Powers Gold Label

This used to be my favourite blended whisky, and certainly my favourite from Ireland. For some reason, having decided to consume a wee dram of Gold Label this weekend, I found it completely unpalatable. Sweet, thin and cloying. Weird.

Anyway. That's the bottle finished! There wasn't much left, it should be said.

I was at Bushmills in Northern Ireland last month, which is a really pleasant visitor experience, though half the distillery was closed to guests and it is a fairly large scale industrial plant, behind the lovely frontage. Great restaurant (all home made food) and bar, though. I really enjoyed the various Bushmills on offer, particularly the two malts I tasted - the 10-year-old and the 16. Maybe that put me off Powers. Or it may have been the single-cask Scotch Malt Whisky Society Longmorn I had just beforehand. which was a bit like peach schnapps, only more pungently paraffinish.

I remember having a Powers in the Temple Bar, Dublin, accompanied by an aged poet bellowing rhymes in my ear...but this talk of Irish whisky reminds me of The Great Jimmy McNulty from the Wire:

Gimme a Jameson's on the rocks. Bartender: Bushmill's alright? McNulty: Bushmills? That's Protestant whisky!...