SYDNEY | One of my favourite Aussie distillers, Archie Rose, have joined forces with top Melbourne coffee roasters ST. ALi to create Blasphemy. It’s a coffee whisky hybrid that blends Archie Rose’s award-winning Single Malt Whisky and ST. ALi’s Orthodox & Wide Awake Coffee.
It might seem like an odd combination at first, but it makes a lot of sense when you really stop and think about it. Archie Rose head distiller Dave Withers and his team trialled various beans, roasts, and extraction methods to discover what would work best. Essentially, the whisky is made as normal, with the coffee added in lieu of filtered water at the reverse osmosis stage of the distilling process. This is the part of the process that gets the whisky down from ~60% ABV to the final 40% ABV.
Orthodox, ST. ALi’s house espresso blend, is batch brewed before being added, while the stronger roast, Wide Awake is first cold-dripped to highlight the coffee’s dark spice and molasses notes.
The final result? The coffee notes amplify the Single Malt Whisky’s chocolate and specialty roasted malts, for a richer flavour. Blasphemy opens with notes of stewed apples, plum jam and fresh berries, then follows through into creme caramel, roasted hazelnuts, amaretto and dark chocolate.