Isla whiskeys are very much, they're an extension of Isla as a place, really. If you get a chance to go there, you taste the island and the culture and everything in every bottle of whisky. They taste seaside, and they taste gritty, and they taste like you would expect a whisky made in a small fishing village to taste. They can transport me to Isla when I'm sitting with a nice smoky whisky. If I'm sitting with a nice Ardbeg, I can close my eyes and sip it and imagine that I'm back there with Mickey heads, looking out the ocean, and just soaking it all in. It's just so overwhelmingly gorgeous and feels like home when you're there. Even the first time we were there, I felt like I should have been there my entire life. It is one of the friendliest places. They think that this is more terroir than anything else in the whisky business in all of Europe. Yeah, we always want to drink something that has a sense of place, right? And this is one of the most immediately recognizable places in Spirits. Welcome back to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. My name is Brett Pontani. I'm a special guest today joining the regular crew, Kristin Ellis, Pat Brophy and Greg Versch. And also joining us to talk about Scotch is the third member of the Whiskey Hotline with Pat Brophy and I, Joe Maloney. Hey, Joe. Oh, hey everybody. Welcome. So we are covering one of my favorite subjects today. We're doing a deep dive into Isla Single Malt Whiskies, the nerdiest of Single Malt Scotch Whiskies. So this is going to be Isla Part 1. We're doing a two-parter. Yeah. I mean, we can't cover it all in one episode. So yeah, we'll break it up. We'll cover about half of it today and another half next week. Awesome. Great. Greg, how do you feel about that? It's kind of our first two series here we're doing. Terrific. We have to leave it on a cliffhanger, like a lot of anticipation for what's going to happen next. What happened to the sheep? If someone says cliffhanger, I think of Sylvester Stallone dropping that chick down that mountain in the helicopter. Exactly. Exactly what I was talking about. That was a sweet sake again, too. Let's get started. We've got eight distilleries on Isla. We're tasting some of my all-time, just a favorite place in the entire world, Isla. We're going to be tasting through some Ardbeg, Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhain, Kalila, Kilhoman, Lagavulin, and LaFrogue. It took me 10 years to be able to say most of those, even remotely close. As a Kentucky boy, I feel like I've done pretty well right now. Let's get to tasting. We're going to start with Bruichladdich. Bruichladdich makes both peated and unpeated whisky. There's only a couple of distilleries on Isla make an unpeated whisky, Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain. When you see a Bruichladdich on the shelf, if it's unpeated, it's labeled as Bruichladdich, such as this bottle of Classic Laddich we're going to try. The peated stuff from Bruichladdich is bottled as Port Charlotte. Pat, do you want to spell Bruichladdich for us while we get into the tasting? Because this is the funnest part. B-R-U-I-C-H-L-A-D-D-I-C-H. We love Bruichladdich. They also have a wonderful gin, the botanist, that they distill on a still called the Ugly Betty. Delicious gin. Which, if you really want to make this morning, is the old still from the Inver Leaven Green. The old distillery from the Inver Leaven Green distillery, which they had to put on a boat and take off the River Clyde and float all the way around to Islay. And it sat in their yard for about five years before they figured out something to do with it. Pat, you brought two Bruichladdich? I actually brought three. I brought this Laddichlassic, which is widely available, and a couple of preview bottles for our listeners. The soon-to-be-released Port Charlotte Ten-Year-Old and Port Charlotte Isla Barley 2011 bottling. Wow. I'm actually a little worried about having to taste those. Why are you worried? Because of their reputation for high-peat content. Well, that would be more of the Octamore line, which is all about making the highest-peated whiskey they possibly can. Bruichladdich Port Charlotte is actually made to about a 55 ppm peat specification, which, dirty secret, every single distillery on Isla is using essentially the same exact peat specification barley from the same exact malter, the Port Ellen Maltines on Port Ellen Isla. They are all using the same 55 ppm malted barley. So it has to do with the barley blend? Yeah. It's what percentage that barley takes up in your overall mix of grain, your overall mash bill, your grist in the whiskey distillation itself. They were doing a bunch of one-offs for a while, right? But then once they really got established with a consistent source? Once they re-opened, when they first re-opened, they were bottling a bunch of their old whiskey finished in all kinds of different casts, rum cast, wine cast. To put it somewhat politely, they were really putting dresses on pigs. I mean, they had all this old whiskey that was in lackluster wood, and they were finishing whatever they could get their hands on. And they made some really stunning bottles. But now that they're getting into their own distillate 10-plus years down the road, they're making some really quality juice. The joke is their wood regimen was, if it's made out of oak and it'll hold liquid, we'll use it. Is there age statement on the Classic Lattie? There is not. There's not. This is really soft. Very soft, very fruity, nice creamy vanilla candy thing going on. Really just approachable whiskey. If somebody wants to dip their toe in the Islay, you start with this. You still get a little bit of that seaside character out of it. But it's really, really approachable. It smells kind of like a Hoosier pie with a little bit of salinity. You know what I mean? That kind of custardy vanilla. No, nobody knows what you're talking about. What the f*** is a Hoosier pie? Hoosier pies are amazing. Definitely get some of the mango in there too. Some guava kind of tucked in the back. Tropical fruits and citrus fruits. Yeah, just really well balanced and gorgeous. That nice sort of bright spicy element on the back end. This isn't peated, but they claim spice sometimes is peaked. So now we're going to check out the new Port Charlotte releases, the upcoming Port Charlotte releases from Brookline. They have really done a great job with the packaging here. Port Charlotte was always kind of second fiddle and not their focus here, but they've repackaged the Port Charlotte, so it kind of has its own identity. It's in this really high-shouldered squat green bottle. It's really gorgeous. I would say it's very reminiscent of the botanist gin that they're making. Yeah, look, it's the exact shape of a botanist bottle, except it's just a little fatter. I love the green glass. Medicine bottle, men's cologne bottle, only it's full of whiskey. I like the green. Reminds you of men tougher than yourself. You want to fight? The green glass looks nice. This is ten years old. This is Port Charlotte, ten year old, Port Charlotte, so heavily peated, Bruichladdich. I'm just not a fan of peat. I'm interested to find the peated styles that I do maybe like. Smoke is not a subtle flavor. And when you try to do smoke subtly, you lose everything that's great about it. You got to assume at some point, a heavily peated whiskey is going to give you a pretty heavy wallop of smoke. But again, it's about what that smoke is layered over. And there's beautiful, fresh, fruity distillates underneath when they're done right. So immediately, this Newport Charlotte 10 isn't particularly overpowering the smoke in the nose. I mean, compared to... For standing heavily peated on the label, this is really quite reserved for what I was expecting. Kind of classic Islay green bottle, 10-year-old heavily peated, Ardbeg and Laphroaig, not nearly as peaty on the nose. And the nose is, when you say peaty, the nose is less overtly smoky. It's almost like a meteor. It's like a meteor savory smell. I agree with that. All the way through the finish, it's not smoke. It's certainly less punchy than the other two, but I think when I actually tasted it now, it's kind of an all-encompassing sort of smoke, but a soft, slow burn. Yeah, it's this envelope of smoke around a meatiness with some stone fruit sprinkled on top almost. You guys know how much this is going to be? This is delicious. $70? $69.99? That's a steal. Totally fair price for a 10-year-old whiskey. Actually, you know what? I just got the sample yesterday, $64.99. This is not very peat-forward. I really don't get the peat until the finish. The peat really comes through as a spice here. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like a lot of strong flavors. You're going to have a whole group of people that just like people who refuse to drink anything at any strength but cast-strength because somehow they're proving something by drinking pure alcohol. Their manliness, of course. Exactly. The same thing. You're going to have these same people who are going to say, well, I can't have that because that's not peaty enough. This on the other hand is what a well-crafted food or drink ought to be, which is a lot of subtlety and a whole bunch of things going on. A lot of layers to unravel here. A real onion of a single malt. Bruichladdich is currently using, appropriately when you taste this next Bruichladdich here, the Isla Barley 2011 Bottling. Bruichladdich is currently sourcing from 17 family farms on the island of Isla that are growing their barley just for Bruichladdich, just for this bottling. So a couple quick facts about Bruichladdich. They are currently using 17 local Isla farmers to grow their barley for their Isla Barley bottling. Isla is not an easy place to grow barley and the yields are very low. So it's kind of cool that they can support the local economy in that way. The mill in the distillery is an original Bobby Mill. Bobby was one of the two famous mill producers, mill manufacturers in England. This Bobby Mill at the Bruichladdich distillery is from 1881 and it is still going strong and it does not need to be replaced. They have one of the smaller outputs on Isla. They're making about one and a half million liters of whiskey a year. That's about half the size of an already pretty small distillery like Ardbeck. You had a funny story about something you did. Yeah, so this is hilarious because we went, we did a little tour and we're walking around in the warehouse and I said, you guys want to try some whiskey? And of course we said, yes. Somehow, there were no glasses around. So we ended up having whiskey just in our hands. We were drinking out of our own hands. It's a very octamore, I think. We sampled a couple of dozen casts in the middle of a warehouse and they were just sticking a whiskey thief into the barrels and pouring whiskey into, we were cupping our hands and slurping it out of our hands. This is like the Isla version of wheezing the juice, just sort of. Yeah, we were totally wheezing the juice. I smelled like smoke for a month. For a month, I smelled like Pete. But we were trying crazy Bruichladdichs in Chateau Petruse casque that had been in them since 1978 and stuff like that. Shut up. Really cool stuff like these whiskeys are going to retail for thousands and thousands of dollars a bottle and we're just slurping them out of our dirty balls. We're just slurping them out of our hands. Yeah. That's great. So I will drink out of my hands. Yeah, that 1978 Petruse. Yeah, sure. Then you wiped it on your pants. This is Bruichladdich, Port Charlotte, Isla Barley, 2011. This Scotch smells fantastic. I really love this. I mean, this is we talk about terroir with whiskey. This is as good as it gets. I mean, this is barley grown within like 10 miles from the distillery on this little rock on the southwest coast of Scotland. It's just so cool. This is fantastic. Talk about your cured meat, salty, salinity. It's got a great, just a wonderful mouthfeel. The construction of it is solid, nice and round. Special Barrel to Bottle Preview coming soon to Binny's. Really delicious. Great job. Pretty limited run. Fairly. We can usually have this on the shelf all year round. Oh, great. It doesn't say Pappy Van Winkle, so we, you know, it tends to last. I mean, that's grace, you know. It's another, it's not a sledgehammer. It's a really graceful, integrated, round fruit, but then like a graceful smoke note over the top. Heavy flavors, but light on its feet. It does burn for me, it's a little hot, so this would be kind of a style where I'd put a tiny little bit of water in there. It is bottled at 100 proof, which is pretty nice. I think it drinks pretty light for 100 proof, actually. I agree. Or I'm dead inside. You are dead. Tristan, time for Halloween. Moving on from Bruichladdich, we're going to go to our only other Islay Distillery that does not peat, and that is Bunnahabhain. Oh, can you spell that? Because it sounds like there's a V in there. It does sound like there's a V in there. It's actually spelled B-U-N-N-A-H-A-B-H-A-I-N. So what we're going to try first is the classic Bunnahabhain 12-year-old, which is their kind of baseline flagship bottle that's always available. So for this episode, one aim I would like, Brett, is for you to take us through this particular expression of scotch and teach our listeners how one would make just an abridged tasting note of scotch. What are we assessing? What are we looking for? Talking about structural elements and how do we kind of break that down? I think people get really intimidated when you start to talk about tasting. They hear people who are purported experts in the business describing in very, very flowery terms with a lot of adjectives how things taste. I usually, if I'm working with somebody that doesn't have that, it has a functioning nose and tongue, but doesn't have the vernacular to actually apply to it. I direct people to think of fruit sweetness, sugar sweetness, think of spice, think of savory, and then potentially think of off flavors and literally describe what pops to your head. Everybody has smelled and tasted things their whole lives, which means everybody has a whole world worth of adjectives based on everything you've smelled and tasted. I call it olfactory baggage. Really? Yeah, that's my little term. But baggage is somehow negative, isn't it? No. Come at us iTunes. Yeah. Olfactory baggage. So digging through my olfactory suitcases, they have a very large set of them. Yes, you do. This is in the hardback set. A couple of things you want to do, you smell it, of course. A lot of people will tell you not to stick your nose in the glass. I disagree as long as you're prepared to know that you're going to get some alcohol out. But put your nose either above the glass or even in the glass if you choose to. What do you smell? You're going to get a lot of indication of what's going to be there in the case of the Bunnahabhain. There is an element that is almost like caramel. To me, there's an element that is like candied fruits, things like maybe candied peaches, candied apricots, things like that. There is, despite the fact it's not smoky, there is a spicy element. I wouldn't describe it overtly as smoke, but maybe you would describe it as tobacco, pipe tobacco, leather, something like that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, things like that. And again, what you really smell, what I smell, I smell whiskey. And that's what people get as scared. It's like, well, I can't put all these different words to it. It's like, I smell whiskey. These are just little hints and things that are popping off in the back of my head, flavors and aromas that are popping in as I smell what is essentially whiskey. So then a little taste. And suspicions confirmed because you get a little bit of that very, very light, very lean. I wouldn't say white chocolate because to me white chocolate is thicker. It is a little bit more of a sugary sweetness with a slight amount of fruit that comes through. I think that the pipe tobacco comes as if you've just drawn on a fresh pipe. It's gone through. There's a little bit of herbal character and a nice spicy, bright sort of peppery finish, which seems to linger. Even though we're describing what seem to be heavy flavors, if you think of leather, you think like leather could be thick and pipe tobacco could be thick and all these things can be thick and pepper, but it's clean. You're using descriptors for thick flavors that are actually very, very clean and bright on the palate. Does length determine quality? It could in wine. It can, but I don't think it's the be all end all. I think that the most important thing for length in anything, but I think especially in distilled spirits, is the cleanliness of the length. It's not that a flavor hangs in your mouth. It's the pleasurable flavor. It's that it's the good flavors that hang in your mouth. So, the finish could go, but if the fruity flavors or the pleasurable flavors are clipped, then we consider that a short finish in scotch as well, just like in lime. A hundred percent. This is the Bunnahabhain. Excellent. Moving on, we're at Bunahabin Tochak, spelled Toyteach. Toyteach, basically, yes. Toyteach. Unfiltered. Tochak. So, let's talk about the filtration thing. This is obviously on the label for marketing, so is it, it's common that we filter Scotch? Oh, yes. Scotch is commonly filtered, it's commonly chill filtered, so you're lowering the whiskey to about zero degrees, passing it through a coarse filter, and removing kind of these like fatty oils and lipids that would otherwise make it cloudy when it gets chilled with something like an ice cube. Modern chemistry has taught us that we've been filtering the flavor out of our whiskey for many years, and we should stop doing that when possible. Lots of Scotch producers have gone all in on non-chill filtration or at the very least calling it out when they do it. This Bunnahabhain is non-chill filtered. It gives an oilier, thicker mouthfeel. How do you say it? Toe-check. Toe-check. Bunnahabhain, toe-check. Gosh, I am not going to do well in Scotland when I can't read a gosh darn thing. Yeah, they speak English there. Yeah, they do speak English. So, you're saying that this contrasts with the other one, the 12 that we had. Now, the 12 we had of Bunnahabhain was classic Bunnahabhain. No peat, you know, fresh fruity, had a bit of salinity to it, but this is heavily peated distillate. Starting in the early 90s, Bunnahabhain started doing small runs every year of heavily peated distillate, started out as only like 5% of their overall production, and that's grown steadily since. It was always used pretty much exclusively for different blended scotches that they produce, but they started bottling as a single malt maybe 6, 7 years ago, something like that. This, I mean, it has the same grain profile with orange and cherry and that like caramel quality, but then there's this graceful smoke on top of it. And this is a bottle of 46%, which is kind of your cutoff for non-chill filtration. Whenever you see 46% or more, you can usually safely assume the scotch has not been chill filtered. A little bit of that iodine band-aid-y, I think it's coming away from the smoke, the layers from the peat kind of lean more to that medicinal side. Yeah, just a hint, especially on the palate, on the finish for me. Yep. Nice and ripe peach though, kind of fruit character to it. What kind of medicine, you guys? Got any fun facts about Bunnahabhain? It is situated up just the tiniest of roads. So when you guys said goat path, that led you to think about Bunnahabhain. Oh yeah. I mean, Bunnahabhain is down like a dirt road that maybe is a car and a half wide. And these giant lorry trucks are going in and out of the place constantly. It's crazy. We're going to move further up the peat spectrum here, the way I'm kind of laying these out are from lightest to heaviest. Okay, so this is when I start to really remove myself from the cast. Yeah, really complain even more. Because I don't have anything good to say. No, you might. You may find that this is, you know. I know I do, you know, my friend, but... So now we're going to move into Bowmore, and Bowmore is one of those classic all-time Isla distilleries. Been around since the 1700s, 1779. Easy brand to spell and say. Yeah, yeah. A little easier than Bunnahabhain. So we're going to start with Bowmore's classic 12-year-old. Already sounds like a party. So Bowmore is moderately peated. It's peated about the high 20s. Another small distillery, about 2 million liters of production a year. You say peat is around 20. What does that mean again? Around high 20s. 20 part per million. Got it. So that's part per million peat phenol. Sure. That's how they measure the peatiness. Now, when we're talking about this... Wait, what's the highest? The highest is contentious. Bruichladdich octomore usually claims to be around in the 170s, 180s. They are measuring it differently than Ardbeg is for Ardbeg Supernova, which is around I think 115, something like that. Realistically though, it's like bitterness in beer where after a certain level, you don't perceive any more of it because it just deadens you. So really in the mid-50s is about as high as it goes, which is like Ardbeg. I was going to say too, as far as the measuring of the peat, I think they're measuring this parts per million after they've just finished the malting process. Yeah, and it's constantly going down. Constantly falls apart from there. It just goes down from there. Fun facts about Bowmore. It's owned by Jim Beam. It's owned by the Beam Suntory Company now. Not fun. Bowmore is known for having some absolutely famous classic Sherry-aged whiskeys. Black Bowmore, which was a mid-60s vintage of Bowmore, was widely considered one of the best bottles of Scotch ever produced. But yeah, it's one of the all-time nerd distillers. This is the upper echelon. This would be like a first growth Scotch distiller. Got it. Cool. It's really easy drinking, this 12. It's mellow, and it's a weird word, but it's mellow. Yeah. It actually feels definitely less smokey than the others we've done so far. Dried fruit and citrus is one of Bowmore's big calling cards. It has a richer, darker grain quality than the others that we've had so far. They're lighter on their feet. It's got a bit more of a mineral component, a little bit of a mineral texture as well. But I just think it's super clean and has a broad complexity, but I get that mineral component. Well, let's see what you think of it compared to this limited-release Bowmore. I like this. Which is the Vault Edition, which is the first release in the number one Vaults Edition. So the number one Vault at Bowmore is their pride and joy. It is their original warehouse, which actually sits slightly below sea level, and it's right on the water, and a wall of it just gets battered by waves and storms all year round. And so it picks up that kind of terroir. It's this dank musty like pit of a little warehouse that some of their most famous releases have come out of that warehouse. Atlantic Sea Salt, it even tells you on the label. So yeah, so this number one, these Vault Editions, they're looking to capture those bits of Bowmore terroir in a bottle. So the first release is Atlantic Sea Salt. They're going to do one that's fruit focused, and you know, one of the other qualities that they deem important to Bowmore and that are exemplified by this warehouse. It is like fresh sea air, you know? Yeah, this immediately just takes you to standing on one of those kind of cool, rocky beaches. I always get pooped on by seagulls. Oh, man, that's only happened to me once, and it was on the architectural boat tour. It's supposed to be good luck in Haiti. In Italy, they say it's good luck. It never feels like it, though. No, not at all. Don't feel lucky. Joe, what's the alcohol on the 12? Oh, on the 12, we're sitting at 40% alcohol. I think that's why it seems flat to me. I think it's watered down a little bit so that it's even, and it's not as spirited. 51.5 on this Vault Edition. Yeah, 103 proof on the Vault Edition, which I love. It's got this dried apricot, citrusy, just real fresh vibrant character to it. A little butter and sea salt. Man, that's a peat bomb to me. Oh, it's a beautiful scotch. Is this a peat bomb to you? It seems kind of reserved for me, but they're really wonderful flavors, not over the top on the smoke. It seems really grassy, like dried reedy grass. Hay. Hay. It seems like hay. Barnyardy. Yeah. But the freshness is really apparent. It's a lot lighter than I think some of the others, even though it's 103 proof. For me, this is a lot lighter on its feet. It's a beautiful whiskey. It's really pronounced. It just jumps out of the glass. Yeah, that's not a peat bomb. It's going to get rough from here on out. I know. We're looking forward to see what happens to you, Pippa. I preface this whole thing by saying I'm super sensitive to peat, and so I'm the person in the room who's representing the people that don't really like it so much. It's just like a really nice smoked pineapple thing on the finish. Yeah. You guys getting that? Wow. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, I really like that. Climbing under the rung up the peat ladder, we're gonna go to Killhoman. And as Brett mentioned earlier, True Farm Distillery, it's on the center of Islay. They are growing their own grains, they are malting their own barley, not 100%, because that would be just not enough for them. So right now, 100% Islay Bottlings that they do, where all the barley is coming from, Islay is about 20% of their overall output. They peat in house for about 10 hours, but it's kind of, when we were there, they kind of didn't, it wasn't the most measured thing. They're like, well, we're trying to shoot for 28 part per million, but like the day we were there actually, we're getting a tour around and we go into the Malting building and he opens up the peat fire furnace and he's like, and the guy goes, oh, and the fire had gone completely out and no one was paying attention. No one knew how long the fire was out. So like some guy, you know, got yelled at and rushed over there and threw some wet peat and dry peat on it to get it going again. And when he left again, it probably went out again. And he was like, yeah, see, this kind of stuff happens. So we shoot for 28 part per million. I think sometimes we end up somewhere between 12 and 24, but we, you know, we don't really measure it. These bottlings are a little bit younger. So at least from my experience, I found with as far as peat is concerned, with the smoke that we're tasting, the younger the Isla whiskey is, the more pronounced for me the smoke tends to be. Whereas if it sits in the barrel for longer, we're sitting like the 12, the 20s, the 30 year old malts, the longer it sits in the barrel, the more the barrel starts to win and the smoke starts to fade away. So these young ones really are going to be fun to see how Kristen enjoys the level of smoke with its freshness. So, yeah, so speaking of that, this first Kilhoman is actually an old Binny's Handpick Cast. This is a 2011 distillation bottled in 2016. This is 100% Isla, aged in a first use bourbon barrel. And this was one we took a whole cask of. Is Kilhoman still the youngest distillery on Isla? For about another month or two. Yeah, until Ardnajo opens. Opens to distillation or opens to releases? Opens to distillation. Okay, so by the time you hear this, Kilhoman will no longer be the youngest distillery on Isla. Yeah, Ardnajo might be open already. I think they're already distilling. I thought that. I was under the impression they're already getting spirit. Now, this is Cast Strength, this is 58.3% alcohol. Hello. Yeah, it's a burly young lad of a single malt scotch. But on the Whiskey Hotline, we like full strength whiskeys because we don't want to sell bottled water. We like selling bottled whisky. We didn't get in this business to sell bottles of water. That's exactly right. When I was a small child growing up in Kentucky, they asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I want to sell whisky for a living. I never changed that to selling bottled water. What I like about this and what it does in the palate is very similar to a high quality wine that I taste is that it's explained by saying it travels on the palate, which means it sort of goes in one direction, savory, but then the fruit really comes out in the mid palate, but then it comes back and you get that bourbon, vanilla kind of Christmas cake aroma from flavor for just a little bit, then a little bit of the peat and so on. It's a winding road of flavors as it develops. That's cool. I like the contrast between the youthful vibrancy of the lemon curd fruit and then like this like sage-y, vegetal, graphite quality, and it just seems like… Dude, you're having a good day. I love this producer. Yeah, they make great whiskey. I mean, it's cool. So it was started by an English guy who took a little bit for, Brett mentioned earlier, the Iliac, the Islay natives to kind of adopt this guy and welcome him in. He was an Englishman who married into the family that founded Range Rover or Land Rover. Tata. Yeah, he had a lot of money and he was like, well, I'm going to build a distillery on the most iconic spit of land in Scotland. And I don't think he was immediately just welcomed with open arms. But they're making some great whiskeys now and they've been, I think it's over 10 years now. I think they're coming up on where they can or they just passed where they could release a 10-year-old. But their whisky drink so well young that I question how much, they're really going to let it go. Yeah, I like drinking around six or seven years old. But we've gotten different cask of whisky from Isla throughout the years that have been, that age range six and seven. It's a great age for Isla whisky. I like this. Well, wait till you try this one. So this next Kilhoman we're going to try was bottled for the Feigille, the Isla Festival in 2017. So it was only sold there. We brought it back with us. That was the year we were on Isla last. And this was Kilhoman matured in bourbon barrels and sherry butts. So immediately it's just a lot darker and more, you know, kind of that classic library, you know, snooty guy with a monocle in his library with a big sniff of scotch. Love that guy. Yeah. I mean, who doesn't want to just drink like the Monopoly man? Exactly. What's that guy's name? Wilford Moneybags. No, but he's got like, he's got like three names like every rich guy should though. Oh, yeah. You know, either way, name your next child after him. Okay, Greg? Greg's wife is pregnant and it's a girl. It's a girl. She's a girl. You can't name her after the Monopoly man. I mean, you could. It's 2018. We call her little uncle money bags. Little uncle money bags. So this is 58% alcohol. So even a little stronger than the last one we tried. Dried fruit. The caramelization here is crazy. The vanilla, the clove, baking spice. Yeah, clove. The nose is just explosive. And I hate to say that because I feel like I'm stroking some egos here, but I'm really just kind of blown away that I actually like this stuff. So I think that's kind of part to the surprise. This is beautifully sherry though. I mean, it's heavy. It's obviously pretty heavily sherry, but it's not over the top. It's not over the top. It hasn't gotten sulfuric. It hasn't gotten too leathery. Right. They can kind of start to taste like aerosol at a point. You get a little bit of a raisin. Yeah, raisin. I was going to say cherry and plum. Maybe, yeah, some stewed plums. Yeah. Yeah. Delicious. Yeah. So tiny little distillery. They're making 200,000 liters of spirit a year. So we also have like good, regularly available Killhoman releases. These are both like obscure examples that aren't even available. Regular Killhoman releases, their kind of standard flagship is going to be McKier Bay. They also do a, they do some limited release casts every year. I think they did a Port cask and a Saturn cask recently. They have a Lock Gorm every year, which is a Sherry cask release. So there's always new, interesting Killhomas to check out at Binny's Beverage Depot. Cocoa powder. It's very drying though. Very drying, like it just kind of sucks the spit right out of your mouth. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the booze. I think that's more of a function of the proof, obviously, but add a little water to it and it really just softens up and it's just a fat treat. Big Scotch. I love fat treats. That's a good one. Smoky. That's a really good one. Treats is Joe Maloney's nickname when he travels abroad with the Whiskey Hotline. Treat Weasel. Treat Weasel, excuse me, Treat Weasel. Treats would be my jazz name. Yes, right. But he is known for ordering dessert with brunch. So hey, sticky toffee pudding everywhere. Why not? That's all I'll have. Haggis, and then please bring the sticky toffee pudding. Hey, that's wrapping up part one of our ILA Podcast. We'll be back in a week to pick this thing up. Stay tuned. Until then, I'm Kristen. I'm Pat. I'm Brett. And I'm Joe. I'm Greg. Keep tasting. But it's really, really appropriate. It smells kind of like a Hoosier pie, with a little bit of salinity. You know what I mean? That kind of custardy vanilla. No, nobody knows what you're talking about. What the f*** is a Hoosier pie? Hoosier pies are amazing. They just basically think of a crème brûlée as a pie. I unfortunately can't, because despite the fact that I lived the first 18 years of my life, 30 miles away from the Hoosier pie factory, I've never had one. Is it like a moon pie? Yeah, what are we talking about? It's like a custard pie. It's like crème brûlée, and Indiana pie formed glory in it. We're going out of Kentucky on Sunday. We're going to stop and grab a Hoosier pie on the way. We need to go to... Well, no, you're going to be in the wrong part of the world. You got to go to Fort Wayne. We got to go to Fort Wayne. Hoosier pie is all over the place. Oh, there's the Hoosier Mama pie shop on Chicago. I'll get you one from there. They're from Indiana. See, I've faked my way into a free pie today. A lesson for all you young listeners out there. That's getting pie.