I finally got my hands on a bottle of the 2025 Laphroaig Cairdeas. Just the one bottle though. Which means my collection of Cairdeas since 2011 might end in 2024 with the Cask Favorites. You see, I’ve been buying two bottles of the Cairdeas every year, one to drink and one to keep. (Well, in some excellent years—see the 2015 200th anniversary release— I bought more than two.) I fully acknowledge that this is a very silly enterprise. The Cairdeas has been up and down over the last 7-8 years; pretty good in some years; ho hum in others; nothing to really get me going since that 2015 release. Laphroaig’s approach to Cairdeas in recent years has something to do with that as they’ve either released wacky wine cask finishes or cask strength iterations of releases from their regular line. Last year’s release was particularly heavy on the “we’ve run out of ideas” subtext, being composed of casks from the previous two years. Which brings us to this year’s release, which the distillery says is a cask strength version of the Lore (yes, a whisky from their regular line). As to whether this truly is a cask strength version of the regular Lore is not clear: I’ve seen reports of people being told at the distillery that it was only made in the same way as the Lore, i.e with the same mix of cask types. If you know more about this, please write in below. In any case, I thought the Lore was fine when I reviewed it on release in 2017 but was never moved to go back and try more recent versions of it. However, this was made, I’m hoping it’s better. Let’s see.

Laphroaig Cairdeas 2025, Lore Cask Strength (59.6%; mix of cask types; from my own bottle)

Nose: A bit all over the place: there’s lime, there’s wood char, there’s salt, there’s iodine, there’s vanilla—but I can’t say any of it is particularly well-integrated. As it sits, there’s a bit too much of the vanilla. With more time still, the salt expands here as well. A squirt of water pushes back the vanilla and pulls out more of the citrus (with the lime moving in the direction of citronella).

Palate: Similar to the nose in being all over the place but here it’s the oak that’s particularly out of balance, and it tastes like young, raw wood (must be the quarter casks in the mix). Major burn at full strength, not surprisingly; rich texture. Spicier on the second sip with quite a bit of cracked pepper coming through. With time there’s more of the lime here and it makes for an improvement; gets a bit sweeter too. Okay, let’s see what water does for it. It balances things here as well, as the raw wood recedes and the sweet and citrus notes merge.

Finish: Long. The phenols keep going and then the salt and pepper expand and have the last word. As on the palate with water.

Comments: This is decent enough, I suppose—especially with water. My guess is that responses to this are likely to be highly modulated by when people got habituated to drinking Laphroaig. If in the last 7 years or so then this will probably be liked a lot—and probably more the closer that date is to the present. By which I mean that if contemporary Laphroaig character defines Laphroaig for you then this is a very good example of it. People who got into Laphroaig in the decade prior or earlier will probably find it too oak-driven, too much of a blunt instrument and not very balanced. You can probably tell which group I’m in. But here’s the thing: when I sipped this alongside bites of dark chocolate, it improved dramatically, with more fruit coming through. I’ll be interested to see if air in the bottle changes things but for now I’m planning on the chocolate pairing for the next several pours from this bottle.

There is some hope for future Cairdeas though. On the back of the box it says, “As part of our annual Cairdeas releases for Friends, this completes the run of our classic whiskies at cask strength”. I’ll drink to that. Go back to putting out high quality young bourbon cask Laphroaig and I’ll drink a lot more of it.

Rating: 85 points. (Pulled up by water.)