The Single Cask Nation Catoctin Creek 3 Year Old Rye Whisky (White Wine Cask)

750 ml molasses butter canteen

Single-Cask-Nation-Catoctin-Creek-3-Year-Old-RyeTasting notes
The nose on this beauty calls to mind a redolent yak cheese I shared in the Mongolian steppe.  Byaslag, it was, and we dipped it into a cup of tea that fogged my glasses and warmed my belly.  Mealy, grainy, and sharp.  But above all, there’s a punky, off-cheese note.  It’s like a chunk of muenster set in a stoneware soap dish to fool my mother.  Tannic and serious.  Concerted, focused.  Later, the nose offers a single high-end, bespoke caramel cut into a rakish parallelogram.  Caramelogram.

The mouth is several silver dollars held in the maw of a gift horse. I’m drinking over-steeped black tea from a cantaloupe half.  Something green–and a touch weird.  Freshly-fallen pine needles littering the forest floor after several raccoons scamper up the trees.  A willow branch corset with thorn padlock.  Succulents with thick, meaty leaves.

Is there beef tallow on the finish?  There’s something so savory and chewy that it begins to pull my mouth into a librarian’s disapproving pucker, but he’s a punk rock librarian and the pucker is, actually, the snarl of resistance and the smirk of knowing that he cannot be touched.  More figures slot in kaleidoscopically.  Molasses butter on a Wasa cracker.  Fuzzy bark tree sap (staghorn sumac, to be precise).  A deck made when the lumber was still wet and which now groans against the nails as it dries in the Phoenix sun.

 

Rating:

On the scale of the greatest players on the Phoenix Suns
The SCN Catoctin Creek 3 Year Old Rye Whisky (White Wine Cask) is Charles Barkley–Though he only played for a few years, he was nevertheless the league MVP on a team he led to the NBA Finals in 1992-93.  Also, he was never, in any way, turrible.

 

                                                        –John

  


–Our thanks to Single Cask Nation for the sample!

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