Goodradigbee Jarrah

Nose: Like vodka with very faint floral and woody aromas. Palate: Insipid. Alcohol, pencil shavings, a little generic spice, light cereal flavour. The texture is neutral and it has no weight. Finish: None at all. It just stops dead. I had not heard about this until yesterday when I saw it at a pop-up stall at our local liquor shop. It's a weird and pointless product. They call it malt spirit but it doesn’t taste like new-make barley spirit and it has a raw alcohol character so it’s probably made from wheat. There are some generic woody and cereal flavours, it’s obviously very young and by definition it is not whisky. It is thin and characterless with no sign of complexity, maturity or integration. Goodradigbee Distillers are not using oak casks to age their spirit for the required 2 years so it can be called whisky. Instead they are using Australian hardwood boxes (see the included image) and maturing for just a few months which is a bizarre idea. They claim that a box provides more surface area for maturation but in fact the difference between a cube and a barrel is not significant, particularly over just a few months. It seems to me more likely that they are just avoiding the expense of buying oak casks and the cost of cooperage, and I don’t see the point of putting spirit into a small box for a few months because this demonstrably achieves very little. It certainly isn’t a fast maturation system like pressure-treatment with oak blocks or chips which can achieve some semblance of maturation (if you’re lucky). This is simply a failed experiment and I noted that on their website they are now advertising a more expensive cask-matured “single malt” but they carefully avoid calling it whisky. I don’t know what is going on with these guys. They may eventually bring something good to market but for the moment I could not recommend any of their products. This retails for AUD$79 and for that price (or less!) you can buy any number of very good real whiskies. “Inferior” : 65/100 (1.5 stars)