Lost Spirits Distillery is a very new and extremely exciting craft distiller on California's coast with an incredibly cool wooden steam still with a dragon head on its soaring Lyne arm and a wonderfully compelling story about local grain, carefully chosen peat and exotic California wine barrels. Never have I seen so much excitement build so quickly about a totally new out of the blue American craft whisky.
I first heard about Lost Spirits distillery in August when there was a flood of blog posts, which started with
David Driscoll of K&L's introduction which features great pictures of malt smoking, Canadian peat, and a video interview with Bryan Davis, one of the two wonderfully knowledgeable and whisky geeky folks behind Lost Spirits.
Josh Hatton of Jewmalt
did a profile less than a day later with his signature brilliant illustrated symbolic tasting notes.
But the one that really threw me for a loop was the
incredibly detailed and lovingly documented interview that Mark Hughes did on the remarkable South African blog
Whisky Tasting Fellowship. Hughes gets deep with Bryan & Joanne's story; their history, their decisions, their rationale, and their aesthetics. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this fascinating project read Mark's piece:
http://fr1day.co.za/2012/08/20/lost-spirits-distillery-home-of-110ppm-peat-monster-leviathan-i/
Bryan & Joanne were nice enough to send me a bottle of LeviathanI for review. This bottle will he headed to Mark in South Africa directly!
Leviathan I 53% abv Cask #3
100% California malted barley smoked with coarse cut Canadian peat and "stored for under 4 years in reused cooperage (late harvest Cabernet casks)."
Color: rich hazelnut shell brown with golden amber glints - slightly cloudy. This is an extraordinary color:
Nose: Powerful, rich and almost indescribable. The first and dominant aroma is untanned hides and fresh leather. But there is a wealth of aromas, including lightly roasted coffee and cacao, sherry, earthy raw peat, old campfire ash on wet clothes, wet dog, dried wine, and malt whisky. After extended air the hides fade a bit and the aroma of wine becomes more prominent. It's an unmistakable and impressive aroma
The
palate entry is huge and off dry with powerful notes of leather, chocolate, yeast, wet animal (like llama or alpaca (my father-in-law keeps alpaca)) and malt sugars. The mid palate expansion introduces a filigree of oak wood with a richly earthy smoky quality and a dark and vinous aspect in the integration of sweet and smoke. There's dark chocolate, and roasted ground coffee beans. A vegetal note creeps in at the turn to the finish like kale or chard. It's an amazingly distinctive flavor profile full of bold and unexpected flavors. The yeast note bothers me, however, and I recognize it as a sign of a very young spirit.
With extended time a bit of honeyed richness wells up in the palate - as often happens to me with malt whisky. But it doesn't banish the yeast and wet animal quality that I find off putting. I get some of this from Wasmund's Copper Fox Malt and I recall a bit of it from Corsair Triple Smoke. I queue up a dram of Triple Smoke for a head to head comparison. Well - side by side they have much less in common that m recollection showed. Triple smoke is dramatically lighter (golden), clearer (less cloudy), lower in proof (at 40%) and lighter in flavor. It has a dramatically lighter flavor density and almost comes off as a conventional younger malt whisky side by side. There are some young yeast notes, but Triple Smoke is gently malty, lightly and sweetly smoked with cherry notes dominating. Leviathan by contrast is dark, rich, titanically dense, and full of these intense flavor notes: particularly the bitter smoky wet animal, roasted coffee and cacao bean quality. The kiss of yeast which I find reminds me of new make and young whisky is a common element - but there is very little else in common; not even the quality of being smoked.
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| Leviathan1 (left) & Corsair Triple Smoke (right) |
Lost Spirits is an extraordinarily innovative distillery and there are marks of brilliance all over Leviathan1 - ranging from unique ingredients and unusual production methods yielding a densely flavored spirit which is dramatically different. However the flavors of new make and some off flavors put me off. I'm reluctant to come down too definitively because I had a similarly negative first impression of Balcones Brimstone and it became one of my favorite drams with time and acclimation. I'm less sanguine about Leviathan. I think I need it to have more time in the wood to conquer the yeast and maybe I need to seek out Seascape to find something with a bit less of the titanic and unfamiliar form of peat. I'm still going to recommend it because it's so obviously crafted and so full of innovation. It is worth trying and there are many who will love this. But at the moment, not me. I will keep an eagle eye on this project, however. It shows enormous promise.
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Unlike the reviews at listed at the top of the page which were overwhelmingly positive, I have some issues with the young flavors in Leviathan. I'm not entirely alone here. Yesterday Sku posted a review with some of the same impressions:
http://recenteats.blogspot.com/2012/09/craft-whiskey-week-lost-spirits.html
