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History In A Bottle Day 23: First Editions Aberlour 23 Year KWM Cask

Posted on December 23, 2022

This post is Bonus Content. It has information on one of the KWM Cask bottles that are featured on the back of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar box. You can find the blog post for the mini bottle for Day 23 of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

The Outturn on this whisky might seem low, but that’s because we had minis filled and featured in our KWM Whisky Calendar on Day 23, in 2018. This was an exciting cask at the time, a 23-year-old Aberlour for starters, something you don’t see too often, but even more curiously, it was a peated Aberlour.

The whisky was a beast, though a gentle one, with a profile nothing like the sherried style the distillery is famous for. A prominent hint of peat on the nose and clean smoke on the palate. Far from over-oaked, the whisky was also decadent and tropical. It isn’t the only Aberlour single cask we bottled, we also put our name on a 19-year-old 1994 Berry Bros & Rudd cask of Aberlour back in 2014. It too was atypical for the distillery, matured in a first fill ex-Bourbon Hoggie!

First Editions Aberlour 23-Year KWM Cask

This is our 2nd single cask of Aberlour and our first-ever exclusive single cask under the First Editions label. Only 151 bottles were filled from a Refill Hogshead cask, Ref: HL14881, bottled at 58.8% after 23 years.

Andrew's Tasting Note

Nose: old English butterscotch, Tarte Tatin, pecan pie and candied nuts; the nose is big and oily with candied orange; polished Italian leather shoes, brandy-soaked cherries and freshly opened cedar cigar box; is there a slight trace of peat?

Palate: sweet, fruity and coating and then boom... wow this packs some power; more old English butterscotch, Tarte Tatin and candied nuts but also creme Brule, ginger-molasses cookies and treacle tarts; leather and tobacco are there too with building spice; as it settles down (and or the palate adjusts) more delicate tropical fruits emerge: mango and papaya; late chocolate and prominent licorice; there is also a delicate thread of smoke?!

Finish: long, sweet and very fruity; builds into a crescendo of lovely spices, tobacco, leather and tropical fruits; warming, silky and smooth.

Comment: This is a gentle beast of a whisky; the complexity is nearly off the charts including a tantalizing trace of smoke; this is a bold but layered Aberlour, very different from the sherried house style of the Distillery bottlings.

This entry was posted in Whisky, Independent Bottler, KWM Whisky Calendar 2022, KWM Single Cask

 

 

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