The M&H (Milk & Honey) Elements Sherry Cask

Tasting notes:
Sometimes sherry cask whiskies take time to open up.  You know it, I know it.  But sometimes it’s fun to just go after it and see what happens.  [Stephen: Said no one.  Ever.  Bill: The no-oneiest noones never even didn’t say it.  Stephen: What?  Bill: Um, right.  What you said.]  So without any further ado, I’m going to crack this thing open and…

Well, it opens with a prairie dog Dutch oven.  All of the vigilant squeaking they do when predators appear?  It’s just screams of “fire in the hole.”  This gives way to fetid oil on a pond in full algae bloom.  It’s the kind of algae bloom that is so robust you could sell it at 90% off in a Persian rug sale.  It’s the kind of algae bloom where the algae itself starts talking about how it’s too much, it’s just too much.  No sooner does the algae conversation begin to get heated and factions are formed, than we get fecal undertones struggling to become overtones.  Then [Stephen: There’s more?] it gets toady.  [Bill: Toady?].  But you know what?  The toadiness starts to win me over.  In time, long after I get stone fruit and the interior jam of three different kinds of purple Pop Tarts, wrapped up together like a toaster-heated breakfast Inception, a big part of me wants to go back to that toady eructation and study it and learn of its ways.    

The mouth is nothing short of redemption.  I’m anchored in safe harbor, or ensconced in a niche, and I look about to see Frog and Toad, together, as they address a matter of the heart with sincerity and directness.  It’s not a matter of the heart, actually, but their pitch of an REM keto cookbook and double album entitled, “What’s the piquancy, Kenneth?”  I’m captivated.  

The finish is the thrum of adult conversation after being sent to my childhood bed.  We didn’t have the acronym FOMO back then, but that fear was real.  Why were the adults getting to have all the fun when I could just be in the middle of it, in my pajamas, dazzled by the flashes of jewelry, the mirth and wit, the smells of cigarette smoke and perfume, and the sounds of contentment and satiety?  For you see, the finish is a mutation of our memory of the nose with the addition of almond paste, and sherried-soaked logs put into a roaring furnace.  Tannic lip smacks are all I hear now from my bed as I stare at my ceiling frowning up at a world that doesn’t care.

   

Rating:
On the scale of facts about REM and food–

The M&H (Milk & Honey) Elements Sherry Cask is the fact that Chef Alton Brown got his break working on the video for REM’s “Losing My Religion“–We think the Milk & Honey Elements succeeds in bringing things together that you might not have put together until you tried ‘em.

   

   

                                                                                      —John

   

   

–Our thanks to ImpEx for the sample!