There is a very sweet quality almost like cotton candy with those delicious single pot still notes hidden underneath. At 46% abv and no chill-filtration this should be the best Irish whiskey I ever had. So I decided to try a bottle of Powers Johns Lane 12 yr single pot still because I finally found it for less than $70. Back in the good old days Powers Gold Label was my shot of choice. I had given up on Irish whiskey until I came across your review for Redbreast 12 last year. Before I became a single malt fanatic in my mid 30s (I’m 40 now), I spent many great nights in bars doing shots of blended Irish whiskey with beer chasers. This is a little off topic but since you wrote a review of an Irish whiskey I figured I would take the opportunity to ask you a question I’ve been meaning to ask. If you think Redbreast tastes too much like whiskey, then maybe Writers’ Tears is for you.Īs for me, I won’t be buying a second bottle. It has been pointed out that this style of “soft” and (ugh) “smooth” whiskey resonates with drinkers who don’t want strongly-flavored whiskey. Writers’ Tears is more well put-together and thought-provoking than a blended Irish whiskey, but it pales in comparison to Redbreast 12, which is only $7 more expensive in my state, and has an age statement to boot. There is a cask-strength version floating around, which I’d be interested to try. It might have been worth its $40 price tag at 46% ABV. I could wish they’d skipped the single-malt portion of the vatting and held back on the watering-down. Overall: A reasonably flavorful dram with a disappointing aroma. The palate seems a little confused, and the finish acquires only a hint of bubble gum. With Water: A few drops of water have little effect on the aroma beyond increasing the nose tickle. Meaty and nutty, with hay and fresh cracked oats. A tinge of single pot-still oils, a faint reminder that the category exists, but is otherwise lost here. It seems a bit austere, likely from that vaunted Irish triple-distillation, but holds its own with a well-balanced assortment of sweets and nuts.įinish: Short. A lot more flavor than was promised by the aroma graham cracker, brown sugar, meaty hazelnuts, crystallized sugars but without being “sweet”. Green apple, soft caramels, a prominent nose tickle (hot), indeterminate nuttiness, and a very faint cadre of spices: caraway (odd) and clove. Nose: Reticent nose, even after a rest in the glass. Back then, fashionable people actually did want whisky that tasted less like whisky, and this trend contributed to the fall of the Irish whiskey industry. They do rightly make a big deal about no grain being used in the vatting (this is only “blended” by technicality, it’s 100% barley), which highlights the 19th-century Irish whiskey industry’s insistence on the use of only barley in the face of new blended whisky products coming out of Scotland at the time. The marketing codswallop (there’s a word I need to use more often) has something to do with 19th-century Irish writers drinking whiskey to alleviate writer’s block, and thus crying tears of whiskey. Note that The Irishman blend has the same two component types, but at different ratios. Produced by the same bottler (NOT distiller) who sells The Irishman blend, Walsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd., (have I mentioned recently how much I loathe NDPs – that’s non-distiller producer – who use the word “distillery” or “distiller” in the name?), Writers’ Tears is a novel vatting of 40% triple-distilled Irish single-malt whiskey “probably” from Cooley (but the source is unknown), and 60% triple-distilled Irish single pot-still whiskey from Midleton, the only distiller of mature single pot-still whiskey - for now! The vatting is aged for an undisclosed amount of time in ex-bourbon American oak casks and bottled without chill-filtration at 40% ABV. I snagged a bottle for the very reasonable price of $40 before it sold out entirely. This relative scarcity, relative value, and super-drinkable whiskey received both a lot of demand and a lot of industry hype before it finally became available in the US. This was also true of Green Spot, incidentally, before that hit worldwide distribution. For years, Writers’ Tears was available only in Ireland (or, more specifically, not in the US) and many a whisky-lover enjoined traveling friends to bring back a bottle or two. This one arrived in my shopping cart with a hefty dose of hype.
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