“I love playing around with Double Oak. My first experience in the spirits industry was working as a cocktail bartender in Melbourne. We would spend countless hours blending, tasting, adjusting, tasting again, and trying to find ways to make our drinks interesting, with depth of flavour and good aroma. This fueled my love for blending casks. As much as purity from a single cask can be exciting, so can it be when you have different tannins, different oak influences, and sweet, dry, spicy, dense, light flavours to play with.

This blend was beautifully simple, two quarter casks, one ex-Bourbon one ex-Apera, filled at a similar time with our unpeated spirit, cut quite high to preserve its lovely strawberries-and-cream quality. Matured for 3.5 years before being decanted. One Heaven Hill Bourbon cask, with a medium toast and heavy char, give us confectionary notes, bright spice and great caramel, charred sugar. The other cask being ex-Apera (Australian sherry) gives the spirit body, and that amazing juiciness
that is dominant in this whisky.

I’m amazingly pleased with how this whisky came out after resting, slow proofing and bottling. Its texture is great, and it is SO moreish. Perfect as a digestif after a big Sunday roast, as we found out when we tested this one standing on the deck at Emita, Flinders Island, looking out over the endless ocean to the west.”