Most of my clients have a recovery ritual that has nothing to do with sleep or food. A glass of something on the counter, a moment of quiet before the day actually ends. I don’t mind it. The ritual matters more than what’s in the glass.
So when Highland Park announced the second edition of its Between You and I series, I paid attention. The 17-year-old single malt doesn’t ship with a conventional tasting chart. It ships with a booklet of short vignettes, written by New York artist and creative director Laila Gohar, that asks you to taste the whisky through scenes and memories instead of a list of flavor words.
How the Whisky Came Together
The brief behind the release was unusual: what does a flavor look like? Orkney distillery Master Whisky Maker Marc Watson sampled more than 80 casks while developing the edition, taking inspiration from Gohar’s Egyptian heritage. The whisky spent its first 11 years in refill casks before moving into unseasoned American oak, selected to bring out notes of orange blossom, leather, and warming spice alongside the distillery’s characteristic peat smoke.
Flavor, Turned Into a Place
Gohar’s reaction to the whisky is where the release gets interesting. Leather brought to mind ancient artifacts in a museum in Cairo. Orange blossom suggested a sun-drenched Andalusian courtyard. Vanilla took her to the slopes of a tropical volcano under a night sky. Those scenes became the packaging, which pairs hand-drawn illustrations by Silja Goetz with layered references to the imagined worlds.
“My work is all about reimagining objects, ingredients, flavors, creating something familiar but totally unexpected to spark curiosity and conversation,” Gohar says. “That’s why this collaboration felt so natural.”
The idea carries into the box itself. The traditional tasting notes are gone, replaced by Gohar’s vignettes. The intent is to approach the whisky through association and imagination rather than a checklist of descriptors.
The Science, Simplified
Aromas aren’t just chemistry. A big part of how a drink tastes is how you expect it to taste. When a whisky comes with a story, your brain is working with scenes, not just compounds. It doesn’t make the drink objectively better, but it can make the experience of it more memorable. Here’s what I tell my clients: recovery rituals don’t need to be complicated to be effective. Sometimes the point is giving your brain a place to go while the body handles the rest.
Try This
Between You and I by Laila Gohar for Highland Park is available globally for $160. If you already have a nightcap habit, this is a reasonable experiment in making that habit more interesting. If you don’t have one yet, you don’t need a $160 bottle to build one. Pick something you actually like, pour it deliberately, and give yourself ten minutes where the glass is the only thing you’re doing with. The ritual is the point.
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