The Pearse Founder’s Choice 12 Year Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey

Tasting notes:
The nose on the Pearse Founder’s Choice 12 Year Old opens with 12 year old panpipes made from Cat O’Nine tails—meaning, Ms. Catherine O’Nine’s tailored suits (from Ann Taylor). We got eroded limestone walls in a canyon cut by a bubbling brook, and also lemon juice mixed into chocoloate chip cookie batter. (Raise your hand if you prefer the raw batter to the baked cookie!) We also got premium, high-end, Kanye West-endorsed, suntan lotion gently and lovingly rubbed into the skin of your 12 year old… hairless …Sphynx cat. For an Irish whiskey, it’s big, complex, and tumescent. “It ain’t the teat, it’s the tumidity.” 

The mouth is resplendent with burnt caramel bitters bought in a Caribbean gift shop. There was also a faint trace of velour—perhaps from a smoking jacket?—that when tracked down, turned out to be a T-Rex skeleton’s bones wrapped by Christo in velour. Perhaps to floor your paramour? Sure. Scandalously, Stephen also found a baggie with a half-inch of grass at the bottom.

[Stephen: Bill! It was grass clippings from the Master’s Golf Tournament! Clippings! Clippings! From one of the middle days of the tournament.] 

We got also a velvet chaise lounge from the deck of an Italian villa on the Adriatic Sea, that was left outside, maybe a tad longer than it should’ve been in the elements, to air out. 

The finish notably evoked a butterscotch scone, a delicious buttery, scotchy, sconey island of my mind. (Apologies to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet who recently crested 100 years of age, and marked the occasion by publishing his memoirs.) There are also roast almonds and little chunks of toasted coconut in the scone, with a surprising burst of umami at the tail end.

 
 

Rating:
On the scale of triply-lucky flora–

The Pearse Founder’s Choice 12 Year Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey is a 12-leaf clover—One leaf per year, the triple luck of a triple-distilled Irish whiskey: a 12-sip program to happiness.

   

   

                                                                        —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to Pearse Lyons and Engelstad Spirits for the sample!