It’s been a minute, let’s see if I can remember how to do this… It has been my experience to date that whisky shown peat in the form of a barrel previously housing plated whisky can have mixed outcomes. Sometimes good, sometimes less so. Here the Welsh druids have taken their own Welsh malt and introduced ex-Laphroaig quarter casks. I am hopeful that the Welsh and the Scots can get along well here… N: Unexpectantly bright and fresh. The subtlest hint of Germoline underlies a waxy furniture polish, vanilla, crisp green apple, and maybe a lemon-pine type affair. The smoke arrives relatively late for me, and when it does its dry and slightly vegetal, like crunchy brown leaves smouldering on a bonfire. P: Delicate but laced with savoury biscuity-vanillin, crisp apple and an SSB wine like gooseberry, lemon rind. A briny-salty-smoke dance plays like a fleeting summer there is the invocation of smoking fish on a pebble coast. F: More delicacy, a wonderful perfumed florally driven crispness is the take away message here. Brilliantly delicate with a lovely balance between the sweet and crisp malt and the powerhouse laphroaig barrel. The barrel has done in incredibly good job of supporting and elevating the malt without becoming a monster like the liquid that once filled it. It could be that the Welsh are onto something and I’m keen to track down some more of these liquids. Distiller whisky tastes #302 [Pictured here with a chunk of blue schist from the Isle of Anglesey in Wales. This (not so blue looking) rock is from a high pressure remnant of a subduction zone. Around 550 million years ago a cold slab of basaltic oceanic crust was subjected and reached very high temperatures at comparatively low temperatures, only 300-500 degrees C for 14 km of depth. The result of this subduction; metamorphic rocks packed full of beautiful blue glaucophane] Penderyn running scores Madeira: 4/5 Peated: 4/5