A life of its own

The mixology monday tea theme has taken on a life of its own, in two seperate directions.
The obvious one is with tea infusions, I've been twiddling with the Lapsang & the smokier whiskies (mainly the islays (Its not heresy, its science)) and seem to have come up with a winning combo in the Caol ila and an hours infusion of the lapsang. It changes the colour of the malt from very pale to a deep amber, and at the same time smooths it out, you get big smoke up front and then a smooth finish with the sea notes that islays are famous for.

The less obvious one is boosting sections of the flavour profile, I'm restricting myself to florals at the moment, mainly because I really like them. This isn't going so well, here is the story of a failure.

The manhatten is a traditional whisky cocktail, and seemed right for what I was planning, a quick search of my bottles and a couple of questions to the web suggested that Glenfiddich might be a place to start. There are a few things I make at home as ingredients. Lavender syrup because I need some way of keeping it in check in the garden. Flavoured vodkas (I use boru, its 5x filtered and gives a nice clean base) usually fruits but also vanilla.Glenfiddich has vanilla & lavender notes, so this all seemed ideal.

Its not. The result whilst not undrinkable is an overpowering burn of alcohol, which when finished really doesn't leave anything you'd call flavour behind. I'll keep going though and hopefully some thing will drop out.