Lot No. 40 Peated Quarter Cask
Canadian Whisky| 55.5% ABV
Score: 5/10
Average. In a good way.
TL;DR
Enjoyably artificial and gloriously confused
Authentic vs. Artificial
Walking down the street in Toronto on a warm pre-pandemic summer night, the “it” restaurants are jammed and spill out on to the street. The cool factor is evident by the masses that are drawn to it, but what is the essence of cool? Next door they seem to have all the right ingredients; reclaimed wood, a shitty paint job, trendy menu, but the empty space inside lays bare the lack of cool. Because you can’t buy cool. The moment you reach out and grab it, it turns to ashes in your fingers and you’re left with the insecurity of knowing you don’t have it.
Cool factor comes from authenticity – the confidence in knowing you’re doing the right thing with no concern for outside perception. There’s nothing cooler than making well informed, passionately authentic decisions, and the fakers and copycats are easily spotted.
The origins of peat use in whisky is very authentic. Using a readily available heat source to dry malted barley, the flavour was mostly incidental . But do things become less authentic when you use peat to flavour malt the way a chef seasons a steak? What about retrofitting peat flavour into an aged spirit by filling it into barrels that previously held peated whisky?
Peated barrel finishing is definitely a trend in Canadian whisky at the moment, with other hip distilleries like Shelter Point also experimenting. I’m not convinced it's a good idea, since cask finishing usually feels like a gimmick or a cover-up to me, and what is arguably the most heavy-handed cask finish in existence has the potential to push into the territory of the ridiculous.
“In whisky there are many forces at play, but there is no doubt that the strongest two are peat and rye”
The Hiram Walker distillery, located in Windsor, Ontario, just a short jump south (yes south!) across the river from Detroit, is a huge operation with a very large portion of output going to produce Canadian Club for Beam Suntory. For their Lot No. 40, unmalted rye is cooked and commercial enzymes are used to produce sugars for fermentation. The fermented mash is distilled once in a column still, followed by a second distillation in a copper pot still with the resulting spirit aged in new American oak barrels.
Authentically Canadian, Lot No. 40 is not afraid of change or experimentation. Since its release, Hiram Walker has continually tinkered with the recipe. The original 1990s version of Lot No. 40 used a mash that included some malted barley to supply the enzymes and was aged in used barrels. In a more recent tweak, the strain of rye was changed in an effort to produce more consistent results.
This current cask strength “exploration” follows the initial new oak maturation with a finish of “17 months in 150L first-fill peated single malt casks” from an undisclosed Scottish distillery. Dr. Don Livermore of Hiram Walker informs me this is 100% rye grain whisky, and was not chill-filtered, nor was any colouring added, which we can all agree is both authentic and very cool.
Review
Lot No. 40 Rye Explorations Release No. 01, finished in peated single malt casks, cask strength, 55.5% ABV
$90
Nose
Very oily; cooking oil, chilli oil, a greasy pepperoni pizza, char. Maybe the pizza crust is charred from a coal fire. Dusty, malty sweet, banana cream pie round out the palate along with some more typical rye flavours; spearmint, dill, caraway rye bread. I wonder if the oily-ness gets removed from the standard Lot No. 40 by chill-filtration, or if this is the single malt casks at work.
Palate
Fried banana, crème caramel, candied yam, tiramisu. The peated cask effect on the palate is strange – there is an earthy, peaty spiciness to it without being smoky. The mid-palate has more peat-spice, menthol, and iodine. Novocaine spreads throughout the mouth and numbs the tongue and lips like a trip to the dentist. Long hot pepper finish with Jagermeister-like bitter herb.
The Dregs
On first pour the whisky was very confused. Blind, I would not have been able to guess what I was drinking (I even emailed Dr. Don to ask him if this really was 100% rye because I thought for sure there was some malted barley in the mix). So I did what I usually do when a bottle doesn’t immediately grab me; pour a couple more just to make sure, lower the fill level a bit, place it at the back of the cupboard and forget about it for several months. Coming back to it, I found myself enjoying it to the point of checking online and considering if I should grab another bottle before this limited release is gone. The price is a little high for that.
It has similar flavours to a peated cask finished Shelter Point I’ve previously tried – not overtly smoky but with shape-shifting medicinal peat spice diffused through the palate. Integrated but not convincingly, the herbal rye spice does bring another dimension to the Lot No. 40, although not really in a complimentary way. It’s not a very authentic feeling, maybe someone should tell Lot No. 40 it’s ok to be yourself.
There is too much going on here… does it work? Yes, in a strange conflicting way it does, while still coming across like a dish prepared with all of the ingredients instead of just the right ones. All dressed potato chip vibes. Unstoppable rye and immovable peat, with the observer as the casualty. I’m confused.
Score: 5/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. AM
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