The Springbank Burns Malt 18 Year 1996 from The Whisky Barrel

Tasting notes:
The nose, at first, burns like holy water spritzed on Regan MacNeill.  It’s a tight, controlled nose–unyielding in fact.  Consider a rhinoceros with laser-sharpened toffee tusk charging toward you across the Candy Land savannas of your nightmares.  But then, felicitously, it turns to gore your romantic rival.  That’s when the array of salt spray hits you, as if a Lyman boat turned hard and submerged your thick canvas inflatable raft with a seaweedy wave.  Bouncing in the wake you find a thoroughly mellowed, thoroughly velvety cornucopia of fruity smells.  Imagine that in a dream you’ve opened a box of Crayola crayons, the big one with the 64 colors, but each one is a different lollipop.

The mouth is just undeniable.  It is so truly scrumptious that I break into the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song book.  How to describe it?  It produces sugarplum, lollipop, and toot sweet feeling of youth, but in a totally adult, must-be-21-years-old kind of way.  Even with my romantic rival desperate to scoop his entrails back into his abdomen, I turn to my inamorata and pledge my love to this Springbank expression.  And by the look in her eye, she knows.

The finish is a long walk on an even longer beach.  Powder-fine diamonds crunch under foot and liquefied sapphires wash up on my feet leaving a crushed-opal foam on the tops of my toes.  Tiny tasers used to revive mayflies fire against my tastebuds, spider silk hair ties pulling back their antennae.  I feel my body turning into ribbons and I am become jellyfish.

–Our thanks to Alastair and The Whisky Barrel for the sample!