The Limavady Single Barrel Single Malt Irish Whiskey

Tasting notes:
On the nose, we find freshly cut lemon wedges smeared with pomegranate butter. But that’s not all. We find grapefruit-encrusted daisy petals, and cinnamon toast sprinkled with lava ash and alstroemeria. Above all the fruity and the floral are wrapped together like a caduceus in which the understudies–in this case, a stoat and a mongoose–got star billing.

The mouth is creamy and satisfying, but still feisty. Think of a pesto turned almost white with the addition of mascarpone cheese; there’s liveliness and brio, but also smooth silkiness. As we reflect further, we see again the interplay of fruit and floral dimensions in a happy complexity. [Bill: “But the demoted caduceus snakes–are they happy? Stephen: “How does this have any bearing on the whiskey?”]

The finish returns us to the lemons on the nose, but this time as gemlike lemon drops chiseled into Johnson solids by magical mathematical elves. They are using banana hammers to make the fine facets. We are impressed by their ingenuity, and resolve to fill our glasses again.

     

 

Rating:
On the scale of Christmas tree descriptions given nearly 200 years ago by the York, Pennsylvania, Society of Bachelors—

The Limavady Single Barrel Single Malt Irish Whiskey is “superb, superfine, superfrostical, [and] shnockagastical.”–The Society of Bachelor’s say also that their Christmas trees “cannot fail to gratify taste,” and we found that to be precisely the case with Limavady’s delightful entry into the single malt category.  

   

   

                                                                                      —John

   

   

–Our thanks to Limavady for the sample!