Let’s start off by saying we’re glad that the small distilling and craft distilling businesses are taking off, and recognize that Portland with its craft brewing/distilling should be commended for their efforts. Let’s now move onto the matter at hand which is this garbage gin.
Warning: If you see this text via search result this is a DO NOT BUY alert. This is just a mere 0.25 of a score away from tying for the worst spirit on this site (Club Caribe, another rum), and even beats the E&J VS Brandy fiasco. Quite simply – this is a giant turd of a spirit. If this was a ghost it’d be the kind to possess you to stick Twizzlers in your ear.
If you are a devout daily reader of this site, you may have noticed that this is a spirit on a Wednesday and that a beer review happened yesterday. This is because HBR is undergoing a new change to stymie the onslaught of whiskey taking up so much of the review space for spirits. We’ll now do Whiskey on Wednesday every other week, and leave Monday for all other spirits. Meaning your monthly spirit reviews just jumped from 4 to 6! With that let’s get into the whiskey.
We didn’t actually plan this ahead of time or after the fact (we’re not actually supervillains living in a volcano lair), but we feel it would be in poor taste to not address the current issue facing Hawaii with regards to earthquakes and eruptions and the loss of peoples homes. We’ll have a link to help after the fold, but in truth, we bought this because it looked like a mana potion.
Well folks this week is Cinco de Mayo, and if like you us you make a social statement about mixing up 2 holidays that seem to be effectively reasons to get drunk – well here’s the Irish Whiskey to do that job. Not that it really does anything else beyond cause inebriation, because this is not the redemption story we were all hoping for.
Cinco de Mayo approaches, but fear not we’ll have a proper Irish Whiskey review in time as is usual for our policy. (Although we did miss a Tequila review on St Patrick’s). This was tried initially as part of a Whiskey Weekend at the incomparable Julio’s. We felt it necessary based on some of the wording and awards they had claimed and take them down a peg.
This is ostensibly a site to review hooch. As such we feel it’s worthy to add a disclaimer here – while this is a breakfast gin we do not recommend gin for breakfast. Try cereal or regular orange juice, please. If you need a pick me up go with coffee or tea, please. Now let’s move into the alternate reality where gin for breakfast is apparently a thing.
Leave it to Bowmore to take the common wisdom of ‘oh if it’s been 15 years it’s likely mellow’ and turn it into a fire-breathing monster that reminds you that the other thing you get when maturing a spirit for 15 years is the sheer power of that time.
A rum this week in between so much whiskey that we are trying to space out (we don’t truly apologize, but sorry). This dominican spirit truly does capture something of the tropical rum oft desired with it’s citrus and spice components. However while it is subpar it’s far better than something Pyrat XO…
Once again the duty-free shops of the world’s airports have made the choice of getting another Auchentoshan breed an inevitability. This time instead of Blood Oak we get another blood-related wood thing – Heartwood. It genuinely does live up to that name of being a warm and woody drink, but it’s sadly not that simple.
