Ardbeg Ten

Ardbeg 10 yr 

Nose: Right off the bat you smell mineral oil, green pear skins, near-ripe Seckel pears, the flesh of meyer lemon, then something like wet sand and burning clay. 

Initial Taste: WOw, it punches you! Like a black peppercorn and juniper berry tincture suspended in mineral oil that you set on fire. Chewing this sip by sip, perhaps with a drop of water seems necessary. 

Body and mid-palate: As slick as fish oil, with an extrmely savoury character. The salt of it puckers your mouth without coming across like a salty pretzel or an anchovy filet.. and yet, it is so very savoury, I am reminded greatly of jiucai, that is, a pungent Chinese garlic oniongrass. There is also the slightest trace of fish bones from the oiliness, pungency, and minerality in combination. To me, the peat is not quite so smoke at all, but dense and earthy like mulch or potting soil heavy with sulfur. Just a touch of water, opening up, and becoming familiar with the drink, reveals the meyer lemon, but with no trace of the pear. THe sand and burning clay show up as well, and wood like that from the burning torches and wood-handled pitchforks of angry villagers. 

Finish: So very long, like the right hook you took in a bar fight with a Scotsman that made you consider seeing a dentist after a week of applying analgesic. Strangely, thesmoke shows up in the end. Big-time burnt honey flavour. Then, much like cigar ash and the tar-heavy last puffs of a maduro cigar, slightly acrid and sour, but welcome. Even stranger is that the faintest bit of Seckel pear peeks out despite being absent initially and in the mid-palate... probably cowering in fear. There's not much spice and yet, your mouth is left numb, but not like from cloves, rather, camphor... and a shot of Novacaine... and the bloody gauze to boot. Then a floral mustiness like dead flowers pressed between the pages of an old encyclopedia. 

Overall: Undoubtedly, this drink is abrasizeand forward, "cavalier" even, but I hesitate to call it "harsh;" The flavors otherwise cloying in isolation passionately grapple with one another, entwined, melding in the ring of the palate like two wrestling brothers, angry and intense and sweaty, but making some strange beauty of the seemingly crude rivalry in the glory of the struggle and resolution. 

Take this drink when you wish you grow your beard hair a few inches. In summation, dinosaurs, peat bog mummies, witches, and refuseof orchards and flower gardens were cremated in a seaside glass factory... this mixture was fermented and distilled, and aged beneath a wharf.