TOPO Eight Oak Carolina Whiskey

Heavy cinnamon nose; very cinnamon and oak flavor. Light to taste, easy drink. Very good!

Nose and taste on this whiskey is very much of raw bread dough. The flavor doesn’t linger at all. It has a slight bubble gum finish.

Burnt sugars and alcohol are the first things to spring to the nose from this glass, but after that the burnt sugar dissipates into some earthier notes that remind me of clay. The taste is more burnt sugar, almost like a marshmallow that’s been charred and then consumed. Toward the tail, a few notes of cocoa can be coaxed out with the aid of a dropper if water. My tasting group nicknamed this whiskey “a burnt smore in a glass”. While it is an interesting whiskey, it is not particularly tasty.

Pretty smooth, sweet flavor. Easy to drink. Gets better as you get deeper into the bottle.

I could not get past the intense heat from this bottle. I have never gotten heartburn from a whiskey like I did this one. I think there may have been an issue with the cork as it kept pushing itself almost all the way off once I loosened the first time. I am going to write it off to the bottle being a one-off quality control issue, but it is disappointing. I love the TOPO brewery and I want to love the distillery, too.

Unusual vanilla oak chip in the bottle. Light, sweet, floral, and then ethanol on the finish. Young, unfinished, needs age. Interesting and well worth trying for the experiment value, but...