The Whistler Double Oaked

Nose: Mild grassy, cereal aromas for the most part. A little vanilla and some floral/fruity orchard notes but it’s a bit too laid-back for its own good and you can easily smell the grain whiskey component (especially on the dry glass). Given time in the glass it expands, but not a great deal, and a drop of water helps as well. Palate: Sweet, cereal, malty arrival that is pleasant but one-dimensional. Butterscotch and barley sugar show up in the development but overall the palate is lacklustre and a bit thin. The texture is silky but watery. Finish: Short, fast. The palate quickly dies out into a simple ethanol aftertaste. A generic lower-mid shelf Irish blend that displays all the better profile characteristics of its class and mercifully none of the faults. Boann distillery only ran their first spirit in 2019 so this is a sourced product. They are coy about this aspect of their operations and don’t divulge their sources, but it seems to me very much like a blend of Bushmills malt with grain whiskey (which could have come come from almost anywhere). Although pot-still whiskey is not listed as a component on the label I did get a characteristic aroma of unmalted barley on the nose, but maybe this is coming from the grain whisky. Anyway, this is average and underachieving stuff, but it is admittedly very easy to drink. Adding water makes it even more accessible and also amplifies the sweet notes throughout, bringing out a caramel fudge flavour. This is a perfectly acceptable session whiskey but at the price it is directly competing with Bushmills Black Bush which is a better whiskey in every respect. While I was tasting this I kept thinking how much better it might have been if the malt content had been 35% instead of only 20%. With a bit more presence it would score a whole point higher. “Adequate” : 74/100 (2.25 stars)