Eric Burke - BourbonSphere

Basil Hayden Toast

I’d like to thank BeamSuntory and the Basil Hayden team for providing this review sample with no strings attached.

…

I’d like to thank BeamSuntory and the Basil Hayden team for providing this review sample with no strings attached.

IMAGE: A bottle of Basil Hayden Toast flanked by two crystal glasses of the same. Image Courtesy Basil Hayden.

I’ve heard it said that after you hit the age of 40, you need to either take up World War Two history or smoking meat. Well, I’m a history buff, but I’d much rather read about history that happened 500 to 1500 years ago than history that happened 75 to 85 years ago. Which, if that adage was to believed, left me smoking meat as my only option going forward.

Which is why, while I write tonight, I’m eating a generous slice off of the fatty end of a smoked brisket. And once I finish it, I will be moving on to a pour of tonight’s whiskey. I don’t usually like whiskey with food but I do enjoy it after food. I prefer to let the fatty flavors settle a bit and then have an after dinner drink instead of pairing one with the other

The drink I will be pouring tonight is the newest permanent release from the Basil Hayden line of whiskeys: Basil Hayden Toast. This new bourbon uses brown rice as the flavoring grain instead of rye or wheat. Basil Hayden Toast is a “mingling” of both finished and unfinished bourbon. Some of the brown rice bourbon is finished in toasted barrels. That finished bourbon is then mixed back in with unfinished brown rice bourbon to create the final product.

So now that I’ve finished my supper, let’s see how it tastes. Note, the notes below are not from tonight, but I am having a pour of Basil Hayden Toast to confirm my thoughts from this past weekend.

Basil Hayden Toast

Purchase Info: This sample was provided by the producer for the purpose of this review. The suggested retail price is $49.99 for a 750 mL bottle.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $3.33

Details: 40% ABV. Made with brown rice as the flavoring grain.

Nose: Vanilla, caramel, nutmeg, and a hint of mint.

Mouth: Brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, hints of mint and dusty oak.

Finish: Very gentle. Lingering brown sugar sweetness, baking spices and oak.

Thoughts: This isn't bad. It's pretty gentle, like most Basil Hayden releases, but tastes pretty good. I like it. That said, I’ll be honest, it isn't going to be something I buy. I’m a freelancer on a freelancer’s budget so for $50 I want a bit more oomph in my bourbon. But this wasn’t created for me. This is for the novice bourbon drinker who may be intimidated by higher proof releases and I think it will work beautifully in that market. As I said, I like the flavors of this a lot, it’s just too gentle for me to want very often.

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Stellum Bourbon

Last…

Last week I regaled you with the mundane tale of how I, almost accidentally, got my hands on a couple of bottles of Stellum Whiskey. I'm not going to bore you with that again, but I think I might jump straight into the "About This Bourbon" section of the post.

Stellum is a line of whiskeys produced by the same folks that make the Barrell line of sprits. Like the Rye, this bourbon is a blend of bourbons produced in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. I'll let them give you the flowery version. From the Stellum website:

Stellum Bourbon finds its flavor in the tension of three Indiana Bourbon mash bills, two of which are high-rye, with the third being almost exclusively corn. Older barrels from both Kentucky and Tennessee are folded in slowly, through a multi-step blending process. This brings added layers of depth and complexity, ultimately allowing us to round out a uniquely Stellum flavor profile.

They don’t come right out and say MGP, but in my opinion, there is a good likelihood of the “Indiana Bourbons” they describe come from MGP. A look at the MGP site shows two “high-rye” bourbons (mash bills: 75% Corn, 21% Rye, and 4% Barley Malt and 60% Corn, 36% Rye, and 4% Barley Malt) and a 99% corn bourbon (mash bill: 99% Corn and 1% Barley Malt). The interview Fred Minnick did with the bourbon’s creator describes it as such: “The Stellum Bourbon blend is focused on a 5–6-year-old IN/KY/TN profile using 3 different Indiana mash bills and includes barrels from 4-16 years old.” Stellum bourbon is officially non-age-stated, non-chill filtered, and cask strength at 114.98° proof.

Stellum Bourbon

Purchase Info: $52.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Lakeville Liquors, Lakeville, MN

Price per Drink (50 mL): $3.53

Details: Distilled in Indiana, Kentucky & Tennessee 57.49% ABV.

Nose: Cap'N Crunch, caramel, cherry, cinnamon.

Mouth: Spicy and hot. Caramel, cherry, cinnamon, nutmeg, and maple.

Finish: Long and warm. Notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cherry.

Thoughts: This is really good. It has a nice balance of sweet and spicy when neat. A little water doesn't hurt this one at all. Water brings the sweetness to the forefront and allows the spicy notes to play a supporting role.

The Cure Starts Now: Ultimate Bourbon Raffle

Long-time readers know that cancer is a touchy …

Long-time readers know that cancer is a touchy subject in my house. In March of 2012, my wife was diagnosed with Stage 3 Ovarian Cancer. After surgery and chemotherapy, she was given the good news that she showed no evidence of cancer. If you haven’t watched a loved one deal with chemo, I envy you. Watching someone I love suffer so much from the very thing that was trying to save her life? That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. We are lucky. She has had clean scans ever since.

Yesterday I received an email from The Cure Starts Now. I’ll let them describe themselves: “The Cure Starts Now, which is a non-profit foundation that represents something truly different – a grassroots effort dedicated to, not just fighting one cancer, but the elimination of ALL cancers. We are on a mission to find the Homerun Cure by funding research for cancer.”

Now, as I mentioned above we hate cancer in this house. And not just the kind that affected us, but all of them. If someone asks me to donate to a cancer charity, the odds are that I’m going to do it. So I would have been happy to receive the email anyway. But in this case they were asking me to help promote a fundraising event that might interest you the reader as well. Here is a little more from the email:

Why does this matter to you? Well, we would like to ask if you’d blog about our Ultimate Bourbon Raffle being awarded at our annual Once in a Lifetime Gala and Auction. We have first and second place prizes, full of amazing bourbons, that I am sure you know all about! Below are the prizes brought to us by our friends at the Party Source.

First Prize - Double Eagle Very Rare.
Second Prize - Pappy Van Winkle collection. The winner will receive a 10, 12, 15, 20, and 23-year bottle.

Anyone who is a lover of bourbon does not want to miss out on the opportunity to win one of these amazing prizes. You and your followers can visit https://csnevents.org/Bourbon to buy raffle tickets. Only 750 tickets are being sold, so don't miss out!

Now, I’m not going to ask you to buy a raffle ticket, I know my readership skews frugal. But, I will ask you to consider it, if you are able. The world will be better off once cancer is defeated. And the more people we have looking for a cure, the quicker that will happen. Plus…who knows maybe you’ll be a lucky winner. (Unless I am…I just bought my raffle ticket)

Ordinarily this would be where I would ask you to give me money. A $3 coffee or a purchase at my Etsy store. Tonight, I’m going to ask you to instead donate that to a cancer charity of your choice. If you want to donate to The Cure Starts Now (who has a 94 out of 100 rating on Charity Navigator) you can by visiting https://donate2csn.org, but they are by no means the only cancer research charity. Do what feels right to you and maybe together we can help make the world a little better.

Stellum Rye

Some…

Sometimes one thing just leads to another, you know? You can wake up in the morning thinking to yourself that you have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and that there is nothing on your calendar. And then you can end the day having spent $450 on a meat grinder and another $120 on whiskey. And that was me last Saturday.

I woke up Saturday morning. Early of course because hungry dogs had me up at 5:30 am. I groaned and tried to convince them to go back to sleep, to no avail. So the only thing to do was see if my wife would make us coffee while I took the pups out to go potty. It has been so dry in Minnesota that I think the only moisture my lawn gets is from the dogs urinating on it. Which probably means that the lawn is done for. But at least the weeds are still green. So there’s that.

As I was cleaning up after the dogs, my wife came out to add something to the ol’ honey-do list. She said, “remember to do some research on a meat grinder today.” Now, as you might expect from someone who does what I’m doing right now, I like to do research on the internet. I find reading reviews, combing through forums, and looking at specs to be fun and enjoyable. And I’ve been smoking a lot of meat lately. Which means I have a freezer full of trimmings. So looking at a meat grinder to turn those trimmings into tasty food was something I was looking forward to.

As I finished my research, I realized that my local Fleet-Farm had the model I was looking for. In-stock and on sale. You know I decided to brave the smoke outside and go get it. And of course, Fleet-Farm is right by a local Municipal Liquor store. It’s a small store, they don’t have everything, but they try to make their selection complement that of the Total Wine up the road by carrying items that Total Wine doesn’t. So I decided that since I was out braving the smoke anyway, it would be a waste of a trip if I didn’t stop in.

And that is where I found tonight’s whiskey. And one of next week’s as well. I picked up the Stellum Rye and the Stellum Bourbon, but I’m going to stretch the content out as much as I can. Stellum is a brand created by the makers of Barrell Bourbon. It is a cask-strength, non-chill filtered blend of Straight whiskeys from Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. According to an interview conducted by Fred Minnick with Barrell founder Joe Beatrice, the constituent whiskeys are between four and ten years old. And according to the Stellum website, the rye we are exploring tonight is made mostly of the 95% rye Indiana mashbill with small amounts of more “barley forward rye and choice barrels from both Kentucky and Tennessee.” The suggested retail price is $54.99 and should be available on an ongoing basis in 45 markets across the US.

I am a big fan of MGP’s 95% rye whiskey, especially at cask strength, and while they didn’t confirm that the 95% Rye from Indiana that they used was actually from MGP, I’m just going to go on the assumption that it is. So I was very excited to taste this one. Let’s see how it tastes.

Stellum Rye

Purchase Info: $52.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Lakeville Liquors, Lakeville, MN

Price per Drink (50 mL): $3.53

Details: 58.12% ABV. Distilled in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Nose: Cooked cereals, mint, cinnamon, clove, and maple.

Mouth: Very hot in the mouth. Notes of honey, cherry, mint, cinnamon, and tobacco.

Finish: Spicy and warm. Medium length. Notes of cinnamon, mint, and brown sugar.

Thoughts: I'm really digging this one. As I said, I'm a big fan of the MGP 95/5 Rye recipe and am very glad that they made it the star of this blend. The other parts of the blend work to add sweetness and round off the sharp edges that 95/5 can sometimes come with. Big fan. I really like this one. I highly recommend it if you want a high-proof variation on MGP-style 95% rye.

Nooku Bourbon Cream

It’s…

It’s been a weird week here in Minnesota. There has been smoke in the air from Canadian wildfires causing air quality and air quality warnings as I’ve never seen before in the state of Minnesota. The smoke was thick in the air. So thick that it impaired visibility and carried the smell of the fires as you breathed it in. It was so bad, that even spending as little time outdoors as possible, I was still dealing with respiratory issues. As such, I decided to pivot away from the tasting I had been planning to do this past weekend toward a couple of small cans I had in my fridge from my recent trip shopping trip in Colorado. I figured it might be best to take a look at something that I wouldn’t be drinking from a nosing glass. Just in case the old sniffer was acting up.

I grabbed these as I was walking toward the checkout at Hazel’s Beverage World in Boulder, Colorado. I hadn’t really been in the market for a Cream Liqueur, but something about the tiny little can, and the fact that one was coffee-flavored, piqued my interest. I figured that for four bucks, I could indulge that curiosity. Might be good in coffee one morning while on vacation. And while I never had the chance to have it in my coffee while on vacation, I did get that opportunity this past weekend as I hid inside from the air outside.

Nooku Bourbon Creme uses two ingredients: dairy cream and Bourbon. In this case, two-year-old, high-malt bourbon from Old Elk. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the coffee version uses some sort of coffee flavor on top of that (not much of one though since it literally says that on the can). And while I haven’t had Old Elk Bourbon, I haven’t heard great things about it. Even so, I was curious to give this a try. I tried each of them straight and then added a healthy amount to an afternoon cup of coffee, just to see if my hunch on these was correct.

Nooku Bourbon Cream

Purchase Info: $3.98 for a 100 mL can at Hazel’s Beverage World, Boulder, CO.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $1.99

Details: 17% ABV. "Bourbon Whiskey with Real Dairy Cream"

Mouth: Thick, velvety, and sweet. Notes of cinnamon, caramel, and dairy.

Finish: Not much to speak of, as expected.

Thoughts: It's a bit like drinking coffee creamer. I’m not getting a lot of “bourbon” notes in it though. Speaking of that, it works pretty well in coffee. If you take your coffee with creamer, that is. In this case, I liked it about half and half. So make that coffee hot.

Nooku Bourbon Cream, Cold Brew Coffee

Purchase Info: $3.98 for a 100 mL can at Hazel’s Beverage World, Boulder, CO.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $1.99

Details: 17% ABV. "Bourbon Whiskey with Fresh Dairy Cream and Natural Coffee Flavors"

Mouth: Thick and sweet. Notes of cinnamon, chocolate, coffee, and dairy.

Finish: Chocolate Milk.

Thoughts: This is better than the regular version. And it also tastes good with coffee, even more so than the original. Personally I like my coffee black, so I’d probably prefer just a shot of bourbon instead of the cream if I felt the need to spike my coffee. Neither of them are particularly to my tastes when tasted alone either, but they aren't bad for what they are. That said, I can see a lot of people liking this.

Calumet Farm 15-year-old Single Rack Black Bourbon “Whirlaway”

Last…

IMAGE: the 15-year-old bourbon from Calumet Farm.

Last Friday I sold my truck. After living the last 18 months, we realized that we were ready to become a one-car family. Especially since the used truck market is super hot right now. Sure, we wouldn’t be able to haul a load of dirt from the garden center, but that might be a blessing for my back. I’m not getting any younger, if you know what I mean. Plus if we needed to haul something renting the occasional trailer would be much cheaper than the repairs a well-used decade-old pickup would bring. Plus no insurance payment on it.

While we planned to use most of the money we got from the truck as a down payment for the new vehicle we have on order, I did convince my wife that we could probably splurge a little in celebration. I mean we got exactly what we were looking for from the dealer. Even knowing that we could have gotten more selling it outright, it felt like a win. I really dislike dealing with strangers and the convenience was worth it. The result of that splurge was tonight’s whiskey.

Calumet Farm 15-year-old Single Rack Black Bourbon is a product of Western Spirits Beverage Company. Much like the 10-year-old Bourbon, I reviewed back in 2018, each 19-barrel batch is created from the barrels aging on one rack in the aging warehouse. It is non-chill filtered and 105° proof. The mash bill is 74% Corn, 18% Rye, and 8% Malted Barley. It is bottled by Three Springs Bottling Company in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Oh and since Calumet Farm is a farm that breeds racehorses, this bottling is named in honor of one of the farm’s Kentucky Derby winners. You can read more about Whirlaway the bourbon and Whirlaway the horse here.

Calumet Farm 15-year-old Single Rack Black Bourbon "Whirlaway"

Purchase Info: $129.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Blue Max, Burnsville, MN.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $8.67

Details: 52.5% ABV. Rack#: 275402.09. 19 Barrel Batch. Non-chill filtered.

Nose: Caramel, brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, apple, and oak.

Mouth: Spicy and thick. Caramel, brown sugar, oak, apple, cinnamon candies, and leather.

Finish: Spicy and long. Notes of dark chocolate, caramel, cinnamon candies, mint, and a touch of apple.

Thoughts: I don't say this often for products I paid more than $100 for, but this was probably worth every penny. It is absolutely delicious and I will be hiding this on the special shelf so that it lasts a long time. I’m really enjoying it. Just giving this a “like” rating due to the price, but it’s good enough that if it were cheaper it’d be getting a heart. But since I don’t love the price, it gets a high “like.”

George Dickel Bottled in Bond No. 3 (2021 release)

Kids…

IMAGE: 13 year old George Dickel Bottled in Bond, Number 3. 2021 release.

Kids. Pull up a chair and let Old Man Eric tell you a story.

It all started way back in the late twenty-aughts to early teens. I was first getting into whiskey and it was a lovely time to be doing so. You’d walk into a store and sure, most of the time there wouldn’t be a lot of American Whiskey on the shelf, at least by today’s standards. The stores I frequented here in Minnesota didn’t usually offer a full aisle dedicated to just Bourbon and its brother from Tennessee. But what you didn’t have in the number of brands, you’d make up for in quality of the whiskey. Well, some of the time. I mean Jim Beam White was outselling everything not named Jack back then too. But age statements were everywhere and they were used to entice you to buy a bottle not to price it out of the range of affordability.

It was by no means the Golden Age that our memories and nostalgia make it out to be but you could be pretty sure that the bottle you were buying probably contained good bourbon if you saw an age statement. And it wasn’t unusual to see double-digit age statements at a relatively low cost.

Tonight’s whiskey is a bit of a throwback to that time. 13 years old. 100° proof. Bottled in Bond. Rich and thick in the mouth. And, at least compared to others in its age range, a relatively low price. This is the third edition of George Dickel Bottled in Bond and, according to Whisky Advocate, it is the biggest batch yet. Now, the price did go up some. The suggested retail price was in the mid-$30s in 2019 and is in the mid-$40s now, but it is still a remarkably good value. Especially when compared to others in its age range.

So instead of me blathering on anymore, let’s see how it tastes.

George Dickel Bottled in Bond No. 3 (2021 release)

Purchase Info: $40.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Apple Valley Liquor, Apple Valley, MN

Price per Drink (50mL): $2.73

Details: 13 years old, Spring 2007 distilling season. 50% ABV. Distilled at DSP-TN-2. Bottled at DSP-IL-58.

Nose: Honey, mixed berries, nutmeg, and a slight mineral note.

Mouth: Spicy in the month. Nice mouthfeel. Honey, mixed berries, cinnamon, leather, and tobacco.

Finish: Medium in both length and warmth. Lingering notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, and tobacco smoke.

Thoughts: This is damn good whiskey. I am really enjoying it. Rich and thick in the mouth with delicious notes of pipe tobacco smoke on the finish. Note, this is not a "smokey" whiskey, it just carries the flavors of tobacco smoke. I'm a big fan. Really, really like this one. I think I will be stopping off on my next trip out of the house to see if I can find another bottle to have for after this one is empty.

Post-Script: So, after I finished writing this, I had to go grocery shopping. I thought that I might check my local corner liquor store to see if there was another bottle to be had, as mentioned above. There was, but there was no price on the shelf. I grabbed a bottle thinking that I knew what it should be and that these guys are usually really good about just charging a set margin on items. I was beyond shocked when it rang up at $69.99! While talking with the poor guy behind the counter I mentioned the price I got it for a couple of suburbs over and that the suggested retail price was $45. He told me that, apparently, there is a local distributor in my area who is doing a little price gouging on items like this and that, unfortunately, they must have gotten it from that one. He apologized for the inflated price and the trouble. So keep an eye on the price of this one. Sounds like there might be some foul play in the Twin Cities metro on it. I’ll be paying around MSRP on this one or I won’t bother buying it. I suggest you do the same.