Nose: Apple, pear, vanilla, barley sugar, cherries, a waft of honeysuckle. Palate: Sweet and salty in the arrival like a combination of salted caramel and diluted honey. As it develops, the basket of orchard fruits that was the standout feature of the nose also shows up on the palate together with berries and rosewater. In the later palate I get a faintly bitter, grassy note but it’s not unpleasant. The texture is OK, nothing special, but it is creamier than the core-range 12 year old. Finish: Medium/Long. Orchard fruits trailing into black tea tannin, but the lingering aftertaste is mildly salty and sweet. This is immediately identifiable as Glenlivet whisky and very specifically as the standard 12 year old core-range expression turned up a notch in volume. It was 100% refill bourbon cask matured and was not chill-filtered but for some reason it was artificially coloured. My immediate question when tasting this for the first time (apart from what moron thought a special anniversary release that was otherwise purist in concept should be coloured with e150a) was "why is this not part of the core-range?". Doing so would not undermine sales of the standard 12 year old as this would definitely be more expensive, but it would earn back some street-credibility for the distillery that was lost after the release of their recent NAS horrors. Illicit Still was produced as a limited edition for the distillery's 200th anniversary and it was followed by another whisky called the "Licensed Dram” but neither expression is still available. “Good” : 83/100 (3.5 stars)