I was able to join the special tasting seminar by Stefan van Eycken at Whiskytalk 2019. This tasting ended up going through a bunch of ghost series bottlings, but Stefan didn't reveal which pours were which until near the end. To be honest, I thought we were getting pours from the ultra-rare ghosts and perhaps got too excited.

Nose: medium to full body, a sort of weird wood bark, spices, manuka or wood based honey, a sort of light toffee and butterscotch, seems a little artificial.

Palate: light to medium body, initial palate is a little sour, mid palate develops the sour and spiciness, also has that honey background, some sort of soil in there too, quite artificial, back palate has a plain paper or raw paper flavor, young balsa.

Finish: medium, semi-boiled fish bones, most notably flounder types, boiled tofu in fish stock, burnt roots, that artificial honey is always there though.

A strange one, seems quite artificial, not sure if it's the nutri-sweet or some other sweet wood going on. A weird one. No idea what it is, but not favorable.
Sir Stefan revealed it was the ghost series Akashi, ninth in the series. Tried this before near the time it was first released since there were so many of them and the ghost series was picking up steam. Felt it was an average C+ back then (bottom of the search posts for starvinggigolojapanesewhisky), not too far now.

Image courtesy of Eric Yee.

Eric Yee

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