The Gospel Straight Rye
Australian Whiskey| 45% ABV
Score: 2/10
Avoid.
TL;DR
Looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, is very much not fantastic
To Be Reverential About It, This Fell A Bit Short Of Modest Expectations
If we’re all honest with ourselves, we’re all magpies. Drawn to shiny surfaces, colourful prints and contoured glass phials, we buckle at the knees for beautiful objects. Anyone who’s held a cobalt-tinted poison bottle will know what I mean, when I say there’s a tactility and childlike endearment in the weighty, jewel-like, glossy transparency of glass vessels. After the 1858 Bradford Sweetie poisoning, glass bottles containing toxic substances were given ribbed sides for unsighted confirmation of contents, when fumbling under candlelight to find them, and later coloured with cobalt, green and amber. These latter steps were taken, in part to make them more easily identifiable on shelves, but also to make these bottles less exciting for children to grab. But ask any child to pick between a clear glass bottle and a deeply tinted, almost ultraviolet colured glass bottle and you know which one they’re reaching for. Rudimentary thinking for an illiterate age.
I’m drawn immediately to interestingly designed glass bottles. In a whisky context I find bottles so much more exciting when they’re embellished, and the distillery has clearly thought about the presentation of their whisky; it makes them stand out from the others on the shelf. Most official distillery bottlings come in unique-to-them bottle designs, with some personal favourites being Arran’s gently tapering, beehive topped stumpy bottle, Lindore’s banana bunch Victorian style gin bottle and the squared, highly textured Lochlea bottle. That extra effort, for me at least, is welcomed and I look out for these distinctive bottle designs because I love photographing them. Which is why, when I stumbled upon this curiously un-spoken-about bottling of straight rye whiskey, I felt compelled to buy it… if only for the Instagram fame.
“Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
OK, I wasn’t quite as shallow as that – I spent a few weeks sporadically unpicking what the whisky actually tasted like before blindly ordering a nice looking glass bottle, but the reviews from The Whisky Exchange – the only place you can find it in the UK – made it sound pretty good! It’s a rye whisky, something I’d never tried before, and they state the whisky has “aromas of buttery rye bread, toffee, vanilla and white pepper”, which is complimented on the palate by “notes of clove, pepper, green apple and caramel.” Sounds ideal to me! Fifty of my pounds were transferred digitally and the bottle hastily arrived to smiles of affection and camera shutters clicking. Then it disappeared into the stash and was never to be seen again, for five months.
During that time I’d opened many other bottles and tried many other samples. One such bottle is the Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers Deanston 10 year old, which was matured in a rye barrel and features a “rye finish”, whatever that is. I have to say of all the Flyers range I’ve tried, this is up there in my top three. It’s a glorious, complex arrangement of leather shops, caramel sweetness and spicy melancholy. I love it to bits and I’ve been cautiously sipping to maximise the duration I have with it. I only bought one bottle before it sold out.
Cut to last week, when in the process of decanting my stash into the new whisky superzone, the little boxy Australian green bottle made an appearance again and I shouted, “EUREKA!”. This is a rye whisky too, albeit of very young age – let me through please, for leather shops and tasty, caramel coated morsels await!
Hey, good looking
Review
Using single sourced grain from near Melbourne , 45% ABV
£50 from TWE (UK only) and in Australia and the United States
The Gospel, an old English translation from Greek meaning “good news” is a straight rye whiskey from Melbourne, Australia. Their brand is achingly cool, with retro vibes and fading typewriter print. It brings to mind the inimitable Paul Thomas Anderson film There Will Be Blood, with Paul Dano shouting, “I abandoned my child…” as the fiddly plastic cap is peeled away revealing a black wooden stopper. This whiskey is stated to be Australia’s first “straight” rye whiskey, due to a strictly controlled, and legally officiated process of distillation and maturation. Featuring 100% un-malted rye of single origin, the spirit is double-distilled and housed in new American, highly-charred oak barrels for “at least” two years, before being bottled in gorgeously embossed, dark green glass. The news, so far, is great. So great in fact that you can buy a triple pack on their website – if you’re in the USA, at least. No UK clickable link is available for this spirit on their impressionable website.
Pouring the whiskey into a Glencairn, I see the colour is not as light as I expected – a colour previously masked due to the darkness of the green glass. The stopper is entirely black, cork included – I don’t like this development; synthetic corks are not my thing. Why am I talking so much about the presentation, you might ask? Well it matters a lot when the liquid inside turns out to be bad news.
Nose
A wave of the nostril in the vicinity of the drinking vessel delivers such a colossal, arrowhead shaped note of carpet shops that I am stuck for several seconds, buffering. I emit a high-pitched noise and set the glass down again. Chemical aromas in whiskey are fine so long as they mingle among other aromas, but here it’s the full party. I give the whiskey, and me, a moment and come back to it tentatively. Again that huge piercing carpet aroma skewers my face, with a little bit of chemical fruitiness turning my mouth downwards. This, with regret, is as far as the nosing journey goes.
Palate
The high-pitched noise is now accompanied with semi-critical eye bulge when this straight rye whiskey is administered through the facehole. It’s equal parts monumentally leathery, to the point that I feel like I’m sucking a freshly-tanned hide, and intensely sweet as well. Like a leather enrobed cough syrup shot served inside a newly opened Tapi Carpet emporium. There are other notes in there, like cherry cough sweets and a burning shockwave of edgy-spice. Not warm and Christmassy, but tart and peppery.
I give it some more time to settle but it goes the other way – the intensity ramps up. I can’t say I’m enjoying this much at all. Water does nothing to dull the flavour, just takes longer to corrupt the soul.
Score: 2/10
Score: 3/10
Disappointing.
TL;DR
Not kidding
Wally’s Notes
Nose
Fairy liquid and lemon dishwasher soap. Not kidding. That theme continues with some scented disinfectant spray – a smell we’ve all come to experience from hand sanitisers over the last couple of years. Not an unpleasant aroma, but not one I seek in a drink. New make spirit here too – pears and rubbing alcohol. Pink sugar mice. There’s a big green herbal hit but it’s confused and dry, like a dried bouquet garni still in the wee mesh ‘tea-bag’ and still in its box. Bay leaves and basil lead, but dry thyme and tarragon here too. Minty herbal tea also makes an appearance. It isn’t dull, just not hugely appealing.
Palate
I don’t know the specs here - the sample is blank except for a skull and crossbones written on the lid, but Dougie will need to work harder than that to intimidate me. It arrives like a spirit somewhat diluted to tame its youthfulness, like medicating a violent teenager. The sweetness is all sugars and a little saccharin. Lots of those dry herbs all over this pot pourri of floral flavours, like drinking a Mediterranean branch of Lush. Ginger, lime and bitter apples try to convince me to pour a second glass, but no thanks.This could be a 2/10, but checking the wording of our system – this is anything but dull. This will liven up any whisky tasting night - for years to come though – because as long as there’s an alternative on your shelf you’ll never get through it. This is what I imagine a lot of folks drink as a young and flavoured cheap ‘whisky-drink’, infused to mask rawness.
Score: 3/10
The Dregs - DC
Checking the website again, I try to find solace in most of the imagery being cocktail based. It’s painfully obvious now that it’s a spirit designed for mixing with other stuff, such as fire. It does say it can be enjoyed as a neat spirit or on the rocks, but being accustomed to the glory that is Scotch whisky and all the incredible young whiskies appearing, I think the youthful straight rye grain game is just not quite my tempo. The speed of this thing is an Exocet missile at full butt, and I am holding on to it with an eyeball. It’s what could be described quite accurately as an acquired taste, but my only other experience of rye has been in the barley based, rye casked Deanston. As a finisher then, rye, it can thus be assumed, is superb. But as a grain to be distilled, matured and consumed in pure form, it’s potently exhilarating. Much in the same way falling from a clifftop is potently exhilarating. For a split second I felt like I was in freefall, with jaggy rocks and churning surf rushing towards my flapping limbs; that high-pitched noise was probably the gaps in my teeth whistling.
The takeaway here is that my love for cool packaging has done me in, properly. The aesthetically magnificent bottle design has lured me, without knowing what rye whiskey is, even as a concept, and with very little first hand knowledge of this spirit to go on. The purchase has come with a heavy penalty – 50 penalties really – and it’s a damned shame that, to me, it’s so unpalatable.
The Gospel, as a name for a product, speaks as a de facto example of that type of product: this is the gospel of rye whiskey, according to The Gospel. Good news, folks. As a sipping whiskey for those unaccustomed to rye it’s very bad news, but I’ll give it a go in an Old Fashioned or some other cocktail and assess it from that perspective instead. Those lofty leather and saccharine sweet chemical notes might play perfectly alongside a spicy ginger beer or, who knows, half a lemon. If you like the taste of rye whiskey – and I don’t know how you can after trying straight rye whiskey – then this might be for you. But through the prism of abstract flavour enjoyment, this is a painful exercise in effective marketing covering for a very disappointing experience.
The Dregs - WM
I’m not heavily into rye whisky, but I’m not generally put off by the profile. I usually find lime and ginger alongside lots of green herbal effervescence and use it as a nice step-change. For me it’s whisky, but from a parallel universe. As a whisky experience it’s often reminiscent of foreign chocolate; it’s chocolate but not as you know it. This is interesting, but ultimately not whisky as I recognise it. Despite the fun in trying to articulate what this tastes like it can be reduced to a single four letter s-word. No, not that one. I was thinking ‘soap’. It’s late but I’m pouring a cask strength Ben Nevis ahead of a thorough tooth-brushing session. Dougie may have either sent a wee bottle of flowers, or nightmares. Sorry.
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC
-
Dramface is free.
Its fierce independence and community-focused content is funded by that same community. We don’t do ads, sponsorships or paid-for content. If you like what we do you can support us by becoming a Dramface member for the price of a magazine.
However, if you’ve found a particular article valuable, you also have the option to make a direct donation to the writer, here: buy me a dram - you’d make their day. Thank you.
For more on Dramface and our funding read our about page here.
Other opinions on this:
Got a link to a reliable review? Tell us.
