Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

There are too many celebrity-backed spirits brands out there. These people are already rich and famous, do they really need to try to make even more money by putting their name on some bottle that they probably had almost nothing to do with? It’s gotten to the point where a celebrity name attached to a brand can have an adverse reaction, setting up an expectation that the liquid inside is just not going to be very good. So I was pleasantly surprised when I got to try the new Willem Dafoe-Laphroaig scotch whisky collab, a 14-year-old single malt finished in sherry casks that happens to be very good, which would likely be the case no matter whose name was attached to this release.

On the one hand, Willem Dafoe seems like an unlikely choice for a celeb-booze collab. He’s a serious actor, appearing in serious movies over the past 40 years like The Last Temptation of Christ, Platoon, Nymphomaniac, and The Lighthouse, along with the first blockbuster Spider-Man franchise. He’s also a theater mainstay and founding member of the Wooster Group, which is known for its experimental works. Laphroaig, on the other hand, is a stalwart of smoky Islay scotch whisky—the core 10-year-old expression can be found at nearly every bar and liquor store, and the rest of the portfolio expands from there to include excellent higher age statements, cask finishes, and the always interesting annual Càirdeas release.

So how did this new whisky, which is called Willem by Willem, come together? According to the brand, Dafoe became a “Friend of Laphroaig,” their global whisky club, last fall when he participated in the “Unphorgettable” campaign and appeared in an ad spot. You should always take it with a grain of salt when a brand talks about how involved any celebrity was in the creation of a spirit, but according to the brand and senior whisky maker Sarah Dowling, Dafoe helped to select the liquid that is in this bottle. In the press release, he offers some generic thoughts about how he chose whisky that made his “tastebuds and curiosity come alive the most.” Okay, that’s all well and good, but despite the attempt to make us believe that Dafoe went full method and spent hours in the whisky lab carefully nosing and tasting different samples (perhaps he did, who knows), this new whisky is very good.

The reason is pretty simple: it’s a 14-year-old Laphroaig single malt scotch that was aged in bourbon barrels and then finished in Oloroso sherry casks for nine months. That might not sound exciting or innovative, because it’s not; it’s just solid age statement and secondary maturation stats. The whisky is, of course, smoky, a defining characteristic of all the distillery’s expressions. But the extra four years in bourbon barrels, compared to the core 10-year, has given it a more complexity, as you will know if you’ve tried older Laphroaig before. And the cask finish is something that always works well for this distillery, imbuing the liquid with syrupy notes of dried fruit, ripe cherry, flamed orange peel, vanilla custard, and some cinnamon, cardamom, and black pepper. It’s bottled at 53.7 percent ABV, another feature that makes the whisky stand out, as the higher proof allows all of those flavors to shine with minimal dilution.

So there you have it. This celeb-booze partnership is interesting in the fact that it’s Willem Dafoe, an actor with a very impressive career, but it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this is a tasty new expression from Laphroaig that I think longtime fans of the distillery will enjoy. It doesn’t arrive here until June so you’ll have to wait a few weeks to try it for yourself, but go find a bottle when it finally drops and enjoy some smoky scotch all summer long.

Score: 89