Scotch Whisky / Bourbon Whiskey thread

ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
BarnBuster said:
After I posted that I thought where in the world would you put/store 6-9000 barrels? But you know they could bottle that as Collapse Bourbon and get another $20 a bottle for it and people would pay it.
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You know they've already thought about it lol
 
curious2garden

curious2garden

Well-Known Mod
Staff member
Mad Hamish said:
Hey Annie!!! Been YEARS hasnt it? Good to be back. Divorce got super ugly I had to hide or get locked up but that madness is done with. Hope you and the fam are doing great!!
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Ugh sorry you had to go through that! Divorce is an ugly thing, murder is far more polite. You growing? I'm on my second of three Bodhi seed tables and thought about you.
 
Mad Hamish

Mad Hamish

Well-Known Member
curious2garden said:
Ugh sorry you had to go through that! Divorce is an ugly thing, murder is far more polite. You growing? I'm on my second of three Bodhi seed tables and thought about you.
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Yes Ma'am, but less fun now had to go full commercial for a bit so its all the same things over and over. Mostly Breathwork from the now defunct Gage Green. Cant believe they stopped making beans.

Ah Bodhi... I havent run his gear in just over a year now but SHOE is hanging on to some Appalachia gear for me I am very excited.
 
Mad Hamish

Mad Hamish

Well-Known Member
Anyhow let me stay on topic. Discovered a monstrous Islay scotch. Ardberg 10 YO. Over tones of smoke, plum, leather (sounds bad but it isnt), caramel and more. Incredibly slow to show legs and when she does they are the closest together I have ever seen so yes its THAT complex. A must-buy but not for sissies its a very bold flavour.
 
Singlemalt

Singlemalt

Well-Known Member
Rare bottle of Scotch whisky fetches record price

Edinburgh (AFP) - An extremely rare bottle of whisky was sold for a new world record at auction in Edinburgh on Wednesday.

The 60-year-old Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 was sold at Bonhams for a total £848,750 (about $1.09 million, 947,000 euros) beating a previous bottle from the same cask that was sold in Hong Kong in May for £814,081...............

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rare-bottle-scotch-whisky-fetches-record-price-142718450.html
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
Fred Minnick is the author of Bourbon, Editor-in-Chief of Bourbon+ and contributor to Forbes magazine. He's usually my go to guy when I want an honest, non-pretentious review. He's got several blogs also.

This article was recently in the magazine. A few excerpts:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredminnick/2018/11/13/holiday-gift-guide-2018-the-most-money-minded-bourbons/#57bf099b36a2

"Holiday gift guides for bourbon are often disingenuous, offering up allocated brands that you simply cannot find or afford. Publishing William LaRue Weller or Four Roses Limited Edition as the main options is simply cruel to the poor sap trying to find a bottle for a loved one."

Ezra Brooks 7-year-old Barrel Strength
For: The Longtime Bourbon Lover
This new bourbon won my Best Everyday American Whiskey Award and is a throwback to the good old days, when you could find compelling flavors at a decent price. This is the perfect gift for the longtime bourbon lover and is well worth every penny.

Wild Turkey 101
For: The Feisty One
While Wild Turkey 101 is tasty and ranks up there as one of the stronger value bourbons, it’s got a certain edge to it that brings you to a 1980s biker bar or 1950s pool hall, with sharks lurking about. Its boldness, layered with spice and dribbles of caramel, is for somebody with a backbone.

Knob Creek
For: Anybody
When Knob Creek won the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2015, all the judges, including me, were absolutely surprised. Since then, I’ve grown to respect this brand as bourbon’s most underrated titan. It has the age and flavor profile to compete for best in the world. Knob Creek is hands down my favorite bourbon in a Manhattan.

Larceny
For: Music Fans
Larceny is a wheated bourbon with a lot of flavor and an edgy finish. It’s great as a sipper, cocktail mixer or on the rocks. But for some reason, when paired with Nat King Cole or Kenny Chesney, Larceny’s complexity truly opens up. I’m a believer in pairing whiskey to music, and Larceny is like the Swiss Army Knife for this category, seemingly going with just about every song. Seriously, try it
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
If you're a Bourbon drinker, you may want to check and see if your state is participating in any bourbon drawings or lotteries. I know PA, OH and KY have one for Pappy's and Buffalo coming up. Drawing allows you to purchase at sugg retail. Couldn't find a master list of participating states.
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
I had to laugh about the blog below that was in https://www.bourbonguy.com today. He talks about collecting "stuff" which I'm prone to do too (and I laughed again when I thought of @2rollingstoned and @GreatwhiteNorth and their habits they posted yesterday.) The author also likes a higher rye content bourbon, as I do. (Russell's Reserve Rye;Bonded Old Grand Dad.) so enjoy...

"I am a fickle guy. My favorite thing this week could be something forgotten next week. My house is filled with items that I just had to buy, used precisely once, and then left sitting on a shelf somewhere. Things, I might add, that my wife/accountant eventually decided to donate to the nearest charity thrift store, give to a family member, or just throw away.

Just a short list of notable items would include:
  • a remote control, color changing LED light: bought in 2007, used twice as a remote control flood lamp isn’t as handy as expected, donated 2016
  • an espresso maker: bought in 2004, used once, accidentally brought along in a move to another state, donated in 2012
  • an aluminum fishing boat: inherited from a family member in 2005, used for one summer in Eastern Wisconsin (where there are few lakes), moved to Minnesota a year later (three lakes within walking distance of my house), gave to my stepfather in 2014 after having never been in a Minnesota lake
  • slide scanner: needed to scan some photos taken on slide film in 2008, excitedly used it once, begrudgingly used it the rest of the winter, let it sit until last year, gave it to my wife to do the same thing.
  • a charcoal smoker: bought in 2012, used once, sat in the garage until 2014 when it was sold on Craigslist.
  • a cassette “ripper”: I had three cassettes that I couldn’t ever buy on CD, bought ripper in 2018 to digitize them, used it on one of them, remembered how bad cassettes sound, found that those three albums were on Spotify, gave it to my daughter.
Hmm….looking back, I get excited about bizarre and eclectic things. But still, knowing that my favorite thing this week, might be forgotten the next does not put a damper on my enthusiasm. Far from it, in fact. I tend to approach every new favorite with the same excitement that every previous favorite had garnered.

And so, knowing all of that, I present to you my favorite rye whiskey ever…this week.

But first, a story. Early last week, I was craving a cocktail. One made of rye, specifically. I had a couple ryes on hand, but they weren’t ones I usually liked in cocktails. I’ve been buying Bulleit Rye since it was first introduced. I like it neat, but I always felt it didn’t work great in cocktails. Didn’t integrate well enough with the recipes I prefer. Knob Creek Rye is a rye that I really liked when it was first released, but these days I mainly buy it because my corner liquor store sells it for $25 for a 750. To me, it just doesn’t have enough rye character to it. I could mistake it for a high-rye mashbill bourbon if given it blind.

But one thing I do enjoy doing is blending. And since I really wanted a cocktail made with rye, and was in no mood to go shopping, I thought that a mixture of the two might work better than either alone. I started with a 50-50 blend of the two. It did the job, but I felt it could be better. I made up five different combinations with different ratios. Starting at half an ounce of one whiskey to three and a half of the other, onto one ounce to three, then two ounces to two and then working my way back down the other direction to three and a half ounces of the first to a half ounce of the second.

Then I let them sit for the rest of the week to mingle and made a bunch of small cocktails on Sunday for my wife and I to sample. We also tried them neat. It was a fun experiment. I never noticed just how thin in the mouth that Bulleit Rye is or how corn forward Knob Creek Rye was until I tried the 0.5: 3.5-ounce versions of each. And the most interesting thing was that independent of one another, my wife and I came to the same conclusion: our favorite of the bunch (and my favorite rye whiskey ever…this week) was the blend made up of one part Knob Creek to three parts Bulleit.

I like it for two reasons. One is that both of these are relatively cheap. I can get either of them for $25 at my corner liquor store. The second is that this particular blend had everything I liked about Bulleit, but with added sweetness and a better mouthfeel than Bulleit Rye straight from the bottle. It worked great in both of the rye cocktails I’ve tried it in, and the added mouthfeel makes it a joy to sip neat.

I wonder what my next favorite thing ever will be?"
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
An interview with Fred Noe
https://gearpatrol.com/2018/12/14/interview-fred-noe-bookers-bourbon/

"The great-grandson of Jim Beam, Fred is a storyteller through-and-through. Going on the road with Hank Williams, Jr. Making rye whiskey by hand in a three-hundred-year-old still at Mount Vernon. Burying his dad with the first bottle of his own bourbon (and his dog). No matter what you talk about in the wide world of whiskey, he’s got an out-of-left-field ad lib to share".

Q:Your family is a bunch of whiskey old-timers — how have whiskey makers changed since Booker’s time?
A:In the Seventies, bourbon was real slow. There was none of this “bourbon boom” talk, nobody was asking if there was a bubble. We wished there was a bubble. And none of the money men were out here hankering for expensive bottles of bourbon, either. We were getting beat by the vodka and clear liquor guys. Everybody was looking for lighter spirits, so everybody started to make light bourbons and whiskeys. My dad thought it was giving bourbon and whiskey a bad wrap.

Q:How have drinkers changed?
A:I always say just look at them old guys and you’ll see pretty quick. They drank one brand and one bottle — that’s it. If my grandfather on my mom’s side was drinking, you better believe it was an old whiskey called Old Tub, and that’s what he drank. He didn’t drink beer, wine or vodka. If we didn’t have no Old Tub, then he drank water.

Q:Do whiskey drinkers know more about whiskey today?
A:Absolutely. I get questions from regular drinkers at a bar and I ask myself, “Are you gonna start making whiskey here soon? Are you about to be my competition?” Back in the day, the questions were more along the lines of, “How many times can you use a barrel?” Or, “What’s the difference between bourbon and whiskey?”

Q:What do people ask you about whiskey nowadays?
A:Shit, now I got people asking, “Well, if you were going to use a pot still…” Years ago, we didn’t even know the damn difference between a pot still and a regular still. You can’t bullshit these folks no more, and that’s a good thing. The second you make something and try to fib about quality, they’ll know. And they’ll roast you for it.

Q:Did you or your dad ever think bourbon would get this big? You’re basically a whiskey celebrity.
A:It’s still a bit unreal. We were at a Christmas party one year and [my dad’s] cousin Parker Beam, who ran Heaven Hill then, tasted an early version of Booker’s. Booker told him he was going to sell it at $50 because that’s what it’s worth.

Parker said something like, “Booker you really think them boys gonna spend $50 on a bottle of bourbon?” I still remember my dad’s reply. Looked him dead in the eye and said something like, “Parker, they’ll give $50 — look at what the give for that damn Scotch.”

It was really a test at the time. We were going someplace nobody had ever really gone before. We didn’t know if it had worked then, but we know now.

https://www.bookersbourbon.com/home
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member

THE CURIOUS, WAX-COATED SAGA OF MAKER’S MARK’S ‘SLAM DUNK’ BOTTLES​
Tim McKirdy VinePair December 12, 2018

Maker’s Mark’s iconic red wax seal makes it one of the most recognizable bottles on the brown liquor shelf. And it’s something Makers Mark takes very seriously.

Each bottle is hand-dipped in special-formula, molten red wax at its Loretto, Ky., distillery. The additional labor adds cost to production and slows output from an average of 200 to 400 bottles per hour to around 100 to 200 bottles per hour.

Occasionally, though, due to human error or something arguably more intriguing, bottles hit shelves doused in much more wax than usual. On these whiskies, known as Slam Dunk or Oops bottles, wax extends past the bottle’s shoulders and onto its label. The rarities are a collector’s item among whisky connoisseurs, often fetching double their retail value on auction sites such as eBay.

Given the attention paid to the wax-sealing process — not to mention the countless hours’ experience workers amass dipping bottles — it’s hard to conceive that these bottles are the product of heavy-handedness or a momentary loss of concentration.

Comments on online forums speculate that slam-dunking is a clever marketing ploy used to keep whisky hounds hunting. Some suggest that around one in every hundred bottles is slam dunked, while others argue that number is much closer to one in a thousand. Even more outlandish theorists suggest that bottles are dunked every time a grain trolley goes by the finishing bottle line, e.g., about three to four times per day.

Maker’s Mark remains tight-lipped about the practice. When VinePair contacted the Kentucky distiller’s media representative about Slam Dunk bottles, they told us that they couldn’t report on the number of hand-dipped bottles.

Maker’s Mark does, however, acknowledge that over-dipped bottles exist. In a 2015 Twitter post featuring a photo of one such bottle, Maker’s Mark wrote: “When a bottle has a little extra wax, we call it a slam-dunk bottle!” The distiller has even run a number of ad campaigns alluding to the names collectors use for them.

“It’s not about the shots, it’s about the dunks,” ran the text on a poster featuring a bottle with a wax seal that runs all the way down to its label. Another, showcasing a completely coated bottle, simply said: “Alley-oops.”

For those not wishing to pay inflated prices on auction sites, the hunt for a Slam Dunk bottle can take years. On Dolcetto Confessions, the online blog of Allison Mannella, a self-described photographer, wife, and southern girl at heart, the author notes a “long, fruitless hunt” for a Slam Dunk bottle that lasted over two and a half years before she finally got her hands on one. (Manella also chimes in on the debate of just how rare these bottles are, writing that “only one in 824 bottles showcases the extra long layer of wax.”)

Don’t fancy that kind of wait? There might be another way to get your hands on a Slam Dunk bottle.

Each tour of Maker’s Mark’s distillery ends with the opportunity for guests to seal their own bottle. Wearing protective clothing, guests dip bottles into the 350-degree molten wax to a point just below a small indentation in the bottle’s neck (roughly a quarter of the way down).

Though Maker’s Mark definitely does not advocate guests over-dipping bottles, the opportunity keeps some coming back for more. In a Chowhound forum on the topic, user JB BANNISTER writes: “I stop by twice a year and YOU CAN DIP YOUR OWN BOTTLE in the gift shop. I only do slam dunks as I use them for gifts.”

One might wonder if the “Mark” in Maker’s Mark is actually short for “marketing.”

 
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