Whisky Review: White Owl Whisky
On my way home from work on Friday I stopped at the LCBO and picked up a bottle of Highwood Distillers Centennial 10 year-old Limited Edition Canadian Rye Whisky. It was a reward for the week of extremely hard work that I'd put in coordinating a training course (I also delivered some of the training, but mostly I had to be there to organize everything and make sure it ran smoothly). Attached to the bottle was a 'Value Added Promotional' 50ml bottle of White Owl Whisky; so, when I got home I cracked open the miniature (which was a plastic, PET, mini...more on this later), and poured it into one of my whisky glasses (a Glencairn 'Canadian')...
Some background: White Owl Whisky is a wheat-based Canadian whisky, which means that it has spent at least three years in oak barrels, although there is speculation that White Owl is a blend of some younger (3+) and older (6 year-old to 8 year-old) whiskies. Once it has matured suitably, it is run through a charcoal filter to remove all colour and then bottled. As a clear whisky, it should be fairly apparent that it was created for use in mixed drinks and/or cocktails that would normally use vodka. Several reviewers with good reputations have given this whisky extremely good reviews, including Chip Dykstra, Whisky for Everyone, and Davin de Kergommeaux who is likley the world's leading expert on Canadian Whisky, and whose opinion I highly respect).
However, whisky is an extremely personal and very subjective topic, and whisky reviews, as Martini from DMC & ME oints out, can be really confusing. To quote Martini directly: "[r]eading reviews I find I'm sometimes baffled by the elaborate or curious descriptions given. Chocolate? Creme brulee? Baked goods? In whisky? Well, sure. And I probably smell things that other people don't too. It's just how your brain interprets the scent." [Maker's Mark review What we smell when we nose whisky, and what we taste when we drink it, is directly affected by our own sense memories, and may be vastly different from what others smell and taste. That being said, my tasting notes for White Owl are as follows:
- Colour: Clear, Colourless
- Nose: Paint Thinner, Acetone, Nail Polish Remover...Davin and Chip talk about Sprite and other notes, but the only other thing I could pick up was very faint traces of flat, artificially sweet cream soda.
- Palate: Flat Sprite with a bad bottled-mineral water aftertaste, the only thing I've ever tasted that was worse was cheap Shochu (a Japanese grain alcohol). Adding a few drops of water just made it taste more like water...
- Finish: None, just an unpleasant burned plastic aftertaste.
- Summary: Worst. Whisky Experience. Ever. I had to pour what was left in my glass down the drain.
At first I thought that perhaps the miniature was quite old, as it had www.centurydistillers.com printed on the label, and from what I could gather, White Owl was produced by Highwood Distillers, not Century Distillers. According to Davin, Century Distillers is a subsidiary of Highwood, and indeed, if you click on the link above, you are directed to what is likely a mirror of the Highwood Distillers website. So, the mini clearly wasn't very old...perhaps the problem was that it was a plastic bottle; I've read elsewhere, and now cannot find the posts so I can't properly source this, that other whisky reviewers have had issues with the quality of the spirits (rum, whisky, etc.) found in minis, and in particular with the quality and taste of spirits bottled plastic minis.
Could the taste have been affected by the plastic bottle? I don't know, but it creates a problem for me in that White Owl is supposedly a good whisky, yet the mini was really and truly awful, and that really makes me hesitant to buy a full 75cl bottle. However, as it seems that White Owl was designed as a mixer, perhaps I'll give it a pass, since I prefer to drink my whisky neat. I'd be interested to know if anyone else has sampled White Owl, and what the results were, good or bad.
