Beware The Hypersonic Mackerel...

SPIRIT NOTES

We found this one immediately full of tar with abundant black pepper, hardwood resins, burning fir wood, smoked mint, lardons charring in a cast iron skillet, chilli sauce and smoked honey. A fusion of super intense peat smoke with big, syrupy sweet PX sherry influence – and yet, somehow, a balance is struck. With water it got thicker and greasier, with camphor, chimney soot, deep and gravelly smokiness, paprika, creosote and aniseed distillate. On the neat palate we found smoked German cheese, bradan rost salmon, natural tar, pink antiseptic ointment, salty Dutch liquorice, green peppercorns and anchovy paste. It gave us the sense of a smoked mackerel fillet colliding with a petrol station forecourt, plus mercurial antiseptic. With water we felt like it had morphed into gentian eau de vie drizzled over charred artichoke, or charred brisket on a hot BBQ with buffalo hot sauce, fish stock, bandages, scorched rosemary wood and rollmop herrings twanged at a hot car engine. Matured for five years in a bourbon hogshead, this was then transferred to a second fill PX hogshead.