tasmania pushing up through Cambrian (~500 million year old) sediments during the Jurassic and heating them, and recrystallising them into a hard metamorphic rock]. Furneaux Distillery Running Scores Flinders Island Peated American Oak Ex-Bourbon: 3.5/5 Flinders Island Peated Double Cask: 3.25/5 Sawyers Bay Unpeated Double Oak: 2.75/5 Sawyers Bay Unpeated Refill (Peated) Cask: 4/5