West Cork Single Malt Aged 12 Years Rum Cask Finished

West Cork Single Malt Irish Whiskey Aged 12 Years Rum Cask Finished

Our fifth and penultimate Irish Whiskey review for St. Patty’s Week is the West Cork 12 Year Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey Rum Cask Finish. 

This is my first West Cork whiskey so I do not have a baseline to compare it to.  That said, the 12 years of aging and the Rum finishing caught my eye since I enjoyed the Teeling Small Batch so much, which is a younger release but also Rum finished.  I recognize that there is a small difference between the two, as the Teeling is a blend while this West Cork is a Single Malt.  That said, I absolutely love the Balvenie Caribbean Cask 14 Year, which of course is a single malt and is finished in rum casks.  Let’s see how it goes.

ABV: 43%

How it smells…..apples, vanilla, honey, citrus, a bit boozy which is surprising given it's only 43%

How it tastes….honey sweetness up front followed by cocoa and toffee.  Ends a bit vegetal and grassy with some bananas on the finish..

Price….the place I purchased the bottle usually has it for $62 but I bought it on a St. Patty’s Day sale for $50.

Rating….🥃🥃🥃

Final thoughts…..I liked this one but I didn’t love it.  I’m going to need to have a few more pulls of this before I can be certain, but at this point I’d have to say that it’s not bad for a not bad price, which puts it at a 3x🥃 by my own rules.  Below, I will go into more depth on why I didn’t love it, but the reason why I liked it is due to the nice transitions it had between flavor stages.

The vegetal/grassy note kind of threw me for a loop as my expectation for a rum finished single malt that is aged in ex-bourbon casks is for a big punch in the face full of vanilla, which I didn’t get.  This vegetal/grassy note makes me think that this whiskey was finished in a Rhum Agricole cask and not one that aged a molasses distilled Rum.  So what’s the difference?  From how I understand the Rum Rules, Rums are distillate from sugarcane byproducts.  This can be in the English style, which is distillate from fermenting molasses (molasses being a byproduct of refining raw sugar cane juice) or the French style, which is distillate made from fermenting pure raw sugarcane juice.  Like the rules for rectangles and squares, all Rhums are Rums but not all Rums are Rhums.

Rhums tend to have more vegetal and grassy flavors compared to the more traditional Rum flavors that most of us are more familiar with.  I tend to favor Rums and steer clear of Rhums.  Now I could be completely wrong and this could have just been really young Rum, which may give you some of that grassy/vegetal notes as well.  The bottle doesn’t really get into details about the Rum cask, just that it was finished in “West Indies Rum” for “circa a further six months”, which I read as “less than 6 months but we are rounding up”.  Further internet sleuthing shows that the European bottle, without an age statement, marketed on the website says the rum is from Consorcio Licorero Nacional rum casks.  Googling Consorcio Licorero Nacional rum is a whole other rabbit hole that I won’t bring you down, but the conclusion is that it is inconclusive.  

To summarize, in my opinion, this particular flavor might be as polarizing as cilantro.  Personally, the vegetal/grassy note is not my favorite but I did enjoy the other aspects of the whiskey so I would be hard pressed to give it a subpar rating based solely on that.