Whisky Review: Timorous Beastie 10 Year

Douglas Laing has been releasing a range of regional blended malts with fanciful names over the last handful of years, joining their more established Big Peat. These cover the Highlands (Timorous Beastie), the Lowlands (Epicurian), Speyside (Scallywag), the Islands (Rock Oyster), and Campbeltown (Gauldrons). While most have started out as NAS malts, they have expanded the range to include core and limited edition age dated expressions.

This whisky was aged in what I would guess were exclusively refill ex-bourbon hogsheads, then bottled at 46.8% without coloring or chill filtration.

I purchased this sample from Dramtime.

Timorous Beastie 10 Year

Nose: honey, vanilla, clean malt, fairly green, almost no oak, a little floral bubblegum, a smidge of orange creamsicle. After adding a few drops of water the floral character is amplified, the green notes shift a bit towards apple, and the vanilla integrates with the malt.

Taste: sweet up front with a lot of green malt carrying through, vague fruity/floral notes around the middle, bittersweet fade out. After dilution it becomes a little washed out and grainy, but with more cask-influenced roundness at the back.

Finish: bittersweet grain and oak, green malt, vague floral notes

Part of me wonders if this sample was mislabeled and it's actually the NAS version, but it's been suggested that it's not likely to be the case. If everything in here is 10 years old, they're using pretty mediocre casks. The malt itself doesn't seem to be of poor quality, but it needs more time to properly mature. Water helped to round it out a bit, so this might have been better off bottled at 43%, but even then it was nothing spectacular. Overall I would give this a miss.