Method and Madness Garryana Oak Finish

Rocking the neck pour here in celebration of Saint Patty's. I used to joke that this was amateur night, a night where real appreciators of spirits abstained. I suppose others have made that joke, but for me, it came out of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom back in the early aughts where, according to the lore of the show, monsters didn't come out on Halloween. I'd walk through the streets of Philly on St. Patrick's Day seeing bros puking in the gutters and think, not really my idea of a good time. But over the years I've softened my stance, and since my wife brought back 9 bottles of Irish from Ireland this past July, we figured we would crack our 3rd of the lot (after Teeling Wonders of Wood Swedish and Bushmills Acacia Distiller's Exculsive) on this, Patty's Day 2025 while she cooks up Irish Boxty Potato Pancakes with mushrooms and cabbage. I always like bottle tasting notes because generally they're both broad and accurate. The back of all Method and Madness bottles have this, nose, palate, finish, and here we get from the bottle: Nose (smoked applewood, treacle, and golden raisins); Taste (crushed black pepper, coffee cake, toasted wood) and finish (clove spice, malted barley and coffee grounds) and most of those things are familiar to me with the exception of smoked applewood. Not that I've ever gone out of my way to taste coffee grounds. Smelled them, yes, but not tasted them. So I suppose I'm in a decent place to judge the bottle tasting notes and perhaps add a few of my own, for who tastes exactly what the bottle tells you to taste when you're tasting a whiskey? I get a grassy note on the nose mingling with tart red apple and a whiff of vanilla. Not really reinventing the wheel when it comes to Irish Whiskey, but here they're coming off full bodied, without any of the bitter tincture of metal you get from blends like Tully or Jameson, which is good given this bottle cost almost triple what they cost. Not that cost always equates with quality, but you'd hope that this was a step above your standard run of the mill Irish given M&M's reputation as experimental and all around satisfying (ok, so maybe that's just my experience with them, but really, over the years all the Method and Madness I have tried have been high quality). The tart sweetness, I suppose, could also be interpreted as golden raisin, as stated on the bottle as there's a pleasant sort of dusky dried aroma here too, which if I venture to guess would be what the Garryana imparts. But it also smells a bit citric like kumquat (the expert reviewer here notes lemon custard pie, and I'll buy that, different ways of interpreting the same thing). On the tongue, there's a strong vanilla element here. Where the bottle states, "coffee cake," I'd say there's a general baked goods quality to the palate. It's bready with a sweetness, but it would be a more subtle coffee cake, not your store bought variety with loads of sugar added, but the subtler variety made by your grandma to actually go with her serving your coffee with brunch, though I'd also venture the more I reflect on the note to call it belgian waffle. And of course, I'd agree whole-heartedly that toasted wood is another accurate description for part of what's going on here. There's a nice amount of spice here, which you can call clove or black pepper and a bitter citrus I'd venture to call orange peel that leads into the finish. Oddly enough, the expert reviewer here calls the finish short. I've always wondered about whether perception of the finish is subjective and I suppose it is because the flavors here linger long after the sip has gone down your throat, floating about in your mouth in a pleasant dry spice that coats the tongue and leaves you looking for your next sip. Overall, this is good stuff. I think I like the single pot still in chestnut oak a bit better, and although I wasn't terribly impressed with my first bottle of their single malt, I bought a second and that decidedly grew on me to the point where I wished I had more. I feel like Method and Madness is a brand to pay attention to. The stuff they're making can go toe-to-toe with Green and Yellow Spot and Redbreast, which for my money are the best out there (haven't tried Blue or Red Spot yet). My wife picked this up for 95 pounds, which in today's conversion is about $124, which is a bit steep. It might be a slight bit overpriced for what it is, but once the money is spent, you might as well get your enjoyment out of it, am I right?