The Fool from North Start Spirits

The Fool is the first in a new Tarot card series from North Star Spirits. A very reasonable priced, cask strength, blend.

Let's see what it's like?

In 2016, Iain Croucher took the dive into the whisky world and started up North Star Spirits. Based up in Glasgow as a independent Whisky bottler priding itself on bottling only the finest single malt scotch whisky, blended malt scotch whisky and blended scotch whisky. North Star focuses its energies on the curiosities, peculiar oddities and obscurities - whisky as it comes, straight from the cask and into a bottle.

NSS have bottled loads of single casks, single malts, single grains and even a few blends - they do went to be towards the middle or top end of the market but this one is definitely at the lower end of the price range.

This blend components are from Edrington with the grain being North British, see below the picture of one of the cask it was delivered to North Star Spirits in!

The Fool is a blend of single malt and grain matured for 6 years. The pair of casks that contained the liquid for this blend came from Edrington in old Macallan-Glenlivet ex-oloroso refill butts, with the grain coming from North British and the malt from another distillery, possibly two from the Edrington group. 

Bottler info:

The rear label lists some of the attributes of a fool:

Travel – Search – Origin – Wandering – Essence – Liberated force – Unreasonable – Chaos – Stampede – Folly

They also give the malt : grain ratio.

As you can see a very high 80% grain.

But there does seem to be some confusion on the age of the whisky 8 years but 2016 - 2022 ? !!!!

Bottled at 57.3% ABV

My thoughts:

Appearance: light gold in the glass, swirls cling as a thin line of beads and take an age to fall as slow thin legs.

Nose: it might as well be all grain here! Buttered popcorn, stracciatella ice cream, liquorice, a little musty note - strange for the age - but it did come in a very old cask! A little time and air suggest honey and orchard fruit.

Palate: Sweet chewy arrival, loads of berry fruit (unexpected),vanilla ice cream and burnt coffee. There's a big bite of peppery spice from the ABV but it doesn't overpower the dram. There's a little heathery peat smoke, some sweet honey and a hint of citrus zest. Nice!

Finish: Dry and spicy with buttered popcorn and berries.

Overall : The big questions here are Where did it come from? and Why? We know the grain is from North British but the malt could have been from any of Edrington's brands: Glenrothes, Glenturret, Highland Park and Macallan. I get a little heathery smoke which suggests Highland Park but there may be other stuff in there too. But why did it get created, a mistake? an experiment that Edrington didn't want to bottle? I guess we'll never know but it's a very cheap blend (£25) at a high ABV with a little more complexity than you'd think - well worth a try!