Personally, I like 8-year-old whiskey, which I think is kind of a sweet spot for bourbon. But we’ve got older stuff, including a barrel from the first lot that I ever bought. It’s 16 years old and it’s 148 proof.
“Oh, we’ve had people argue about it for sure,” Mandy Vance, manager of the Private Barrel Selection process at Four Roses, told me a few years ago about a pick. They generally work it out, though, because they’re having fun.”
Despite lacking complexity, this is an easy-sipping tequila that’s ideal for newcomers who are finally convinced to go slowly with tequila rather than shoot it.
Immediately, I thought of Heaven Hill’s bourbons, which have only 10 percent rye in the mashbill but come off as nicely spicy in the glass. Then Veach cited Old Fitzgerald, a wheated bourbon that has terrific spice notes despite having no rye.
The nose is rich and complex, combining dried flowers, ripe raspberries and blackberries and whiskey-wetted oak.
If you’re even semi-American whiskey savvy, you recognize the phrase in this bottle’s name: Cask Strength Bottled-In-Bond Bourbon. Well, it’s true: no water was added to achieve 100 proof; just the mingling of sub- and above-100-proof casks to attain that essential proof for BIB.
There are days when I think, “I’m finished with cask finishes!” and then there are days when cask finishes redeem themselves. Old Elk Cognac Cask Finish did that recently when I tasted it and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Last year at a high-level Kentucky whiskey industry event I requested a Manhattan. When the genial “bartender” merely poured me bourbon on the rocks, I asked about the vermouth and bitters. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Can you tell me what to put in?” I settled for whiskey on the rocks.
But after tasting hundreds of bourbon iterations in my career, the consistency of them many is becoming as concerning as comforting. Some days, I wonder if too many are just too similar, especially when I see so many parallels in my tasting notes (and others’) for reviews and barrel picks.
Like every wood-finished Maker’s release, The Heart Series offers up a rich and complex nose featuring oak, chocolate, cinnamon and clove. Pastries, pie crust and fruit tarts made from all three doughs emerge laced with caramel and mocha.
