The oldest blend dated from late 2021 so I was looking forward to some interesting stuff.
First up the chocolate bourbon. It smelled good, a faint chocolate milkshake note on the nose, sweetness on the palate, with just a hint of the vanilla + chocolate milkshake that I was hoping for, followed by a fairly heavy dose of bitter tannins. This was always an outlier as I buggered up the stripping runs due to a cracked alcometer so I had run them too far and the resulting blend was very low proof. This stuff is at about 45% now in the jar and hasn't been proofed down at all.
Secondly, the wheat and oat. I had split the batch in two, with one half going on charred oak, and the other on medium toasted oak with no char. The char came good first, but after about a year, the no char was more complex. Firstly, the nose was headsy as hell. I would cut way harder now. That's good... I'm learning!
But on the tongue there were those bitter tannins again. Between the tannins and the solvents they are undrinkable. Both of them, and there's no real discernable difference between them.Thirdly, the YLAY / sugarhead left-overs. Nah. Just nah. I don't even know what it is, but there's just something off. Maybe some concentrated tails. Maybe in didn't sit well with what I ate for dinner. But nah!
Finally, the best of the bunch remains an oak tea that is a by-product of trying to pre-age some oak for using with apple brandy. I've soaked some oak sticks in neutral, changing out the neutral every 3 months or so. The resulting blend is very whisky-like and complex although still lacking mouthfeel and something beyond "wood". It's got a similar tannic aftertaste to the first two above, but without the intensity.
In conclusion, when ageing small amounts of spirits in fresh oak, you do need to watch for over-oaking. The above were sat in glass on french oak sticks of 2cm in section and cut to lengths to give an equivalent of 100cm²/ litre of surface area which is roughly equivalent to a 200 litre barrel. The oak may not have been adequately aged. It's from an oak that was growing in the garden and while it had spent many years outside, it wasn't split first so the heartwood could easily have hung on to a lot of tannin.
The big question being what to do with the over-oaked booze? I did use a jar of the chocolate bourbon to make Punkin's muck and that went down well, but I don't recall trying it again first. My feeling is either used as a base for a strongly flavoured sweet liqueur, or dumped in with the all feints run that I'll hopefully attack soon and see what comes out.
