Lark Distillery LD80 Cask Strength

The Lark Distillery does single barrel bottlings, so every bottling is slightly different. They use a wide variety of different casks, but this particular bottling - the LD80 Cask Strength - was matured in 100 litre french oak port barrels (in fact all the bottlings I tried turned out to be french oak port barrels).

The smell is warmer than the non-cask strength bottlings. Same vanilla sweetness with hints of citrus, with a slight spirit warmth at the back of the nose.

The taste is rich, warm, smooth and powerful. It has a nice balance of vanilla sweetness, with the spice, oak, and hints of port coming through with a decent hint of spirit warming the mouth. This is even more like a good christmas cake than the LD74. A genuinely good malt at cask strength.

The finish is longer than the standard strength bottlings, and starts with the remnants of the spirit warmth, fading through spice into gentle vanilla sweetness.

On an interesting note, I was chatting a few months ago with a gent by the name of Mark Nicholson, who works at The Lark, and he mentioned that they standardised on 58% for their Cask Strength bottlings, but that they come out of the barrels significantly higher than that. In fact, he mentioned that they often find that the whisky comes out of the barrel at a higher ABV than when it went in. He said due to the different relative humidity of the Tasmanian climate compared to the Scottish one had something to do with it.

So I guess all the shares for the angels get deposited down here... ;)