Upshot Red Corn

Upshot Red Corn the last stop on my Whipper Snapper journey today. Red Corn is a relatively new addition to the Whipper Snapper corn series created to highlight the many different varieties of maize, and the first of many to come apparently. Now sold out until sometime next year I have managed to get a second tasting this week from the very last bottle which is at about 50% empty. The red corn used here is a rare heirloom variety, also known as ‘Jimmy Red’, which was a favourite amongst southern U.S moonshiners in the early 1900s, apparently. Back in 2018 Whipper Snapper sourced the variety from the same farmer who grows the Whipper Snapper yellow corn, at the Bothkamp family farm in Kununurra in northernmost Western Australia. N: Very soft. Is your head sinking into a really good pillow a smell? It should be. Delicately floral, sweetness from honey, slightly nutty and with a background of pear. Overtime starts to feel slightly oily. P: Arrival texture walks a tightrope between oily and syrupy. Vanilla and toffee forward that initially masks subtle crisp green apple and light honey. There is a creamy texture but I am not finding as much wood as in the yellow corn upshot. As I near the end of the pour there is a macadamia or Brazil nut like quality that is really interesting. F: Medium-short. Toasty nuttiness, caramel-brown sugar, soft chocolate. Surprisingly complex. Kununurra is a fantastic place, I have spent around 6-8 months of my life looking at rocks there, up in the very furthest north of Western Australia. Kununurra is a violent environment, incredible temperatures of over 45 °C, insane deluges, fires, incredible humidity, unforgiving ancient landscapes of rocky canyons, dry scrub land and deadly snakes. This whisky is not that. Very far from it. In a word, delicate. This is perhaps not unsurprising, but the Red Corn is a completely different whisky to its regular yellow corn Upshot brethren. Delicate and light, here is a liquid with unexpected gentleness and novel character. It requires a lot of patience and hard contemplation to get out of it what it offers. I must have spent close to an hour with this and I’m not satisfied I’m done with it. It’s a little bit of an anticlimax then to have to say that after all that it’s less enjoyable than the regular upshot. I will concede it is superior, but it was just a lot of work. I wonder what a freshly opened bottle would hold? Distiller whisky taste #120