https://youtu.be/ahpzkoPPa4o

I never thought I would be this flabbergasted by any whisky. When you’ve been tasting spirits for this long you don’t really think that anything can shock you in a new way anymore. How wrong I was, and it took this exquisite bottle of Bushmills to prove me wrong.

Spending the first thirteen years of it’s life in ex-bourbon and ex-oloroso casks, it was then transferred to maderia casks for sixteen years! Bit of a stretch of the word ‘finish’, but it works, nonetheless.

A huge amount of this whisky, for me, is the nose. The melding of toffee, coffee, tobacco and this wonderfully sweet and mouth watering minty aroma is jaw dropping. Other whiskies have had this this? Yes, they have. But none have delivered it quite the way this one has.

Nostlagia in the tobacco note is a key thing for me, so many smells of childhood captured in a liquid.

This is the best Irish whisky I’ve ever tried, it even surpasses the greats of Redbreast 15 and 21YO, but it is a single cask. As a result, numbers are low and it has to be treated as the exception that it is. With that said it is still on a different level of extraordinary.