The Hearach
Batch 00007 | 46% ABV
The First But Not The Last
Over the course of the past 2 months we have made this journey several times - to look at houses and visit schools. We’d set off at an undignified hour, drive for 4 to 5 hours, arrive, do what we needed to do whilst there, and then return the same day - a challenging and tiring day, each and every time. Today we set off knowing that it was a one way trip.
The speed at which this has all transpired is still surprising, and I think it’s probably why it doesn’t feel real yet. It’s been two months of significant stress, panic, delight, desperation, and as we waved the Crystal Seniors off at what will now be known as “our old house”, a mix of new emotions washed over us - relief, excitement, apprehension: we’ve seen “our new house” the sum total of once, for 40 minutes, 5 weeks ago.
Scotland has endured some of the worst weather in recent history, with frightening levels of rain causing astounding levels of flooding and landslides. The peak of this awful weather transpired over the weekend before we moved, and it was a bit worrying because the route to our new place is through the worst hit of all Scotland. Also, our whole life is packed into two high-sided lorries.
On the day of our departure the sun is splitting the sky and rain is not forecast at all, but it doesn’t dampen the impact of what the bout of torrential rain and wind has done to the landscape. Vast swathes of green fields are now temporary lochs. Waterfalls that once gently cascaded down rugged mountain sides are now roaring with liquid anger. As we weaved our way around Loch Laggan towards the dam at the head of the loch, a fast billowing mist was visible above the treeline and we stopped to see what’s going on. I’ve never seen such a vast quantity of water shifting in such a dramatic, borderline frightening fashion - the gates are open and water is being thrown hundreds of feet down river, and the noise! It’s transfixing.
We get back on the road; soon the Eilean Donan Castle appears and we know it’s only a matter of an hour or so until we’re at our new home. Crossing the Skye bridge to arrive on the shores of our island is a momentous moment for my wife and I: we’ve dreamed of this moment for twenty years. Mrs Crystal’s heart was captured when she visited the Isle of Iona as a teenager, singing in the school choir for the islanders and realising for the first time that there was such a thing as the Hebrides. I’ve had family out west all my life and knew that one day I too would call myself either a western highlander, or an islander. Today our dreams come true.
We arrive at our new house and immediately we know that everything is going to be alright. Mini Crystal feels the same, running around our garden shouting about how many horses and sheep she can see, and how many big hills there are. Inside the empty house sits one large box - our house is positioned such that the internet service is a non-negotiable 2010 speed copper fed disappointment. We will both be working from home, and Mini needs to be able to video call grandparents, pals and have all her routines available to her, meaning fast internet is as important as hot water. So Starlink it is - enter your chosen feedback for the Musky Madman below, but his ambition has given rural folk like us a connection to the outside world where none was previously available.
Ten minutes after unboxing, the wee satellite dish is whirring about searching the sky for the Starlink train and boom: the internet connects with 3 times the speed of what we had in central Perthshire. Incredible. We have time for a quick video call with the Crystal Seniors to check all went well with lockup, and then we’re off for dinner at the local pizza/candle/cinema combo, on the road heading south from Portree. It’s a really superb wee place, modernised throughout with a warmly welcoming ambience, offering incredibly tasty pizzas, gorgeous scented wares and a proper cinema, with new releases showing too (Oppenheimer was showing when we last visited but regretfully not now).
As we enter the front door I mention to Mrs Crystal that I’ve forgotten to pack any whisky into the car - the look on her face confirms my inability to perform rudimentary tasks - and that I might see if they have anything in here to open as celebration. On the way out the last time we’d visited, I’d noticed that the candle shop had a wee nook with a shelf displaying local gins and whiskies, with some Raasay and maybe even Torabhaig on there, but tonight as we walk towards the pizza wing, I immediately spot a dumpy fluted bottle and know it’s The Hearach.
We get seated in the restaurant and place our orders before offering my apologies to the girls - Daddy has something he has to attend to. The candle shop is quiet at this hour and I ask the ladies chatting behind the counter if they’re open - “we’re always open” comes the twinkly eyed reply and I’m so thrilled that this is going to be local to me. Humour in places like Portree, where tourism is served turbocharged most of the year, can understandably wane. Maybe I caught them at a good time, or maybe they’re just lovely people, but purchasing a bottle of The Hearach was a friendly experience.
I return to the table with all four waiting eyes rolling in weariness, and soon we’re gobbling our way through yet another fantastic set of pizzas before then making our way, in the darkness, to our new home. It’s thrilling. We are here, on an island, for good. The joy is tempered with the realisation that tonight we are sleeping on blow-up beds the size of a small ironing board, and my back is already complaining after lugging all our worldly wares around the house in cardboard boxes these past few weeks. Hey ho. Once Mini is in her slumber we toast with some fizzy wine followed by a wee dram of The Hearach to round us out. Mrs Crystal swoons and declares that this is a whisky for her.
Review
Batch 00007 - September 2023, 46% ABV
£65-70 - available in shops - limited online
The next day the storm has returned in brutish form - horizontal cutting rain and wind awakens us and thoughts turn to the removals chaps: currently setting off from their digs in Kyle of Lochalsh, their journey an hour or so to us here north of Portree will be desperately dangerous in those tall vehicles. They arrive around 9am and get straight to work, wrestling our stuff into the house in abjectly awful conditions.
By 2pm they’re done; the garage is filled to the brim and our house is full of bubble wrapped nondescript forms. Well into the evening we’re discovering our possessions anew, Mrs Crystal eyeing the power tools with intent. Beans on toast are served to hungry bellies. The Hearach is opened again, and we toast once more to our new life on the Isle of Skye.
Nose
Bright, fresh and zesty - immediate notes of lime, coffee and confection - stick of rock.
Bit of digestive biscuit appears with half the bottle despatched. Still has a zesty edge - key lime pie. Big sniff brings some subtle earthy, farmy things. More a field downwind on a crisp fresh day than standing in a silage tub, but it's there. Oven chips, just. Sweet chilli sauce. A flump with that smelly powder - bums. Quite a lot of umami notes flying about here too, again subtle, but soy sauce and red miso defo.
A few days later - natural yoghurt, salty, coastal, bright yellow and green. Wax crayons. Has an almost Speyside like fruit note. Frosted cornflakes.
Palate
Mild honey, sugary sweetness - very mellow. Candyfloss then licking a rubber washer. A lot less earthy and malty compared to Ardnamurchan AD/, and less chippy than Raasay R-01.2. Boiled sweets - bright yellow. Banana/tropical. All the usuals - toffee, cinnamon, spices, sugar, rice paper. Very very slight souring on the finish, but in a good way. The keylime pie waves hello downwind. Moreish.
The Dregs
The Hearach is a whisky that has long been awaited. Another new distillery comes on-stream and another source for the Uisge Beatha appears, chipping away at the borderline insatiable desire for new whisky. Since I really got into whisky mid-2021, we’ve seen loads of new releases from Clydeside, Nc’Nean, Raasay, GlenWyvis, Lindores, InchDairnie, Torabhaig, Lagg, Lochlea, Holyrood, Abhain Dearg and many others. Each inaugural release was one, maybe two expressions.
The Isle of Harris distillery (IOH), built in 2015, decided to release 8 bottles for their inaugural release, each one purported to be unique, and each batch circa 13,000 bottles. Doing some rudimentary arithmetic with the information provided by IOH, that’s almost 98,000 bottles on day one of the IOH’s whisky release. Staggering figures!
On the face of it, it’s a really interesting prospect - 8 different bottles of whisky to compare against - and one that set the bottle chasers alight. Within mere hours all bottles of The Hearach were sold out online. From Instahoot I noted that quite a few people went for the whole hog - 8 bottles. At £65ish each, it makes it a £500+ investment, not a small amount of money.
How unique each of the 8 bottles actually are can only be answered by those at the distillery, and those who bought all 8 batches and have since compared them all. To try and give us punters a chance to pick one aligned with our tastes, IOH put all the details of each batch online in advance, with all the information you could ever wish for, as well as a summary of what it tastes like from both the perspective of a local, and IOH Chief Storyteller Mike Donald. An information overload, with 16 points on each of the 8 batches to compare; an overwhelming amount of data to observe, consider and act upon.
I’ll be honest. I never read any of it, because I lost interest seeing how much effort it was to pick apart each one and read all the tasting notes and specs in comparison. I was also in the depths of mortgage madness and didn’t have the capacity to absorb any more data. However looking closer now I see that most of the information for each of the 8 batches is exactly the same, save for the marrying time and the averaged peat level, and of those variables the marrying time is the only real differentiator - peating level goes from 12 - 14ppm, not something I’d hazard most whisky exciters would be able to detect. How much does marrying time influence the final taste? I do not know. But I’m going to assume that the bottle I found in the wild will likely be quite similar to the other 7 bottles.
Since I can’t compare to the others in the inaugural release, I can only take my batch - 00007 (an indication of intent with the four zeros, perhaps?) - and compare it to other things; the most likened whisky to The Hearach from other reviewers seems to be the Ardnamurchan core range, a distillery that I’m fairly familiar with. So I pour a dram of a fresh bottle of the AD/ and at first I’m quite taken aback by how malty, savoury and peaty the Ardnamurchan is. Compared with The Hearach, it’s almost bready. After the neck pour has passed (and in short order), the Ardnamurchan settles more into the subtly peated, sweet coastal maritime nectar we all know and love. Turning back to The Hearach, it’s markedly sweeter, markedly less peaty and a bit more zingy.
I also tried it against the ArdnAmerica bottling, just for fun…
For kicks, and a bit of education, I open the bottle I received for my birthday in August, one that is made by a wee island off the eastern coast of the big island I now reside upon - the Isle of Raasay. I thoroughly enjoyed the bottle of R-01.1 in November 2022 - “a decent few notches above most newly released whisky” - and despite my lukewarm appraisal of the Distillery Exclusive Tourism Destination of the Year 2022 bottling, it’s still a reference point in the Raasay sphere: I’m excited to get into the R-01.2 at length, released exactly one year on from the R-01.1, and see if it’s as good as the first; this year’s batch uses a different barley as R-01.1 and a very small adjustment on the balance of casks used: 0.5% less virgin Chinkapin oak and 0.5% more Bordeaux red wine; slightly less bottle ppm too.
Even more exciting is my future visit to my local distillery, although word has it there’s a picture of auld Doog with a big cross over it hanging in the visitor centre…Comparing to the Raasay R-01.2, which is immediately very chippy, salty and coastal, The Hearach presents a bit softer, less farmy and a brighter yellow - tropical juice.
It’s safe to say that The Hearach is a tasty whisky. It’s definitely more complex than other new releases that I’ve tried, but the fact that Mrs Crystal, when I mentioned that I was opening the Raasay to compare, asked for a pour of The Hearach and sipped her way through quickly, shows that this is a whisky open to non-whisky drinkers too. It’s a whisky that begs to be used as a gateway to the beauty of new whisky, or even just whisky in general. It’s easy going, very moreish, sippable and disappears quickly. It has all the hallmarks of an accessible whisky too - biscuits and key lime pie. What’s not to like?
Speaking with Gary, of Kinnaird Head Whisky fame, after I posed the question of what marrying time does to a whisky, he mentioned that marrying time of the batches of The Hearach increase with each batch, so at Batch 1 the marrying time is 12 weeks, increasing incrementally through each batch until Batch 8, where the marrying time is 20 weeks. From what I’ve seen around whiskyland regarding The Hearach feedback, the batches are not that dissimilar to one another. For those who bought all 8 I suspect, if they’re ever opened, a uniform presentation will spread across them all. For those of us looking to try the Isle of Harris Distillery’s first output, picking any batch of the 8 available will be a worthy way to assess, and serve as indication enough that the Harris Distillery is one to observe closely henceforth.
What else to say? Well the packaging is remarkable in both value added and visual impact. I’ve never seen such an elaborate construction around a whisky bottle, with inception levels of information revealed as you unfurl the wrap-around outer sheath. Each new face revealed has information upon it, and in both Gaelic and English, adding to the impression that you are experiencing something from the depths of Scottish folklore - there’s even a beautiful wee booklet tucked inside a flap at the back, and a free paper coaster that’s made from excess from production.
When I bought my bottle in the candle shop I was warned to be careful with the latch that holds the box together, and I’ve seen a few warnings sound from others about how precarious the line is between a cool unboxing experience and watching your new purchase fall to the floor when the interference fit latch gives way, due to you holding it in the wrong place. Care must be taken.
Once you get to the bottle though, it’s a sensationally beautiful design, but that was to be expected given that the Isle of Harris gin bottle is one of the most striking in that saturated market. The Hearach is short, dumpy and, truth be told, not the best pouring experience. The spout is short and, owing to the wide bottle, causes an awkward bashing of bottle and glass to try and get the spout far enough into the mouth of the glass, and makes dribbling your whisky on the table a very easy thing to do. A tale of form before function? Maybe. But I tell you what, Mrs Crystal was quick to snatch it away for display on her new shelves. I expect in a few batches time this outer sheath will disappear - we’re in an age of cutting down on superfluous packaging.
Just look at what we have before us - yet another distillery opening its warehouses, and in astonishing quantities to boot, making the future of young scotch whisky utterly compelling. Now, to check what times the ferry departs from Uig all but 10 minutes up the road from my new digs. I’ll need a tent it seems, for the ferry only goes over to the Isle of Harris once a day!
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC