In the words of Peter Andre, this is insania.
So, what weird and wonderful offering do we have here?
A blend of single malt Scotch whisky and dark rum, that's what.
Strange Bedfellows Experiment 001 Batch 001 has been created by the team at The Start-Up Drinks Lab which was established in 2017 by Hannah Fisher and Craig Strachan. Whereas, during the day, the Drinks Lab provided a facility for start up drinks brands to launch, at night when the lab was empty, the team worked on their own drinks experiments. And so now with this first release, the Out of Hours Spirit Experiments brand is born.
This inaugural bottling is a blend of a single cask of Highland single malt with a dark ruby rum blended in a 40:60 ratio.
I'm not going to just copy and paste the press release here - you can read more over on the Drinks Lab Spirits site: HERE - but it does suggest that the team expects to court some controversy amongst whisky enthusiasts. There's no mention of how rum fans might feel by the way. But, to be fair, they're probably not as precious ;-)
This whisky enthusiast definitely welcomes such sacrilege though; sometimes it's good to mix things up a bit.
But has the experiment worked? Of course, this is just my opinion but for what it's worth, here are my thoughts:
Nose: porridge with a dram; hint of parrafin; notes of grappa; hints of vanilla ice cream and cream soda; a slight note of Vimto.
Palate: fresh ginger; slight note of chocolate orange; more cream soda here followed by sweet popcorn and cherry cola.
Overall: this is definitely unusual. There's a slight dirtyness to it and it's perhaps a wee bit rough around the edges when taken neat. However, I can see this working well in an Old Fashioned (which I haven't tried so, if you have, let me know how it went).
This is available from the DLS site: HERE - £26.95 for 35cl or £35 for 50cl
