On Wednesday I had a review of a bourbon cask Arran; I did not care for it overmuch. Let’s see if we can get my Arran trajectory back in a positive direction with this sherry cask release. The bottler in this case is Acorn. They are a Japanese outfit that has apparently been releasing selections since the late 1990s. I think it might only have been in the last half-decade or so though that their casks became more widely available outside Japan. Or at least that’s when I first noticed them. This profile on ScotchWhisky.com notes that they now have distribution in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Japan—so still not so widely available, I guess. (ScotchWhisky.com, by the way, has good information on a number of independent bottlers—I’m hoping their list will slowly become more comprehensive: a number of major bottlers are not yet on it.)

This cask was released in 2016. It’s a sherry hogshead, and interestingly was not bottled at cask strength. I wonder if it was a little too unbalanced at full strength—given the greater wood contact for a sherry hogshead vs a sherry butt. Anyway, let’s see what it’s like.  Continue reading →