Dubhghlas Peatsie Tawny Port Review – Saving the Best for Last?
And just like that, we have reached the final dram of Dubhghlas Week.
Over the past few days I have had the enormous pleasure of celebrating something I have been waiting years to see: Dubhghlas officially becoming a whisky distillery. I tasted the spirit before it could legally call itself whisky, watched Cees and Laura build their wonderfully unconventional little distillery around their own ideas, engineering skills and sense of humour, and now I have been able to sit down with all three of their inaugural Peatsie releases.
That makes this one a little bittersweet. I have thoroughly enjoyed putting Dubhghlas in the spotlight this week, but more than anything I am incredibly happy for my friends. Making whisky is easy to romanticise from the outside. Actually building a distillery, making the spirit, filling the casks and waiting years to discover whether all that work has paid off is another matter entirely. With these first three releases, I think Cees and Laura can safely say that it has.
We started with the excellent Palo Cortado, moved on to the Ruby Port, and now there is one final cask waiting for us: Peatsie Tawny Port.
And what a way to finish the week.
Listen to the Dubhghlas Peatsie Tawny Port Review:
Peatsie Tawny Port and the Final Inaugural Release
This is the third of the inaugural Peatsie releases from Dubhghlas Distillery, made with their 50 ppm peated spirit and matured for three years in a first-fill Tawny Port quarter cask. Like its siblings, it has been released as a single cask at natural cask strength, with no added colouring and without chill filtration. Cask 37WM230202 yielded just 141 bottles at a formidable 62.47% ABV. Quarter casks provide considerably more wood contact relative to the amount of spirit inside them, so three years in one can be rather eventful. Add first-fill Tawny Port and heavily peated young spirit to that equation and subtlety probably isn’t the first thing you’d expect.
Yet one of the things that has impressed me throughout this inaugural trio is that these whiskies don’t simply taste like young spirit hammered into submission by active casks. There is a distillery character underneath all that oak, peat and fortified wine. This Tawny Port might demonstrate that better than any of them.
Tasting Notes: Dubhghlas Peatsie Tawny Port
Stats
- Distillery: Dubhghlas Distillery
- Country: The Netherlands
- Type: Dutch Single Malt Whisky
- Series: Peatsie
- Age: 3 Years Old
- Peat: 50 ppm
- Cask: First-Fill Tawny Port Quarter Cask
- Cask Number: 37WM230202
- ABV: 62.47%
- Outturn: 141 Bottles
- Natural Colour: Yes
- Non-Chill Filtered: Yes
- Flavour Profile: Smoke & Storm
Three years old, 50 ppm peat, a first-fill Tawny Port quarter cask and 62.47% ABV. On paper, this has all the ingredients required to become an absolute flavour battering ram. Yet if the Palo Cortado and Ruby Port have taught me anything this week, it is that these inaugural Dubhghlas releases have been surprisingly capable of carrying all that cask influence and alcohol without losing the spirit underneath. With the Tawny Port, I’m hoping they can do it one final time.
Nose
Musty, but wonderfully so. Walking into an old toolshed is the first thing that comes to mind, with wood polish, old timber and machine oils all immediately present. Actually, forget an old toolshed. This smells like my grandfather’s old toolshed.
That memory hit me almost instantly, and once it was there I couldn’t shake it. It smells like elbow grease, if you will, and I know how much of that my grandfather put into his crafts. There is something beautifully nostalgic about it for me.
The peat builds around charred wood, brine, tar and smouldering vegetation, while underneath it sits this wonderfully musty fruitiness that reminds me of opening a bag of cereal with raisins inside. It shouldn’t necessarily sound elegant when written down, yet in the glass it paints a remarkably complete picture.Better still, the nose makes you feel as though you’re about to drink something much older than three years.
Palate
Wonderfully syrupy. Cherry syrup, maple syrup and treacle arrive almost immediately, giving the whisky this thick, dark sweetness that suits the Tawny Port beautifully. But what really makes the palate work is everything happening around that sweetness. Crushed black peppercorns provide a sharp spicy edge, followed by roast beef, Turkish tea and cloves. Freshly ground nutmeg adds another layer of warmth before dark chocolate and ground espresso beans start pulling everything towards an increasingly dark and savoury profile.
This is a heavy whisky. At 62.47% ABV it was hardly going to be a wallflower, but despite all that power, peat, sweetness and spice, it remains beautifully balanced.There is an awful lot happening here, yet nothing feels like it is fighting particularly hard to be heard.
And perhaps that is what surprises me most. With a three-year-old heavily peated whisky coming from a first-fill quarter cask at more than 62% ABV, I was fully prepared to reach for the water almost immediately. Yet unlike the Palo Cortado, where I thought dilution significantly improved the experience, I don’t feel the same urgency here. This is enormous whisky, certainly, but the alcohol feels remarkably well integrated for the strength.
Finish
Long, dark and satisfyingly sticky. Maple syrup and extra-dark chocolate linger beautifully together, joined by liquorice root and an unexpected little flash of cherry popsicle. The sweetness gradually gives way to darker, earthier flavours, but that little cherry note keeps occasionally poking its head back through.
There is still plenty of peat hanging around as well, although by this point it feels more like smouldering wood than outright smoke. The dark chocolate becomes increasingly bitter, while the liquorice root provides a slightly herbal dryness that stops all that syrup from becoming too much.And then it just… stays.It hangs around for quite some time, which is exactly what I want from a whisky like this.
Food Pairing
I’d go straight towards something dark and rich here. A flourless dark chocolate cake would work beautifully, particularly if it isn’t overly sweet. The bitterness of the chocolate should latch onto those espresso and extra-dark chocolate notes while leaving the cherry and maple sweetness plenty of room to breathe.
If you prefer something savoury, however, I’d be very tempted by smoked or slow-roasted beef. That roast beef note on the palate, combined with peat, black pepper and treacle, practically begs for it. A properly caramelised exterior on the meat would only make that combination more interesting.
Who Is Dubhghlas Peatsie Tawny Port For?
This isn’t the whisky I’d hand to someone taking their first tentative steps into whisky. At 62.47%, with 50 ppm peat, an active first-fill Tawny Port quarter cask and a flavour profile seemingly determined to occupy every corner of your mouth, Peatsie Tawny Port isn’t exactly shy. But if you love big cask-strength whisky, dirty peat, dark fruit, syrupy sweetness and those slightly industrial notes of oil, tar and old wood, there is an enormous amount of fun to be had here.
More importantly, I think this is one for whisky drinkers willing to look beyond the number three on the label. Young whisky has become almost synonymous with compromise in certain corners of the whisky world, as though age alone determines whether something deserves to be taken seriously. Peatsie Tawny Port makes a pretty compelling argument against that idea.
It tastes young in places because it is young. But it certainly doesn’t taste immature.
Verdict
I was impressed with the Peatsie Ruby Port Cask for a first release of only three years old. I was amazed by the quality of the Peatsie Palo Cortado Cask without even looking at its age. And this Tawny Port Cask? Consider me astounded in general. What a dram.
There are moments when reviewing whisky where age becomes useful context, and there are moments when it becomes an unnecessary distraction. If you poured this blind and told me afterwards that it was only three years old, I would have a very hard time believing you. Not because it tastes like a conventional old whisky, but because it possesses a depth, balance and completeness that I simply don’t associate with whisky this young.
The combination of cherry syrup, maple, treacle, roast beef, Turkish tea, dark chocolate and espresso is already enough to make the palate memorable, but it is that nose that really elevates the whisky for me. That nose is going to stay with me for a while. Whisky has this wonderful ability to connect flavour and aroma to memories you weren’t consciously looking for. One moment I’m sitting there analysing a three-year-old Dutch single malt and the next I’m standing in my grandfather’s old toolshed again, surrounded by old timber, machine oil and wood polish. That is worth more to me than another dozen generic notes of vanilla and caramel ever could be.
More objectively, I think this is the most complete of the three inaugural releases. The Palo Cortado arguably gave me more individual flavours to explore and changed wonderfully with water, while the Ruby Port demonstrated another side of the Peatsie spirit altogether. But the Tawny Port feels as though all the individual components have landed in exactly the right places. The peat, Port influence, spirit, oak and alcohol all seem to understand what the others are doing. For 62.47% ABV whisky that has only spent three years in a quarter cask, that’s quite an achievement.
Final Thoughts
And with that, Dubhghlas Week comes to an end. Three inaugural whiskies. Three tiny single casks. Three years of maturation after considerably more years of dreaming, experimenting, engineering, distilling and waiting. Most importantly, three whiskies Cees and Laura can be bloody proud of.
The Palo Cortado showed me just how accomplished their young spirit could already be. The Ruby Port demonstrated how well Peatsie could carry a sweeter, fruitier cask influence. And the Tawny Port finishes the trilogy with perhaps the biggest surprise of them all: a dark, oily, syrupy, smoky little monster that somehow manages to feel far more mature than its age suggests.
And yes, these are my friends. I make absolutely no attempt to hide how happy I am for them or how much I wanted these first releases to be good. But wanting something to be good and actually finding good whisky in your glass are two very different things. I’ve known for years how much passion Cees and Laura have poured into Dubhghlas. This week I finally got to taste the result with the word whisky written on the bottle.
Was it worth the wait?
After this Tawny Port, that’s a very easy yes.
