Australian Whiskey| 45% ABV
Score: 2/10
Avoid.
TL;DR
Looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, is very much not fantastic
To Be Reverential About It, This Fell A Bit Short Of Modest Expectations
If we’re all honest with ourselves, we’re all magpies. Drawn to shiny surfaces, colourful prints and contoured glass phials, we buckle at the knees for beautiful objects. Anyone who’s held a cobalt-tinted poison bottle will know what I mean, when I say there’s a tactility and childlike endearment in the weighty, jewel-like, glossy transparency of glass vessels. After the 1858 Bradford Sweetie poisoning, glass bottles containing toxic substances were given ribbed sides for unsighted confirmation of contents, when fumbling under candlelight to find them, and later coloured with cobalt, green and amber. These latter steps were taken, in part to make them more easily identifiable on shelves, but also to make these bottles less exciting for children to grab. But ask any child to pick between a clear glass bottle and a deeply tinted, almost ultraviolet colured glass bottle and you know which one they’re reaching for. Rudimentary thinking for an illiterate age.
I’m drawn immediately to interestingly designed glass bottles. In a whisky context I find bottles so much more exciting when they’re embellished, and the distillery has clearly thought about the presentation of their whisky; it makes them stand out from the others on the shelf. Most official distillery bottlings come in unique-to-them bottle designs, with some personal favourites being Arran’s gently tapering, beehive topped stumpy bottle, Lindore’s banana bunch Victorian style gin bottle and the squared, highly textured Lochlea bottle. That extra effort, for me at least, is welcomed and I look out for these distinctive bottle designs because I love photographing them. Which is why, when I stumbled upon this curiously un-spoken-about bottling of straight rye whiskey, I felt compelled to buy it… if only for the Instagram fame.
“Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
OK, I wasn’t quite as shallow as that – I spent a few weeks sporadically unpicking what the whisky actually tasted like before blindly ordering a nice looking glass bottle, but the reviews from The Whisky Exchange – the only place you can find it in the UK – made it sound pretty good! It’s a rye whisky, something I’d never tried before, and they state the whisky has “aromas of buttery rye bread, toffee, vanilla and white pepper”, which is complimented on the palate by “notes of clove, pepper, green apple and caramel.” Sounds ideal to me! Fifty of my pounds were transferred digitally and the bottle hastily arrived to smiles of affection and camera shutters clicking. Then it disappeared into the stash and was never to be seen again, for five months.
During that time I’d opened many other bottles and tried many other samples. One such bottle is the Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers Deanston 10 year old, which was matured in a rye barrel and features a “rye finish”, whatever that is. I have to say of all the Flyers range I’ve tried, this is up there in my top three. It’s a glorious, complex arrangement of leather shops, caramel sweetness and spicy melancholy. I love it to bits and I’ve been cautiously sipping to maximise the duration I have with it. I only bought one bottle before it sold out.
Cut to last week, when in the process of decanting my stash into the new whisky superzone, the little boxy Australian green bottle made an appearance again and I shouted, “EUREKA!”. This is a rye whisky too, albeit of very young age – let me through please, for leather shops and tasty, caramel coated morsels await!
Review
Using single sourced grain from near Melbourne , 45% ABV
£50 from TWE (UK only) and in Australia and the United States
The Gospel, an old English translation from Greek meaning “good news” is a straight rye whiskey from Melbourne, Australia. Their brand is achingly cool, with retro vibes and fading typewriter print. It brings to mind the inimitable Paul Thomas Anderson film There Will Be Blood, with Paul Dano shouting, “I abandoned my child…” as the fiddly plastic cap is peeled away revealing a black wooden stopper. This whiskey is stated to be Australia’s first “straight” rye whiskey, due to a strictly controlled, and legally officiated process of distillation and maturation. Featuring 100% un-malted rye of single origin, the spirit is double-distilled and housed in new American, highly-charred oak barrels for “at least” two years, before being bottled in gorgeously embossed, dark green glass. The news, so far, is great. So great in fact that you can buy a triple pack on their website – if you’re in the USA, at least. No UK clickable link is available for this spirit on their impressionable website.
Pouring the whiskey into a Glencairn, I see the colour is not as light as I expected – a colour previously masked due to the darkness of the green glass. The stopper is entirely black, cork included – I don’t like this development; synthetic corks are not my thing. Why am I talking so much about the presentation, you might ask? Well it matters a lot when the liquid inside turns out to be bad news.
Nose
A wave of the nostril in the vicinity of the drinking vessel delivers such a colossal, arrowhead shaped note of carpet shops that I am stuck for several seconds, buffering. I emit a high-pitched noise and set the glass down again. Chemical aromas in whiskey are fine so long as they mingle among other aromas, but here it’s the full party. I give the whiskey, and me, a moment and come back to it tentatively. Again that huge piercing carpet aroma skewers my face, with a little bit of chemical fruitiness turning my mouth downwards. This, with regret, is as far as the nosing journey goes.
Palate
The high-pitched noise is now accompanied with semi-critical eye bulge when this straight rye whiskey is administered through the facehole. It’s equal parts monumentally leathery, to the point that I feel like I’m sucking a freshly-tanned hide, and intensely sweet as well. Like a leather enrobed cough syrup shot served inside a newly opened Tapi Carpet emporium. There are other notes in there, like cherry cough sweets and a burning shockwave of edgy-spice. Not warm and Christmassy, but tart and peppery.
I give it some more time to settle but it goes the other way – the intensity ramps up. I can’t say I’m enjoying this much at all. Water does nothing to dull the flavour, just takes longer to corrupt the soul.
Score: 2/10
