Laphroaig 25 Year Old

LAPHROAIG 25 YEARS REVIEW

EYE

Tarnished gold

NOSE

Smoked meat, banana cupcakes, peat, cinnamon, dried dark fruit, saline, vanilla beans and light bits of pears, iodine, burnt plastic and “oil”. It’s lighter than I would have imagined and water didn’t do much to it.

PALATE

Peat, burnt plastic, cinnamon, dried orchard fruit, dried dark fruit, vanilla beans, sweet tobacco, iodine and a touch of minerality and “oil”. Again, it’s lighter than I would have imagined and water doesn’t do much to enhance it.

FINISH

Long meaty fade of peat, malty sweetness, iodine, burnt plastic and “oil”.

BALANCE, BODY & FEEL

Good sense of balance, full round body and an oily heavy feel.

OVERALL

Laphroaig 25 Years is a good whisky, but it didn’t have the oomph I was expecting and I didn’t get much of the Oloroso coming through. Still, as you might imagine, it was a good whisky. Both the aroma and palate had an overall character I could best describe as a campfire in an orchard. It was sweet and smoky with this oily nature that flowed from nose to finish.

That oily nature in the Laphroaig 25 Years isn’t quite like a straight up cooking oil or anything like that. It would be more like if you took a bunch of blackberries, raspberries, lingonberry berries, etc. and blended them together with some olive oil to make a dark fruit oil. There’s a light touch of that throughout the whisky and I enjoyed the way it played out through the senses. A unique aspect I’ve only found in this 25 year.