This is the second oldest bottle in my collection, one I bought on March 6, 2020. How do I remember that? Do I hold onto my receipts? Well, sometimes, but not in this case. I remember because I had bought this to keep in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. Now, don’t be mistaken, I would never drink on the job (I believe despite having a pseudonym here, I should err on the side of caution and make that declaration) except under extraordinary circumstances. At the time Trump was still president. Now don’t worry either, I have no intention of getting political here or stirring things up. It’s just he was doing a bit of that old saber ratting with North Korea at the time, and with the way my mind works, I figured if the missiles started to fly at major cities while I was at work, I might as well have some whisky on hand to drown the fears of impending disintegration. Of course, most of you would say, “Why would you choose Tullamore Cider Cask as your last dram? Why not Lagavulin 16? Why not Laphroaig 10? Or Ardbeg? You, how profess to be such an Islay fan are going with an 80 proof Cider Cask finished Irish whisky?” To which I would answer that it was a different world back then in more than one. I had my youngest child in daycare at the time and that cost our family upward of $10K a year. My wife was saving for a kitchen renovation which meant I was also saving for a kitchen renovation, so if I had the extra cheese to splurge on a bottle of Laphroaig 10, I wasn’t saving it in the bottom drawer of my desk for a nuclear holocaust. I was bringing it home and ripping into it that night. Life is short. Gotta treat yourself. As for this, it was an in-case-of-emergency break glass whisky. It was on clearance for $14.99 and really, with the bombs falling, would I care about taste? The point would be to anesthetize myself. (Also, as an aside, I knew very well then that North Korea didn’t have the capability to reach the East Coast, but in my imagination, as soon as rockets started launching I pictured China jumping in and all hell breaking loose…it might be far-fetched, but you know, I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a plan). Anyway, I stashed the bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk, wrapped in a paper bag, and went home that Friday night, not knowing that I wouldn’t return to my office for another 13 months. You see, I was working from home on Mondays and Thursdays at that time to help me defray daycare costs and keep my youngest with me while I worked those days, and on Monday, when I went to pick up my eldest from kindergarten, the powers that be in our school district decided it was safest to shut down school for the full week because a mother of a child in the district was a caregiver of one of the first COVID cases in our region. I came home and told HR at work, and HR told me, “Why don’t you just work from home this week, too, just to be on the safe side.” So I did. Then the following Monday, cases around here had exploded, and work decided to move us all to temporary work from home for the next few weeks, and those few weeks became another few weeks, and by the end of the year, our CEO had decided the work from home thing was working out well. While we kept an office downtown for those who wanted to still work in an office or do a hybrid model, they decided to sublet half the space and significantly reduce costs by only using the other half as our offices. Thus in May 2021, I went back in to clean out my cube, and I finally got to bring home that clearance bottle of Tullamore Cider Cask that I’d stashed there for another type of end of world scenario. By that point, my youngest was out of daycare and the kitchen was done (yes, we had our kitchen remodeled in the midst of the pre-vaccine pandemic), so I received what felt like a significant pay bump simply because those were no longer costs I had to commit funds too. And that meant, by this point, I was buying much better whisky. The Tully Cider Cask went on my whisky shelf and there it remained until today, when I thought, it’s October, I’ve got my horror movie marathons going, I’ve got my pumpkin spice candle and my pumpkin spice coffee going, why not open the Cider Cask Tully. So I did, I just made my wife a cocktail with it (1.5 parts Tully 1 part Aperol and a dash of Orange Bitters), and I poured myself a dram to review here. So now that the story of this bottle is out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks: how does it tastes, smell, finish? Not necessarily in that order. I have to forewarn you, this is not an amazingly complex whisky. On the nose, it smells like boozy apple cider and vanilla and maybe a little maple syrup. The regular Tully has always tasted to me like apples and oats, and this is pretty much the same with the apples being a little sweeter, more prominent, maybe an apple browning a bit or a caramel apple. It’s really light in the mouth at 80 proof, and if the bombs were falling, I’d likely have had to chug to get myself to the point where I walked outside and waved at the missile as it was coming down on old Willy Penn at City Hall. But, you know, I probably wouldn’t have had a problem chugging. Hopefully no one would be asking me to share. In any case, the finish is short, but that’s to be expected too because the base of this, I believe, is the standard Tully where the finish is also short. All in all, however, I can’t hate on this. It is exactly what it advertises itself to be, it was priced accordingly and there might be a slight edge of astringency, but it’s not enough to ruin the experience. Actually, this is a pleasant little fall treat that’s not going to rock your world, but it’s also not something to turn your nose up at. And if you have some apple cider, this is the perfect thing to spike it with, though if you have Aperol and Orange Bitters, you should make the cocktail I describe above, because that’s probably the best use I can see this going to. And what’s the oldest bottle in my collection you might ask? It’s a bottle of Glenfiddich Fire and Cane that I also got on clearance (in that case $25 dollars) in the summer of 2019 before the shit really hit the fan. I’ll get to that one someday, but for some reason, the longer a bottle has been unopened in my collection, the harder it is to open. Usually I have to find an occasion. For the Tully Cider, the occasion is my favorite season, my favorite month, and a celebration that there is, this year, a Friday the 13th smack dab in the sort of middle of October.