Longrow 18 2020

The 2018 release was just wonderful, so it wouldn’t take much convincing to try this one, but at my current budget and bottle-storage limits there was no compulsion to try every batch. The less-than-usual cask make intrigued me enough to try this one, however.

Longrow 18 (2020), Campbeltown Single Malt, 46% ABV

Minutia: Matured in 25% bourbon, 20% rum, and 55% Sherry casks for 18 years and bottled on August 12, 2020 yielding a batch of 4,300 bottles. Enjoyed neat in a glencairn.

Color: Burnished; 1.1.

Nose: Pleasant smoke, a humid but dusty storage area, toffee/caramel, Russian rye. There’s really a lot going on here, and those are the only notes I can put to words.

Taste: Fruit gives way to cardboard, to bitter chocolate and back again.

Finish: Sweet, metallic, slight smoke with medicinal touch, sweet citrus. A bit of bitterness. An overall ‘mechanical’ feel.

Man, a real treat. Nothing wrong in the mouth, but the nose is just more interesting. This is a dram you could have over a course of an entire evening and barely take a sip. It’s complex, but there’s a subtlety to the complexity that is quite nice. There’s an overall sweeter tone to each of the elements noted above that don’t intrinsically sound sweet, I suspect this is the rum influence. This distillery continues to impress, and this is no exception. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the 2018 release, but I did enjoy it quite a lot.

Score: 90

Musical Evocation: Beast in Black – “Blind and Frozen”