ABV: 40 %
Origin: Speyside
Type: Single malt
Bottles in collection: 0
Emptied bottles: 1
Impression: 1/5

Tasting notes
Nose: This is young and spirit driven. At first there’s a rather flat fruity pear note with some vanilla and malt attached to it. The distillate is young and very pronounced and it comes with an unpleasant cardboard note. With time in the glass the fruity note grows a bit more noticable and a tiny sweet liquorice note comes through around the edges. The vanilla turns into a thin toffee note after a while. This is a rather thin and uninteresting nose.

Mouth: It starts out with a generic sweetness taking up most of the palate and the distillate sits up front. It really tastes like cardboard and it’s very flat. The fruitiness is coming through as ripe yellow pears but it’s beaten down by most of the other flavours. The oak is already present and it’s a very bitter and unpleasant oakiness in the background. The sweetness do turn into the same vanilla and toffee note as before but they are still overridden by all the other unpleasantries going on.

Finish: The distillate pushes through once again and it brings the cardboard note with it. It’s very young and harsh. The sweetness and the fruitiness flickers by but fortunatly it completely falls apart rather quickly and it doesn’t take long before the (not in a good way) bitter oakiness is all that’s left. To be fair, after a couple of minutes the oakiness settles down and becomes a bit nutty, which is a good thing. This is a really bad whisky and it certainly presents itself as a budget alternative.

Additional information
Bradan Orach means golden salmon in Gaelic. It’s aged in american ex-bourbon oak barrels and was added to the core range in 2009.