Kavalan Solist Madeira Cask
Crown Cellars Exclusive | 61% ABV
Score: 6/10
Good stuff.
TL;DR
Powerful, intense, but with a catch
Revelationary?
Integrity. Impartiality. Honesty. Hard fought and easily lost. You’ve likely heard this before but it’s worth reiterating once in a while: Dramface was founded on the principle that we are community funded and each writer brings their own whisky to the table.
The first part is still 100% true to this day for you will never see an advertisement or sponsorship anywhere, and the second part remains vastly true with minor exceptions.
In some instances, distilleries have elected to send their whiskies along for our two cents, always arriving blind and with the explicit and clear understanding that we will always report our thoughts and state that a whisky was provided to us rather than spending our money on that particular bottle.
Some distilleries or bottlers have stopped sending samples while others have continued to do so, seeing value in what we are doing even when less than favourable scores pop up. I always get a silent giggle when perusing shelves and I see a prominent gold sticker or medallion looped around a bottle neck, proudly displaying a 91/100 score and think how unsexy our 5/10 score would look in comparison, even when they are nearly the same when compared against each other.
While we’ve received two dozen or so whiskies from distilleries and bottlers so far (out of nearly 1250 reviews), we have two firsts here today. In a landmark move and a first for Dramface, a store has sent a bottle in for review. It’s also a first for me as well; while there have been a few beating around the bush and some expelling of hot air and no follow-through, nobody has pulled the trigger to send something to me to be tossed under the BroddyScopeTM. Until now!
Crown Cellars is a local-to-me store in Calgary, Canada, and was founded by some geeky whisky folk. After receiving this well-packaged Kavalan, I had a chat with one of the co-founders of Crown Cellars one Friday night. It was such an easy going discussion that the 1.5 hours flew by and I had to end the discussion short for a whisky tasting with friends, a coincidence we will discuss later. What stood out from this chat was the sense of community and honest interest in supporting us normal whisky folk. A not-so-insignificantly sized community chat is quite active and is a two-way street, supporting open dialogue across members from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and beyond. What they’ve created is very impressive and it’s quite refreshing to see a group created by the people for the people with no financial angle. Well done Crown Cellars, well done, we can relate.
Review
Kavalan Solist Madeira, Crown Cellars (Canada) Exclusive, Cask: D170317055A, 61% ABV
CAD$260 (£140) at retail, this one gifted to Dramface and allocated by Wally
Score: 6/10
Good stuff.
TL;DR
Powerful, intense, but with a catch
Nose
Very densely sweet with a savoury edge. Fudgy caramel. Hoisin sauce. Glace cherries. Black forest cake. Perhaps some Ribena concentrate? Wet East India Trading Co. tobacco. Almond extract. Sticky toffee pudding.
This has to be one of the sweetest and densest smelling whiskies I’ve come across in the hundreds of different whiskies I’ve drunk thus far.
Palate
Tell your taste buds to hold on tight for your first sip for they are in for an intense flavour punch.
Cola cubes. Flat Coca Cola mouth-coating sweetness. Sticky toffee pudding again. Licorice. Walnuts. Dark chocolate bitterness. Cinnamon heart candies. Fresh cherries and moist earthy tobacco. This has a fuzzy sweetness about it, coating everything and nicely muddying it all together. It sticks on your tongue for a good while, with red licorice and chocolate strawberry cake studded with walnuts.
This doesn’t drink as hot as the 61% abv would suggest, hiding the punch behind the thick veil of sweetness. One could get moderately in trouble with continuous pours of this one.
Sounds great right? Except I’m missing something in the middle. It hits hard out of the gate with powerful sweetness, then dips out in the middle, before transitioning to the fairly potent lingering sweet-related notes on the lengthy finish. The transition from entry-to-mid-to-finish happens quickly as well, with the redeeming feature of a good strength and long finish.
This is quite tamed down with a drop of water. If you have a bottle of this or are considering it, you might as well enjoy it for what it is at full strength.
The Dregs
I’ll be honest; the first few drinks were quite hot and one-dimensionally sweet. Only with some time and decreasing fill level has this rounded out and given up some of its secrets.
On top of that, I found this is a tough one to score. Let’s discuss why, as this has been something of a revelation on my part.
Kavalan is a distillery that was founded in 2005 with the help of Dr. Jim Swan. Now some of you may or may not have heard of the late Mr. Swan, but he was an active consultant that helped many distilleries around the world. Jim worked on the distillation and maturation of whisky for a long time, from his doctoral thesis on wood extractives in 1988, to playing an instrumental role in research at the Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWRI), and providing consultancy services to the industry.
This is perhaps where his longest lasting portion of his legacy might come from; helping aid new distilleries in getting up and running and inventing the shaved toasted and recharred (STR) casks that are often associated with these distilleries. While his influences are wide-reaching and sometimes not published, several post-2000 distilleries have Jim to thank, including:
Annandale
Kavalan
Macaloney’s Island Distillery (Canada)
Jim was also a consultant at the beginning of Ardnamurchan, however the folks at Ardnamurchan deviated from Jim’s trademark style to create a new make suited to their vision of the distillery. This included, from what I have pieced together and attempted to verify, a cloudier wort and later cut points especially for the peated runs, creating a more robust distillate.
Jim’s modus operandi; attempting to paraphrase, read between the lines, and presuppose when I’ve never met the man, the myth, the legend himself - was to create a clean and not too ‘jagged’ new make spirit. A clear wort and narrow cut produce a bright, clean, and somewhat fruity new make. These distillate profiles are purposely designed to be gentle and supporting young releases, or in other words, the distillate is not intrusive to the flavours being extracted from the wood.
If any of you paint, either household, automotive, or even your fingernails, you will know that alcohol is a solvent. It will actively extract soluble components from the casks in the short term. In this way, you are controlling the final product with your wet casking selections rather than relying on the longer method of oxidative, hydrolysable, and greater in-barrel esterification processes employed by other distilleries. Objectively, this long-term aging is like whisky roulette, taking your chances that the barrel will work its magic over time. It’s like the oft-referenced 80/20 rule where the first 80% can be readily achieved with knowing the basics and good practices, and the final 20% takes significantly more effort and time to reach the last remaining goals of perfection.
Am I crazy? Perhaps. But when have you seen a refill ex-bourbon whisky from a Jim Swan distillery? I haven’t. There’s always some version of a wine cask included, very likely an STR, and a sherry cask, bringing the sweetness to the party and, dare I say, fortifying a gentle and somewhat benign spirit underneath. The cask choices are almost like a veneer. In a completely unrelated and unprompted side note, a quote that had lodged itself in the bowels of my memory was dredged up from a tasting last year:
I don’t make a Jim Swan distillate. I like my distillate to be strong so it can handle age.
Patrick van Zuidam, owner and master distiller, Millstone
In reflection, I’ve tried a few Jim Swan distilleries so far and can comment on their consistent traits, as much as my memory allows of course. Amrut presents itself fairly similar to Kavalan however their prices are much lower and likely less luxury-oriented. I adore Amrut’s Fusion whisky, providing a consistent experience and good strength (50%) at a much lower price point. Cotswolds was a flash in the pan (one of the first releases - Odyssey if I remember right?), provided an easy drinking and spiced-loaf note; nothing to write home about. Milk & Honey (ex-peated cask one) was extremely ‘mid’ as the kids say these days, only coming to mind because I tried it a few months ago, otherwise it was not memorable at all. Lindores samples were disturbingly similar to Macaloney’s, which circling back to the intro, led me to duck off my phone call with Crown Cellars.
As luck would have it, friends had snagged a tasting flight of Macaloney’s to taste that night, going through five 120 mL samples of core range and future releases. Macaloney’s and Lindores presented so eerily similar that blinded, I wouldn’t be able to pick out which was Scotch or Canadian, both with a pleasant and generic nose leading into a sweet initial taste, hollow middle, and relatively quick fading finish (all 44-48%). Needless to say, both myself and my budding whisky nerd friends were quite underwhelmed. They nosed well for the age with nothing offensive turning us off. Anything peated had a mild peat sense on the nose (something along the 15-20 ppm malt phenol content) however on the palate, it was near absent for everyone.
I think this reinforces what I’ve been finding with these Jim Swan distillates: ultra clean washes with slow distillation and narrow cut points leads to a spirit that doesn’t lend itself to the peat/phenol’s coming out at the lower cut points. I suspect this is why Ardnamurchan modified Jim’s recommendations for they knew what spirit they wanted to make and thus bucked his insights, something I think we are all thankful for.
If you use the new-and-improved Dramface search tool for each of the above Jim Swanned distilleries, you’ll find that the core range of each doesn’t reach over a Dramface 6/10, with only special releases or single casks gaining an extra point. Again, another indicator of average distillation and experience as Dramface’s average score across the over 1200 reviews is a 6/10.
So that brings us to this Kavalan. I don’t think Jim Swan distillates are my style. All cask, limited middle palate experience, and loads of generic sweetness with no character. So how to score this then if this style is not for me and we try to remain impartial and honest? Also, compound that with the very unique pricing scheme employed by Kavalan (ahem, very high compared to others) when I consider price in my scoring system? The dilemma’s are multiplying!
When I first cracked this bottle, it was an easy 5/10 but with time, it has softened, rounded, and allowed some of the unique attributes of this particular Madeira cask to come through. This hurts me to say, but this is a Dramface 6/10 whisky at the eye-watering price of $260 CAD (£140). For reference, the average price of a Dramface 6/10 is £66 (n=343) so I would recommend this whisky as a try-before-you-buy with the acknowledgement that if mega Madeira sweetness and high proof is your thing, then this bottle might be worth your hard-earned toils; but for other folks, this might be a one-trick pony. If you weren’t super nerdy and dissected every whisky you drank, I could see this being a 7 or 8/10; elusive territory for sure. But I think Kavalan and frankly many of the other Jim Swan distillates fall short of the magical potential required to survive under the microscope, save for the odd unicorn cask.
Thanks for the long read. I didn’t set out to write such a long article but sometimes the words and puzzle pieces just click. And thank you to Crown Cellars for sending along this bottle for Dramface’s first Kavalan review, but most importantly, a massive thank you and kudos for the peek under the hood of the whisky community being built around this small but growing store.
It’s truly magical what whiskyphiles can accomplish around something so innocuous as a glass of whisky.
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. BB
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