Kilchoman Single Bourbon Cask

I love a review with drinking advice built in.

Kilchoman single casks seem to be pretty popular on blogs and whatnot lately. What's the cask number of this bad boy?

@OlJas, this is cask 198/2009. It was bottled for Sun Favorite Taiwan. I would imagine many of these single cask one-offs are quite different from one another, so they may not be of much use for most people. Still review-worthy just for the sake of reference, though.

I must agree with your assessment about too much air. My experience with Kilchoman is that after too much air it gets very smoky and ashy. I like your description as "musty tobacco." I have just opened a sherry single cask of Kilchoman that is not as amazing as my last single cask. Again, it has that overly smoky and "musty tobacco" note that really dominates. My hope is that a little time will change things. It was worth the risk, but over priced.

Cool. When I've found a single cask bottling that I might buy, I always run some Google searches in the small hope that at least one of the other ~350 (or whatever) bottles was bought by someone who's already opened it, tasted it, written a review, AND noted the cask number wherever Google needs it to be to find it. When those stars align, it's so useful.

I wish those stars had aligned for the last bottle of IB Bowmore I bought. Instead I bought it on faith and got burned. It's a sour winey Bowmorey mess.

The next time I can justify a whisky purchase, it might just be one of the Kilchoman single casks from K&L.

@Nock, Glad I'm not alone in that assessment. It really put a damper on my enjoyment of this one.

@OlJas, Sorry to hear your Bowmore didn't work out. Hopefully you'll have better luck with your next Kilchoman if you decide to pull the trigger. IB's and single casks are always a risk, aren't they? They're usually either the most rewarding or disappointing whiskies to be had in my experience.

@hunggar thank you for reviewing this one. I like this distillery and was curious about this one.

About the oxidization changing the profile too much, I wonder if being a young spirit is the cause of the downfall. It hasn't had enough exposure to oxygen while aging in the cask through contracting with the weather. maybe if aged longer, any oxidization via pour exposure may stabilise this. Maybe.

Still for me, cask strength and single barrel 5 year old is something worth trying.

@Frost, you bring up a question that I've asked before (here on Connosr, I think) and never gotten a satisfactory answer: Why does "oxidation" (or whatever we should technically call the process of whisky deterioration in an opened bottle) degrade* whisky in a bottle but not whisky in a cask?

Casks typically have plenty of headspace in them, especially as a given barrel ages. Definitely comparable to what's in an open bottle.

And casks are said to "breathe" in a way that bottles don't.

So why the difference?

My only theory is that the good stuff happening during barrel maturation outweighs the bad stuff that's happening simultaneously, and in a bottle it's nothing but bad* stuff. Any takers on that theory?

Yeah, I used mostly negative terms for the effects of air on open bottles here. I know that lots of people experience positive changes too. I think the question about the process stands either way.