In all honesty, I probably wouldn't have bought a bottle of Connemara if it hadn't been gifted to me. I'd seen it on the shelf more times than I can count, but it never moved my personal needle. Not even as an idea.
With the Connemara, I just couldn't get one idea out of my head: who is this stuff for?
It's not that I don't like Irish whiskey. Much to the contrary, it holds a special place in my heart. Although I find it a little rough these days, regular 'ol Jameson (yes, the green bottle you can find at the supermarket) converted me into an honest-to-god whiskey drinker, and provided a core flavor profile in my twenties that said, “Whiskey can be your thing, too.” In comparison to Bourbon, Jameson showed me that whiskey could be sweet, and dear god, even palatable for a novice.
“The Connemara 12 knocks the careful balance of the base whiskey out of whack with a bunch of smoke the Irish Whiskey drinkers never asked for.”
As I grew older, I appreciated the depth that the category had to offer. There's nothing—and I mean nothing—that smells quite like a good Irish. To me, the mix of malted and unmalted barley has this absolutely wonderful combination that's somewhere-but-not-quite in the vicinity of mint, bubble gum, turkish delight, and mochi gummies. And the flavors are just out of this world. The Powers John's Lane 12, which I tend to recommend to anyone who will listen, fuses the sweetness of banana bread with the curious richness of leather and tobacco, with some bright copper tastes to provide further intrigue.
The charm of Irish Whiskey lies in balance. The very best of them don't bludgeon you over the head with anything. Instead, the common thread that runs through just about every bottle, from the inexpensive to the exorbitant, is a lightness and a natural sweetness. To me, that basic essence is never unwelcome, not only in the summer or winter, but over the fifteen years in which I transitioned from a guy who maybe wanted to like whiskey, then into a guy who legitimately did, and now into someone who still likes it and maybe knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there's scotch, and specifically the kind of scotch defined by peat. While I don't share their viewpoint, necessarily, there is a certain category of whiskey drinkers for whom there is no excessive amount of peat. If it tastes like someone filtered their scotch through the detritus of a haunted house that just recently burnt to the ground, all the better.
So what do we do with Connemara? It's an Irish whiskey that's peated. I reasoned it probably wasn’t enough peat to work as a novelty, which would satisfy the scotch fanatics, but was probably enough peat to knock the careful balance of the base whiskey out of whack with a bunch of smoke the Irish drinkers never asked for. The fact that Connemara is the only Irish whiskey like this was reason enough to be skeptical.
Cutting to the chase: does it actually work as a concept? I'd argue not particularly.
We can start with the base spirit. All Irish whiskey is pretty incestuous in the sense that just about every brand you know of comes from the same four places. This isn't a Jameson/Middleton product, nor does it come from the Bushmills stable. Instead, this is a Cooley distillery product, which is maybe the least known of the whiskey producers: far fewer drinkers recognize brands like Tyrconnell, Kilbeggan, or 2 Gingers.
As I wrote in a review of another Cooley whiskey, I've found that what they produce is good, though unexceptional. There are shades of what I liked about the Wild Geese Irish Soldiers and Heroes Rare Whiskey (whew!) in this bottle. If you hunt for it, there's still some of that banana cream pie flavor I associate with Cooley. The aroma has some tropical fruit notes and graham cracker, and there's a soft fruit on the development. The nose has a bit of that beguiling Irish character, and no shortage of mint and aniseed, which surprised me.
Past that, the peat takes hold. There's not a lot of it, mind you! Connemara has about half the level of peat you'd find in a typical Islay scotch, but what is there is enough to throw a weird amount of smoke across whatever delicacy exists in the base spirit. I think the smoke is most similar to the dry ashiness one finds with peated highland scotches like Ardmore or Ancnoc, as opposed to those located in Islay proper or on the other isles—Lagavulin or Talisker, for example. If that all sounds like a bunch of scotch-dude gobbledygook, it’s a kind way of saying that the peat Connemara uses reminds me more of cigarettes than beach campfires.
This definitely isn't helped by Cooley's stuff being kind of watery and thin from the get-go. With nothing else in the Connemara to challenge the peat smoke, it automatically becomes the loudest voice in the room. It actually makes it hard to suss out any clear tasting notes beyond barley and a general, nondescript kind of honey flavor.
To be honest, superstition was partially to blame for me taking so long to get this review up. The bottle was a present from a good friend, who I hope for some reason misses this review. So here I am, looking that gift horse right in its goddamn mouth with my readers and Google's internet spiders as my witness. Just before Christmas, no less.
Maybe I'll get hit by a bus as a karmic reward for this whole exercise, but it was gnawing at me, dear reader—in the end, I had to let you know I didn't think Connemara was that good. If you've been passing it by for the reasons I ignored it for so long, your instincts were dead on.
