Whiskey Review: Iron Fish Two Peninsulas Whiskey
Editor’s Observe: This whiskey was offered to us as a evaluation sample by Iron Fish Distillery. This in no way, for every our editorial insurance policies, influenced the closing outcome of this review. It should also be observed that by clicking the buy link toward the bottom of this overview our web-site receives a tiny referral payment which helps to aid, but not influence, our editorial and other fees.
In the midst of a 60th birthday party in 2013, Richard Anderson’s wife handed him his gift – A compact ebook, “Michael Jackson’s Total Tutorial to One Malt Scotch: A Connoisseur’s Guideline to the Single Malt Whiskies of Scotland.” Tucked within was a aircraft ticket for him to devote 8 times discovering the fabled Scotch-earning distilleries of Islay in the Internal Hebrides islands.
It turned out to be an auspicious excursion. Sarah Anderson considered it could possibly enable her husband get above an obsession with Islay Scotches, so he and two of his brothers in regulation set out to discover the region. A person day, they ended up hand-cutting peat out of nearby bogs and getting a personal tour at Laphroaig, in which a writer for the London-primarily based journal Whiskeria found them.
“These distilleries are like monasteries,” Anderson told the magazine although he sipped 2002 Laphroaig straight from the barrel in 1 of the distillery’s warehouses. “They have not modified substantially in hundreds of several years. Nevertheless complete of individuals practicing the identical religious observe.”
The adhering to day, Anderson and his brothers in legislation visited Kilchoman, an additional of the island’s famed monasteries of whisky. Kilchoman is Islay’s only impartial farm distillery, escalating all its own barley on-website. Standing with a glass of solitary malt in hand and searching out more than the barley fields, Anderson explained he “was seriously very stricken” by the majesty of the place, and turned to brother-in-regulation David Wallace and claimed, “This is what we need to do with our retirement.”
David Wallace and his wife Heidi Bolger experienced a short while ago purchased a farm in northern Michigan and hadn’t made the decision still what they needed to do with it. The Scotland vacation sealed it, and the family came up with a prepare to acquire estate-grown spirits in an work to plant the Islay spirit in new floor 3,400 miles absent in Thompsonville, Michigan.
The initially two releases hatched from that plan started selling lately, a two-grain and a 4-grain whiskey distilled totally from neighborhood grains. Two Peninsulas Whiskey is the two-grain and Mad Angler Whiskey is the four.
Iron Fish Two Peninsulas (picture by means of Debbie Nelson)
Tasting Notes: Iron Fish Two Peninsulas Whiskey
Essential stats: Iron Fish calls it a two-grain whiskey, but the mash bill truly incorporates a few – 51% wheat grown on the farm at the distillery, 44% Michigan Upper Peninsula rye and 5% malted barley from Great Lakes Malting Co. 90 evidence/45% liquor by volume MSRP of $60.
Visual appearance: Dim amber, tending toward reddish brown.
Nose: For a wheat whiskey, it smells astonishingly bourbon-like. It built me assume of Blanton’s, with hints of caramel, butterscotch, brown sugar, and fondant.
Palate: Far spicier than you’d expect, both from the fact that it’s a wheat whiskey or primarily based on the nose. It’s a minimal boozy, though it burns off promptly as it heads for a gentler end. Assume cinnamon sweet and cough drops at first, right before it fades into a much more earthy mid-palate, with hay, grass, and wheat flavors. The rye unquestionably comes by way of prominently, in any case.
