Bushmills Causeway Collection 2010 Cognac Cask Single Malt

It's a time of change once again for myself as I've started a new job, once again with a civil engineering twist, and I've left Fort Lauderdale and moved to Port St Lucie about 1.5 hours north. Living in the U.S. for nearly a year I've come to realise why Americans talk about travelling in time rather than distance.

I'm used to travelling pretty much a mile a minute back in my hometown of Coleraine. Open space is a given with low population density and the fact that there are probably more sheep than people. In South Florida the opposite is very much true. Open space barely exists until you hit the everglades and then you run the risk of being eaten by alligators or suffocated to death by Burmese pythons. A mile here is likely to take 3 minutes, if your lucky.

Patience has never been a strong point of mine but I'm having to learn it here! Four way intersections are the bane of my life but are also just a way of life in Florida. I timed a stop at an intersection recently in Fort Lauderdale.....3 minutes 48 seconds sitting at a red light. I was close to combusting. But I've realised it does no good to reason on why travelling 5 miles takes 18 minutes now, rather I just accept I'll be in traffic for 18 mins and that distance travelled has become largely irrelevant. This is the price you pay for 300 days of sunshine I suppose. And also being exposed to incomprehensible amounts of borebon.

Thankfully the move to Port St Lucie does mean that the traffic issue has be significantly diminished. Sadly the same cannot be said about my exposure to the borebon.

Circa 10 months since leaving Ireland I'm returning to the Emerald Isle through the medium of liquid gold and that of my closest distillery, Bushmills. In a way the move to the U.S. has made me appreciate even further how lucky I was to have a distillery of the calibre of Bushmills pretty much on my doorstep. 

Thanks to my job I was in close vicinity of Bushmills pretty much on a weekly basis, something that even then I knew was a luxury but now that I'm approximately 4,100 miles away from the distillery I realise it was a real privilege. 

My closest distillery here in Florida is St Augustine and that's a 200 mile drive. Easily driveable I know, but back home I could of had access to roughly 25 distilleries within a 200 mile radius of Coleraine.

So for any whisky/whiskey nerds back home in Ireland, make sure you take full advantage of what's on your doorstep. 

That's enough sappiness for today. Let's get on with the job at hand, whiskey tasting. Today's dram is the Bushmills Causeway Collection 2010 Cognac release. Matured for 7 years in both bourbon and sherry casks the whiskey was moved to ex-cognac casks from the Charente region of France that had previously held cognac for at least 15 years. The second maturation period in the ex-cognac casks was for roughly 5 years. Bottled at natural cask strength of 53.8% abv with no colour added or chill filtration a bottle cost £110.

Let's taste.

Nose: Super fruity - booze soaked bananas, fresh and stewed apples, pears, honeydew melon. There’s sweet cinnamon, some dark dried fruit plus plenty of vanilla and caramel sauce.

Palate: It’s quite floral on first sip. Chamomile and a bit of elderflower. Then honeycomb sweetness followed by warm apple tart topped with vanilla ice cream. Cinnamon, nutmeg and some pepper heat mid palate. Milk chocolate plus raisin and just a hint of date. New leather too.

Finish: Medium to long with vanilla, pear, toffee and oak.

Score: 8 out of 10

Overall: I’ve had pretty mixed experiences with Cognac finished or matured whiskies, I’d go so far to say it’s pretty much my least favourite finish so I was really surprised by this whiskey from Bushmills. I can happily say it’s excellent and by far the best whiskey I’ve tried that uses Cognac in finishing or maturation. Not overly cheap at £110 a bottle but the experience is well worth the asking fee.

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