When we began a maturation trial in 2016, we hadn’t expected the whiskies to develop such deliciousness in so short a period of time. One-year-old malt spirit, made at a Speyside distillery famous for the robust character of its whiskies, was re-racked into first fill Oloroso-seasoned butts. Sampling them three years later, one particular cask – #2 – proved so compelling that we began to experiment. A parcel of first fill Bourbon barrels containing whisky from the now closed Imperial Distillery had sat in our sample library for some years. Though delicious in its own right, as whiskymakers we couldn’t hit on the ideal match. The much younger malt whisky from the Oloroso-seasoned cask proved the ideal means to deepen the fruity and creamy profile of this rare parcel.
